#playing fast and loose with what is mechanically true and what i deem true for the vibes

[marshmurmurs]

by anychance, do you have thoughts on lifesteal!captain sparklez? the implication drive me bonkers

i think about him a normal amount (warning)

there are two main types of rules servers can have. there are rules built into the server itself, enforced by some greater power—the widespread no flying without elytra, vh disabling multiple items and enchantments, any respawn and heart mechanics. then there are the community established rules—no flying out of combat, no enderchests in mianite

i think sparklez is not necessarily bound to any of the rules of the land. he is brought on as a god, holds far too much power for that. nobody is bound to the community established rules beyond an honor system level and the enforced rules would not apply to a god the same way it does others (if at all, who is to enforce the rules on the greater power? gods are not known to be weak. to be limited by the same things as mere mortals) but he is of balance and here to restore it, so he plays along

jordan intentionally limits himself. he follows the heart system and keeps himself from flying without an elytra even though he has wings (even as he plays at being a regular person, he is still a god. the world still responds accordingly when he falls for the first time. the sky turns red and reminds everyone of what he is)

he doesn't strictly follow the community established rules though that is mostly from a place of not being aware of them. he flies out of combat a bunch not knowing it's against the rules. when he realizes there might be a rule about it he asks and is repeatedly told by the people on his side that no it's fine for him to fly. though it still does come to a point that he starts to refuse to, even as his people tell him that he really should get himself out, he says he wants to keep in the spirit of things

he wants to keep things balanced

on that note, before the assassination and everything devolving into warfare i was so ready for my guy to go down the balance but fucked up and evil route. the way he was talking about being the authority, about stomping down any violence and disagreement? balance overcorrecting to the side of order, suffocating balance in the face of the chaos that is the kill people server

the lets death ban that guy team briefly brought up the idea of trying to corrupt the captain and i can't stop thinking bout that either. i think zam meant it in a lets get this guy to be pro murder way but i don't think he was ever against murder, just the absence of balance it was causing. murder in the name of restoring balance? violence as retribution? perfectly fine and normal. surely no slippery slope to corruption to be found here

[weirdlandtv]

Like the 1960s generation had The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, the Big Three of the 1980s were Prince, Michael Jackson, and Madonna. Their new albums weren’t just song collections, they were messages uttered by the Oracle up on the mountain, echoing across the valley. They were events, statements, re-incarnations. Each new album presented a new persona for fans to imitate and for critics to evaluate, or, in the case of Prince, decipher. (Artists, back then, had to change with each new release or else be considered irrelevant. David Bowie entered the 1980s a smart yuppie, George Michael in the span of 7 years went from sparkling teen idol to sensitive, searching biker cowboy.)

Michael Jackson and Prince were regarded as rival gods, with the former more commercially successful but the latter preferred by most serious music critics (though in reality, fans, like me, liked both). Michael Jackson played games with tabloid journalists, who in turn responded with growing hostility; Prince played pranks on music critics, who wilfully allowed themselves to be deceived and wowed by this inscrutable prodigy.

Michael Jackson’s Avalon was Neverland, a fantasy dream that always invited ridicule (though not from me); Prince’s Mount Olympus was Paisley Park, a place deemed so mythical that fans constructed their own maps from the few photos and bits of footage that existed of it, and then endlessly speculated on what life was like inside of it: the parties, the concerts, sacred rituals, whisperings, the spontaneous nightly sessions. “Did you know,” they’d say, wide-eyed, “Prince has this huge vault of original masters and unreleased music right under Paisley Park? Only he knows the key code.” Whole albums (all masterpieces of course) had disappeared into that vault, never to be heard by ordinary mortals. And he never slept: nobody had ever caught him sleeping. He just went on and on, creating music. That was Prince, the enigmatic wonder, the living love symbol, and flamboyant question mark.

I still find it strange to realize so many of the artists I just mentioned, who so energetically populated my childhood and early teens, are dead. Michael Jackson, Prince, David Bowie, and George Michael all died within 7 years of each other; but there’s also Whitney Houston, Freddie Mercury, Kurt Cobain, and so many more. (Compare 1960s giants Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, who are still touring and releasing records.)

When Prince died, a little more than three years ago today, I was on Texel, an island to the north of Holland, where I live. I checked my phone, checked the news, like you so stupidly do every now and then, and then saw the incredible headline. A sunny day, clouds seemed to appear that moment. Some people love celebrity deaths and follow juicy rumor sites about who punched who and who stepped out of the limo without their knickers on; me, I get depressed. It’s like having swallowed a stone. The sensationalist cries around every celeb death to me are like a beehive of bad vibes, a pest, and I have to stay away from it as far as possible if I want to protect my mental health, or what’s left of it. Prince’s death made me take things slow for a week or so. I have to mentally chew on such things, change my settings, ease into the new reality, let my heart adjust to its new weight. I’ve often had to deal with death in my life, sometimes it’s as if every high-profile death shocks me back into that familiar feeling of dread and despair.

Though Michael Jackson’s Neverland has turned into a derelict theme park that carries the curse of being unsellable, Prince’s Paisley Park has become a museum. Occasionally, browsing the internet, I see photos of it, and I’m always struck, kind of uneasily, about how soulless it seems. What does the lair of an extravagant hermit look like? What did I expect? Not something that looks like the atrium of a New Age company maybe. Looking at the interior, those sad police photos that were released last year, I can’t help but see the stupendous mundanity of it all. The building itself, somewhere in a suburb outside of Minneapolis, resembles a bunker, and though the pyramid skylights, that vaguely resemble guard towers, provide some natural light, the rest of the building is artificially lit, but dark. The recording studio is just that. Some of the walls have sayings like “Everything You Think Is True”. Stained glass with stars, clouds, and guitars. There’s a potted plant here, and an ugly tangle of phone cords in the corner there. Prince’s bedroom was sparse with empty green walls, and a plastic trash can you can buy at your local Walmart (but he never slept of course). The legendary vault reminds me of the storage room of my dad’s old electronics company, with its disorderly shelves and half-opened cardboard boxes. And everywhere, in every corridor and every space, there’s Prince iconography, but it’s rather bland, like the cover of a cheap unofficial biography.

For Prince, it must have been strange living in your own mausoleum.

The music that came from that place though. I believe PARADE (1986) was the first full album he recorded there, and then everything that came afterwards. My uncle was a real Prince fanatic, taking a slew of albums with him whenever he stayed with us, bootlegs too, so from an early age I became quite well-versed in all things Prince. Bits of his lyrics are as familiar to me as old family sayings. Personal favorites are the albums 1999 (1982), BATMAN (1989), and the LOVE SYMBOL ALBUM (1992). I like the street-smart humor of his early stuff, the raw passion, the in-your-face sex metaphors, with symbols as loud as cymbals, just the wild mercury sound of it; later on, his work became more spiritual, and harder for me to follow. His whole being though was music, every movement was a melody, every step a beat; he created music the way other people breathe. He had more songs in him than a duck has quacks. If you listen to the posthumous release, PIANO AND A MICROPHONE 1983, it’s as if the piano, microphone and artist aren’t three separate things, but one organism, bleeding and generating music; it features some wonderful, loose playing. It seems to me that towards the end of his life, in physical pain and unable to play a piano or guitar unless stuffed with elephant tranquilizers, he started to drift, and drift further, until he fell over the edge.

Like Bob Dylan, whose mystique and inaccessibility he shared, Prince had a habit of frustrating his fans, by deliberately excluding a great song from an otherwise so-so album and storing it in his vault, or by making his music hard to buy or even find (online, before he died, there was almost nothing). That’s one reason I kind of stopped following him; the other is the depressing decline of his songwriting since the 1990s. Looking at his later albums, which I first dutifully bought until I didn’t anymore, there’s hardly anything I really like. None of the best-of compilations collect anything from after the 90s. What happened? Age is part of it of course. A decline in quality is inevitable, most musical artists do their best work in their 20s and 30s. It’s also possible Prince’s brand of singing about his women like they are divine vaginas simply went out of style. Once cheeky and outrageous (his work was why Parental Advisory stickers were invented), his songs no longer shock us 21st centurians. We’ve seen so much already. Dirty sex wasn’t the only topic he sang about of course (far from it), but it’s the one he pushed forward the most as part of his image; his “royal badness” was part of his appeal. (The BATMAN soundtrack originally was going to feature Michael Jackson as Batman, the force of good, and Prince as the Joker, representing decadence, sin, evil.)

But his supposed “badness” was an act of course. The cocky poses, flashy gestures and mean diva looks were an obvious shield against the outside world, a theatrical defense mechanism. An attempt to dazzle people before they can get to you. When you’re shy—and he of course was the shyest—you feel like everyone is constantly watching you, and you become overly aware of how you look, how you walk, how you come across; you are constantly aware of your physical being taking up space. So what do you do when you’re an artist? You perform. Everything you do becomes a kind of performance, a conscious act. It gives you a feeling of control: you know why people are watching, because you’re making them watch you. But the essence of it is always shyness and nerves.

There’s something endearing about that 1983 footage of him being invited on stage for an impromptu jam by James Brown, who a few minutes earlier had invited Michael Jackson up. Ready to upstage his rival, who had just performed some killer moves, Prince takes the stage, struts, plays some random riffs, struts some more, suddenly takes off his jacket and does some tricks with the microphone stand, claps to whip up the audience—and then as he wants to make a fast and sudden exit, he clumsily goes down knocking over a prop, stage hands hastily arriving from all sides to help him up.

He died in an elevator near the lobby, but the spot itself has been covered up by a new wall (it’s near the watchful eyes in the third image). I keep wondering what happened. Was he making his way down to the ground floor from his production offices, or was he going up from the recording studio to his bedroom to maybe sleep? One associate, questioned by police, stated that Prince had told her he “was depressed, enjoyed sleeping more than usual and was incredibly bored”, and that at his last concert, he felt like he was going to fall asleep on stage. Those were rare remarks. An intensely private person, he mostly hid his problems, not just from others, but even from himself. The end, then, was inevitable. As with Michael Jackson six years before, the drugs relieved him of his pain, and then of his life.

He never slept, and when he did, it was 4ever.

[raven-wraith]

This is Actually a Completely Subjective List Written in a Completely Objective Voice, so I’m not Wrong, Y’all just had a Bad Year: A Look at the Best Titles of 2020 A.D.

By Orova

I feel like a recap or an intro that encompasses the past year will be redundant to both the reader and the writer, so I just won’t. Instead, I’ll just say that due to circumstances provided by 2020, I had a lot of time to just shut up and play games. And games did I play. I played a lot of good games[1]. I played a lot of bad games[2]. I bought the newest games that came out[3] and I went back down memory lane with some classics[4]. But at the end of every day, I was completely satisfied with how I spent my time and did what I wanted. So this is a list of the games that surpassed satisfaction, pushed the bar higher, and made me reconsider what a truly great game can be in 2020.

The Last Of Us Part II

This game is a beautiful work of art and storytelling. If gripping gameplay is what you came for, then you’ll be staying for the story. Naughty Dog continues to come out with games that push current gen Playstations to astronomical heights, making that hardware and software work overtime to get a game that becomes so overwhelmingly tangible that it cause the player to stop. The Last of Us Part II is no exception to this rule. So often does this game take lefts and rights when you expect it to go straight that it is absolutely insane how much ground it truly covers. Sneaking about before getting into claustrophobic gunfights feels smooth and natural, the new mechanics and enemies are unique, and while the non-linear parts can overstay their welcome at times, the game is long enough for them to not fill in empty space. 

When I first played this, I was with my girlfriend for the whole journey and at the end, I didn’t feel quite as fulfilled as I thought I should’ve from the sequel to one of the greatest games I’ve ever played. It wasn’t until I returned on a higher difficulty did I find just how much this game has to offer, making the story all the more powerful as every fight truly felt like my last and every enemy made me rethink my choices and decision making and every arrow I fired and molotov I threw felt a nice weight to it that I have to emphasize once more. This game is a beautiful work of art and storytelling as the gameplay speaks for itself before anything else.

Final Fantasy VII Remake

To those that actually care, I reviewed this game when it came out[5] and I was shocked to find how many people didn’t appreciate it as much as I did. Final Fantasy VII is one of the most influential titles of my life that being able to see Cloud’s hair rendered so cleanly in this dystopian futuristic gothic fantasy world was a miracle in my eyes. A dream come true. The action comes in spades with enough sword fighting and magic to make Power Rangers to look like a fucking picnic.

The graphical design of the game, the direction of animation, and the cunning take on a lot of depth we never got to see so early on makes me very excited for future titles to come. There are some downsides, lots involving the side quests and voice acting, but that is just some of its downsides to look past to find the content at its core. Shooting moonbeams out of your greatsword at stormtroopers while in chase on a motorcycle. Take down a tyrannical oil monger as an eco-terrorist. Find cats for a little girl. Is this a Bioshock? No. But is it a game I keep trying to remind myself to not replay? Yes.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 + 2 Remake

Superman by Goldfinger played and my sister laughed as she watched me cry. This game brought tears to my eyes, literally. As I got to relive sitting in my grandma’s basement, I was propelled to complete absolutely everything I wanted to do. This game was a complete package and its delivery was spot on with what a remake should be. A collection on a past game with quality of life improvements, enhanced handling and accessibility, and a software overhaul.

The game is simple. Complete challenges, unlock drip, flex on your friends. Usually in that order. But it is finally that simplicity in a new game that makes it such a good title. We wanted the game we knew and loved and they promised that. Nothing more, nothing less, it is exactly what we got. A new soundtrack, updated graphics, and nostalgia not most can achieve is a massive point to play this game.

Huntdown

Contra meets Kung Fury. Why the fuck have you not grabbed a friend and played this masterpiece yet. I mean seriously. If you’ve got a roommate or SO or friend with nothing going on tonight, play this shit. It’s great. Moving on.

Mortal Shell

I would like to address the fact that, yes, this is a souls-like and it isn’t exactly the most friendly game because of it. However, this game came out of fucking nowhere and blew me on my ass. Going back to delivering on a promise, these guys crafted an unforgiving title with little to no hand holding to show that this-THIS[6]-is how you make a souls-like. It is balls to the walls skill based combat where the player has to use what little tools they have to overcome a myriad of enemies. Progress is possible only through rewards and items, meaning there is no grinding or farming, just straight gameplay.

This is a game where I paid half the price for a full game and got, while a shorter title, the enjoyment from a full priced AAA game. It takes no time to complete when the “click” happens and it is a fun, fulfilling title the whole time. There are some incredibly unique mechanics that forced me to break my souls brain and for that, it just makes the experience far more personal. If you aren’t weak hearted, I cannot recommend Mortal Shell enough.

Doom Eternal

When Doom Eternal dropped, my sister was playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. After we both went into respective video game comas from it, we dubbed March 20th Doom Crossing Day. Doom is Doom. Nothing more to say past that honestly, but I will continue my rambling cause I know it’s what you all want anyway.

These guys keep cranking the intensity knob higher and higher. With Doom 2016 these guys said, “Hey, what if we gave the best first person shooter that requires no thinking whatsoever to completely obliterate enemies and zoom around the map at breakneck speeds?” With Eternal, the guys said, “Hey, what if we did what we did for 2016 except this time, we actually have the everyone (enemies and the player) move faster, hit harder, and actually require them to think?” With that, the gore orgy of Doom Eternal was born. Still very much a fast paced shooter with some extra content to fill the pockets of completionists, it delivers in fucking truckloads exactly what it wants from the player. To let loose and fucking floor every hellish abomination in their path.

And the soundtrack, while a sad story, is still one of the best things to listen to in gaming and probably the world.

Darkwood

The only thing that made me stop to consider buying this game was how reliant on a crafting system it seemed. I hate games that force crafting. I don’t know why, so I won’t elaborate. But, done with The Last of Us Part II and needing a survival horror itch to scratch, I sucked it up and bought it. After all, being an indie title for a genre I admire more than most, it couldn’t have been a terrible waste of time. That was probably the single best decision I made during the last year and Darkwood is not lost on me in that sense.

The fact that Darkwood has not only exposed the horizon of top-down horror, but it has experimented and perfected its use for the camera angle is astounding. The atmosphere rides on that perspective and, between the short days of scavenging and talking to the few NPCs you meet to the long nights crouched in the corner of your (un)safe haven, it is never lost. It’s a game where you constantly hear your heart in your ears. The combat can be sloppy at times but the story is one of a kind and its execution is phenomenal. If you are a fan of horror games or roguelikes, I cannot tell you enough. Get Darkwood.

Deep Rock Galactic

After lots of thoughtful consideration, I have deemed this the number one title of 2020. Not only did it keep me and my friends together and in touch during the hard times, it is a shooter that I support with my whole body. You and your friends play as a team of drunk space dwarves, tasked with a mission that sends you deep into a spider-infested planet, where you will have to use your class sets to fight, plunder, and escape the hostile environment.

With PvE at its core and ridiculousness as its foundation, Deep Rock Galactic is a masterpiece of cooperative shooting and procedurally generated dungeon crawling. Blending class play from Team Fortress 2 with unexpected and differing missions from Darkest Dungeon, one will find this lighthearted shooter is an easy, accessible title. With a hint of Risk of Rain to complete its graphics, the game is above all fun. That’s right. It. Is. Just. Fun. Shoot a spider that launches fireballs from its mouth, drink beer that teleports you into the farthest reaches of space, get rich off of gold veins while your team calls you greedy, dye your beard purple, and Rock and Stone in this amazing fusion of PvE and dungeon crawling. 

Thank you for coming. There will be no score. It is simply a list where I feel those that need some new titles after the biggest disappointment of them all[7] should find some great titles in here for themselves. Have a safe next year and be patient. Patience is what will reward you. Practice is what humbles you. Hesitation is defeat. Toodles.

[1] Ghostrunner

[2] Hellpoint

[3] Mafia: Definitive Edition

[4] Silent Hill 3

[5] 9/10

[6] Not you Hellpoint

[7] Cyberpunk 2077 but I mean, we all saw this coming. I had to put it in here somewhere.

[rosebloodcat]

Revealed- Arthur p2

Lewis had lost a lot of his anger towards Arthur while traveling with the Mystery Skulls again.

Yes, he still remembered seeing Arthur push him, but it was so hard to hate someone who was doing everything in their power (and then some) to try and find him. Who would happily wax poetic about how much he meant to them, without a single lie or falsehood in his speech or behavior. The person who really, honestly wanted him back.

It was so hard to connect the vicious, cruelly grinning face of his killer with the exhausted mechanic that was determined to bring him home. Who wanted to bring him back to his family (god, his family, they still didn't know). Who wanted him to help get Vivi's memories back. Who just wanted things to go back to how they should be.

He was still frustrated and bitter about his passing, but he just didn't have the hatred he had when he first woke in the Cave, dead as a doornail with no explanation why.

And the way the blonde had (many times) risked himself to protect Vivi from harm? As much as he disliked him, Lewis couldn't be more grateful to Arthur for saving the blunette's life.

He looked up at the quickly darkening sky. A blizzard looked to be moving in, and fast. He had to find Arthur and Mystery and get them inside before the storm hit. Neither would last through the drop in temperature. He let loose a number of his Deadbeats, partially to make finding the blonde and not-dog easier, and partially to keep an eye out for the creature that attacked them. (It was still out there, possibly watching. Waiting.)

Tracking his way back to Arthur was actually pretty easy. Because of Lewis' fiery nature, he'd left a rather convenient trail of melted snow in his wake during his dash for the cabin. But the snow was already starting to fall so he had to move quickly before the trail was hidden from sight, and Arthur caught hypothermia or something equally terrible.

He squinted through the darkness, finally spotting the yellow and orange lump laying at the base of a tree with a small black and red form next to it. Exactly where Lewis had hoped they would still be. It was good to know that Mystery had trusted him to protect Vivi, and willing to stay behind to keep Arthur safe. But something was off. The yellow form seemed too- big? Long?

Lewis' non-existent stomach lurched in alarm.

That thing- It didn't have some kind of werewolf-syndrome going on, did it? It couldn't transfer it's condition via injury, could it?

He surged forward, dropping beside the unconscious blonde and pulling him into his arms, eliciting a small, startled yip from the dog beside him. Arthur didn't stir.

“Arthur! Come one, wake up!” He spoke softly, very gently shaking the other and trying to get some kind of reaction. He couldn't detect temperature very well, but he could tell that Arthur was far too cold, his skin too pale, his breathing too shallow.

Worse still were the trails of blood dripping down the blonde's body, staining the once-white snow a dark crimson. Lewis could see the the long, diagonal gashes across Arthur's chest and side, and he knew there were some across his back too. The blonde wasn't even twitching from the pressure Lewis was putting on is injuries.

He cursed softly, this was bad. Very, very bad.

The part of him that still cared for Arthur as a friend panicked. He had to get Arthur back to the cabin, before he bled out or froze to death.

One of his Deadbeats chirred curiously, tugging at it's mental connection to him like a child tugging at an adult's sleeve, drawing his gaze from his friend's unresponsive face to look at whatever had gotten it's attention.

And he felt himself still.

Lewis had long since come to the conclusion Arthur had kept things from himself and Vivi. Before his death, he'd never really thought much of it, believing everyone was entitled to their secrets and their privacy. The same still held (mostly) true for him after death. But because of said incident, he had become far more aware of things that were hidden.

Death had open his vision in a manner not unlike removing sunglasses from someone's face. You could see everything, but at the edges of your vision, you could see there was more to the world than what was in front of you. But when you turned to look, your view didn't really change. The world hadn't really changed from how it had been prior, but it had become sharper to his sight, clearer. Letting him see details that he couldn't have seen before.

He had realized that Arthur was keeping something pretty big from them, but it hadn't seemed relevant to his death so he hadn't bothered looking into it. He'd deemed it unimportant, or something he didn't need to forcefully push his way into. He knew it had had something to do with the way Arthur looked or felt because of the veil he'd seen when they'd all finally reunited. But he had been sure that the way Arthur looked hadn't connected to why the blonde had killed him. It had seemed like a simple little side note.

But that didn't stop the stunned disbelief of seeing one of his Deadbeats playing with the end of a brown and yellow snake tail. A tail that was easily several meters long. A tail that was very obviously attached to Arthur, growing out where his legs should have been.

He was fairly certain his mind had pulled up the Blue-Screen-of-Death at the sight.

Mystery was quick to headbutt him in the side with a snarl, bringing him back to the present and kicking his mind back into gear.

The not-dog was giving him a look. His pretty-much-patented “Freak out later, we have more important things” look. It just further cemented why Arthur always treated Mystery like a person instead of an animal. He was just too smart and expressive to be normal.

He quickly shifted one arm under Arthur's- under where Arthur's knees should have been, and carefully lifted the blonde up, his grip tighter than it probably needed to be. The mechanic wasn't heavy per-say, but the long tail made balancing his weight awkward (also those scales were cold, and he didn't think that was a good thing). One of his Beats had the bright idea of wrapping the tail around Lewis' shoulders, making so that it wasn't dragging in the snow or getting caught in stray branches (Tree, bush, or other), but it wasn't very helpful over all.

Getting back to the cabin was slower than Lewis' would have liked (due to the cold, the snow, and him juggling Arthur's awkward weight), but he was just glad the thing that attacked them hadn't come back for a second round. Getting inside had held him up for a moment but his little beats easily opened the door for him, once he realized his hands were too full of unconscious mechanic to open it himself.

“Vivi! I found them! But you're gonna need to take a look at Arthur!” 'Because I sure don't know what to think of this...' He heard a thud from the second floor, followed by the scrambling foot steps of someone racing down the hall towards the stairs. He carefully laid Arthur out on the couch, fumbling slightly to get the long tail off his shoulders and trying to figure out what would qualify as “comfortable” for the other, before just draping said tail over one armrest and curling it around the back of the couch.

Arthur hadn't stirred in the slightest throughout the trip, and it was really starting to make him worry.

“Holy Cheese!” Lewis looked back to see Vivi at the bottom of the stairs, staring wide-eyed at at Arthur. More specifically the tail attached to him. “What on earth happened to him?” Lewis didn't know what to tell her.

Mystery let out an aggravated bark, making the girl and ghost jump at the sudden noise. Lewis gave his head a shake, bringing himself back to the task at hand.

Arthur was still hurt, still bleeding where he lay. They needed to handle that first. He stated as much to Vivi, who tore off to grab the med-kit they brought with them.

Arthur's shirt, jacket, and prosthetic were carefully removed, Lewis taking a moment to cover the blonde's waist from Vivi's sight (He had no idea if there was anything there, but he would still respect Arthur's modesty in front others). And when the girl returned with the supplies, his wounds were quickly swathed in medicine, gauze and bandages.

Thankfully, it seemed the cuts weren't as deep as he feared, most of them shallow and easy to clean and dress. They were still bad though, and it would takes a couple weeks before he fully recovered, Lewis was sure of that. They'd made sure to check the blonde's head too, since he had been knocked out (There was a lump, but it didn't look too bad).

But now came the hard part, figuring out what happened to Arthur to change him like this. After all, humans didn't randomly change into half-snake people from being bashed upside the head. That just wasn't natural.

Lewis stared down at the unconscious blonde, trying to puzzle out how this was even possible when he finally noticed something he hadn't before.

“The veil's gone...” he muttered. He had been so distracted by the state the blonde was in that he hadn't even noticed that his ever-present veil was no longer there.

“Veil? What do you mean?” He looked back at Vivi, trying to figure out how to explain it. Maybe it was something she could explain?

So he did. He explained the energy he had always seen wrapped around Arthur (he didn't bring up the one around Mystery. He had a feeling that would anger the not-dog and he didn't want that), the way it originated from his chest and wrapped around him from there, how it was kind of warm yet the blonde had never said anything about feeling too hot.

He watched Vivi chew her lip thoughtfully.

“I remember one case I had gone alone for,” she said slowly, carefully pulling at her memories as she spoke. “It had been while Arthur was still getting his prosthetic, a minor one about someone seeing something weird, nothing harmful, just odd. I found a cryptid was using a cave near town as a hiding spot, because she was having trouble with staying in her human form.

“She told me that some cryptids could take human forms on their own, but others like her needed a help staying in that form. They carried special talismans with them that helped them stay human even when they lost their concentration. She had lost her's and was trying to find it again. I helped her figure out where it went, but she made me promise not to tell anyone about her unless it was really important. She said they didn't like being revealed, because a lot of people didn't like folks who weren't human.” She straightened up, her expression firm, with an undercurrent of realization.

“Arthur- Arthur must be like that too. He must've had a talisman to stay human, and lost it when that monster attacked him.”

Lewis felt a small flicker of worry in his chest, a hand clenching on the back of the couch. Discovering what that veil was answered some of his questions, but now what?

If Arthur wasn't actually human, how could they heal him? What if he actually needed some kind of special medicine that they didn't know about? Was the stuff they used going to work? And why wasn't he waking up?!

Lewis' wanted to beat his head against something in frustration (preferably a wall).

Vivi crouched down by Arthur's tail, resting a hand over the scaly form as she examined it.

“Heat, we need to get him warm.” Her tone was firm, and she nodded in that self-assured way of hers. She lightly patted it as she continued. “This is a snake tail. Snakes, like most reptiles, are cold-blooded animals. Meaning they can't generate their own body heat. This is just a guess, but I bet Arthur can't either. You said the veil was warm, right?”

Lewis nodded.

“Then I bet it was making his body warm enough to keep working. Snakes and other reptiles go into hibernation when the temperature drops, that's why people never see them in cold climates or during winter.”

“So the cold's basically sent him into a coma, and he won't wake up until he's warm again.” Lewis summarized. Vivi nodded, confirming it.

It was still worrying, but at least they now had some idea of what was going on and what to do. His hand reached up to rub at the back of his neck (a habit from when he was alive), only to drop it to his side. They had work to do.

“Alright then, I'll get a fire started. Why don't you see if you can find a clean shirt or a sweater and some blankets for Arthur?” He paused. “Actually, don't we have a bunch of electric blankets in the van? I'll send some Deadbeats to get those.”

[groundbreaking-science]

1-10 - Breaking Down the Power Level

From the start of my patchy teaching career, beginning as a brother then a parent, my general ethos towards explaining the world has been to never patronise. I have developed some semblance of self-awareness over the years and so may at times simplify or reign in tangents - not everyone needs to know the minutiae to gain a broad understanding of a topic. My aim though is to never shy away from trying to provide a full answer to a question posed, no matter the age or background of the poser. An earnest and enthusiastic question deserves a considered answer with all the nuance one’s expertise can provide in the situation. I trust those listening to instead communicate where clarification would be helpful, or sift through what they need in the moment and chew over the rest later.

In contrast, there’s a trend in wider media to cling to ‘consumers’ of scientific content by ratcheting up the the sensational, the over-simplified, the drama that may or may not be manufactured for entertainment. Narratives within popular science help guide and contain the message within (no one wants to be subjected to a list of facts, even regarding ki) but often the science is so watered down the only substance of the piece is the fluff. Those with a genuine palate for science (or history, or literature, or…) are left underwhelmed on repeated readings and sometimes even mistrusting of the expertise involved.

It is for those reasons I decided to include this section as a hat tip to the insatiably curious, though for those among you with little appetite for a smattering of mathematics, I first bring you a tangential, and completely true, offering in the form of a fish.

I have spoken frequently of a model for ki. By that I mean a story that explains the effects of ki we see using fundamental quantities. The story links cause and effect in the form of equations, transforming the qualitative to the quantitative.

The model presented here is not perfect. All models are an approximation to the truth and there are many simplifications (particularly in this version and I will highlight where), but broadly the model performs well and the limitations of the model are well defined. I trust you to take away what is most useful to you now, and I hope this treatment gives potential undergraduates a taster for some of the more theoretical aspects of a course on ki-use I hope will materialise in the near-future.

When in battle one question sits on the tip of everyone’s tongue: “What is the enemy’s power level?” This is proxy phrase to ask many questions at once. What is the opponent’s potential? How many people will be required to tackle them? How much strength should I use straight out of the gate? What is the risk to the local environment, the nearby populace, the planet? The highest power level will not always win a fight. Power level differences of an order of magnitude, even sometimes two, can be overcome with teamwork and sound strategy. Getting an early indication of the opponent’s location and power can give your team vital time to plan and distribute yourselves effectively.

As we discussed in a previous section, the idea of a power-level measuring device - the scouter - was first introduced to us by Freeza’s personal army and deconstructed by Bulma.

The original scouters performed perfectly well in the situation they were designed for, searching for clusters of life-forms with power levels of 0-2 (encompassing the vast majority of people in the Universe) to allow the possessors to commit mass murder extremely efficiently. The scouters were able to stretch beyond this range, reaching higher power levels of 5.3; any higher and the harmonic oscillator arrays constructed to respond to the vibrations in the ki field (with technology developed along a similar branch to Dr Gero’s) would break. Specifically: the atomic ‘pendulums’ of varied masses contained within ion traps would be kicked out of the holding magnetic fields and flung away into the rest of the structure, shorting the electronics and usually exploding the device. The designers believed the likelihood of any of Freeza’s forces  encountering someone that strong so low they didn’t deem it necessary to prioritise the scouter-wearer’s safety. Clearly Freeza’s true strength, peaking above a power level of eight at that time, was hidden from the vast majority of his forces.

The fully artificial scouters were not flexible enough to cope with everything life could throw at it. Life itself on the other hand has an amazing capacity to give as good as it gets. I can sense everything from tiny fogs of ki in less-than-clean water to the brightest kis in the Universe standing almost blindingly close, and I can do it all without shorting my own circuitry. Whilst the mechanical scouters have a range of 0 to 5.3, the newer versions developed on Earth can cope with -1 to 14, (or 0.1 to 100,000,000,000,000 unlogged). That is tested. Hypothetically they should remain accurate up to a power level of 17 but we never want to be in situation where we’re reading that. Our method’s downside is the loss of precision compared to the original scouter, which was able to differentiate just as well between power levels of 1 and 2 and 10,000 and 10,001. Our scouters do maintain a 0.1% precision however, which is usually sufficient. Anyone wanting finer precision to monitor and argue their progress needs another hobby.

Capsule Corp employees have for the most part stayed away from playing with the biophysics of life, knowing the trouble and potential backfire meddling can cause through the work of Dr Gero. What little research and development that has been done in this field has been led by Bulma and Mai through all above-board personal funding. The new scouters are a result of this off-piste research and utilise a genetic modification of bioluminescent bacteria found in a tropical fish.

The fish in question - the blue-finned angelfish - exclusively inhabits the coral reefs around one of the many South Sea archipelagos. They’re crepuscular feeders, making use of the changing light levels at dawn and dusk that other fish and invertebrates struggle to cope with. When hunting for prey like small fish and krill they spread into what can appear to be a dangerously loose shoal. What makes this strategy effective is the beautiful symbiotic relationship the fish has with a bacteria within the fish’s transparent skin along the fins and tail. The bacteria glows neon yellow using bioluminescence near low power levels (-2 to -1.5) and flickers in a predictable pattern with the ki signature, the wave of flickering allowing for the triangulation of distance. When the glow starts, the fish play a game of hot and cold until close enough to pinpoint their prey through smell. The now brighter glow brings the rest of the shoal to feed into the early night.

Why then are are these fish known as the blue-finned and not yellow-finned angelfish? Well, they are named as yellow locally, though zoologists from the mainland way-back-when never much listened to local expertise, routinely removing chosen specimens from their natural environment to study in the comfort of the lab. As the scientists approached the fish in the tank back home their fins glowed a bright blue and the fish reacted poorly, racing to escape. It transpires the bacteria can luminesce over two colours, yellow for prey and blue for predators - the latter covering intensities of 0.3-2. This range catches the bigger fish and reef sharks that home in on the yellow glow of a feeding shoal. When a wave of blue creeps across the shoal in the near-dark, the fish know to hide. It just so happens this range encompasses the scientists’ own power levels, too. To the scientists with clipboards then, these were only ever blue-finned glowing fish.

The locals know of the fish’s defence intimately and is a source of great amusement. There’s a shallow, natural harbour in one of the smaller islands that, very rarely, a large shoal of angelfish will chase prey into. The harbour is sealed and all the boats dragged onto the shore. A call is then sent to the other islands for an impromptu night-long festival - a spontaneous get-together and chance to catch-up. Traditionally, the arrival of the fish had been seen as a mixed omen, that bad luck is ongoing or shortly arriving. Assembling a group to challenge the fish twice-touched by a creator god (once for each colour) however will guide the selection of the warrior or leader to pull the islands through a time of strife.

The challenge is as follows. Representatives from each attending island volunteer to take on the fish. Their true reasons for participating are varied: trained warriors, children nearing adulthood, people looking to impress an onlooker they’re sweet on, older fishermen showing off their talent, the local clown putting on a show. Each representative is then painted over the course of the afternoon by friends and family with a glowing set of pigments (not made from the fish fins, I hasten to add). Some designs are beautifully intricate; most are messy, child-sized handprints. Everyone then waits for twilight with great anticipation.

The participants take their turn to wade in and try to catch a fish in the harbour with only a net - the great difficulty being of course that the fish will glow blue and alert the shoal to avoid the intruder. This leaves an ever-moving empty ring of water around the participant to flounder in, struggling to cast the net and maybe just reaching the shoal edge. The larger their genki, the wider that ring and the greater the challenge. The winner is decided by elected older folk, and is usually a combination of how fast a fish was caught and how much paint was left on the challenger’s body. About half of participants catch and release a fish, nearly everyone trips, and the spectators have a great time.

Nowadays the omens and winners are not taken seriously beyond passing on fantastical stories, spooking the children or for gaining bragging rights. Usually.

The year before the 28th World Martial Arts Tournament, a shoal made their way into the harbour. The residents of one of many islands answered the call, the group including the young Papayaman and his family. Their island hadn’t been doing so well in recent years; the Moon’s twice vanishing and reappearing act dampened the tides for a time and their delicate yellow mangrove trees took a hit. The entire food chain around the islands and reef was disrupted and the trees would take decades to recover. As the slow-growing tree bark is prized for its tannin, the island’s economy took a brutal hit, too. The residents, previously relatively comfortable, had eaten into their savings and were near the brink. Going to the festival was supposed to be a rare fun day out. As the eldest sibling at nine years old, the boy who would become Papayaman had already resolved to compete in the hope he would be worthy enough to help his family.

The evening went smoothly until the boy took the long walk down towards the water. As he hit the shoreline the fish retreated, that blue ring growing to taunt him, he believed. When in the water the scale of the challenge stretched before him. There was no way he would be able to throw the net that far out, let alone hold onto it to drag a fish back. He became more and more frustrated as his time and paint dwindled and his anger, something he rarely felt, rose… then burst. For a moment the entire bay was full of blue stars, lighting up the dusk. Then the fish bolted, some even jumping onto the shore in a frantic escape attempt, causing pandemonium amongst the younger children.

The boy did not catch a fish himself in the end. But there was no doubt about his potential throughout the archipelago, and he was brought into warrior training as soon as he returned home. He was then selected to attend the tournament on nearby Papaya Island to earn money for his village. Although he didn’t win, due to his efforts and subsequent training the island eventually did recover.

A number of years later the shoal returned and the now young man eventually found a way to catch that fish, finally marking (from his own perspective at least) his graduation from training with my father. And as they say, the rest is history.

My first encounter with the fish was a little more begrudging. I had just “moved” to East City for a postdoctoral position into a cosy office with two others funded on the same grant. We got on well and I was hoping for a relatively relaxing couple of years. That was thrown out the window within the first month when the zebrafish aficionados in the labs two floors below decided to branch out, nabbing a number of blue-finned angelfish to get to grips with the bioluminescence. They’d hypothesised the glowing bacteria were responding to the fish’s excitement and stress levels (apologies for not correcting you sooner) and were planning on running behavioural studies.

Those fish hated me. Even at that distance, my natural aura was just the right strength to set them off. No one could figured out why the fish were constantly stressed during lab hours, until of course the news reached our office and I put two and two together. My chronically guilty self had the most fun five months suppressing my genki at work until the lab moved from data collection to analysis and the fish returned home. Still, I’m grateful I got to peruse the results from the bacterial DNA sequencing. I relayed the gist to Bulma and she was able to isolate, then modify, the particular colour and ki range the bacteria glowed at. I’ve contacted the old lab members for co-authorship on this new work. I hope they’re not too mad.

The new scouters use these modified bacteria to read power levels and ki signatures. Stacked into mini vials filled with agar, the bacteria respond to ki much like cone cells in the eye respond to light wavelengths. The spectrum of light emitted by the bacteria indicate the intensity of ki hitting the scouter, and the specific pulsing is monitored and decomposed to identify ki signatures - much like instruments can be isolated from a song. With at least two detector packs and accelerometers to track the movement of the wearer, ki signatures can be triangulated and located. A simple pair of glasses (less conspicuous than the original scouters) can be used display results - one lens for a simple overlay or both for a full 3D effect. The isolation isn’t fantastic at a distance as the baseline separation between the detectors isn’t that great, but in relatively close quarters they work perfectly. Better yet are the systems Mai built into the jet flier and jeep windshield that give a heads-up display of the scene for both the driver and passenger. Due to “popular” demand there is a smartphone app, though sadly the hardware is not included.

All in all we’re pretty well-equipped to quantify overall power level. The measure was rendered completely useless by Earth’s martial artists, however. As soon as Freeza’s army found we could suppress our ki and therefore their scouters were unable to accurately predict any form of maximal potential, the tech was discarded. With the new scouters, getting beyond that one measure to find all the components - genki boosts, yuuki, shouki, the base power, flow suppressions, effort - is entirely possible and we can fully model a person’s ki-use and potential. The equations for the model (omitting the calculus) are as follows. 

The overall power P (without being logged) can be defined as the total energy E_T divided by the time interval t, or

We know the total energy can be expressed as

Or, as the sum of energy derived from the field (E_F) and what is remaining of genki energy E_G,rem. This can be substituted into the first equation to form

Genki energy E_G is divided into two parts: the genki that is amplified (E_G,amp) and the remaining genki (E_G,rem), so the above is expanded to

From section 1-9 we know E_G,amp can be expressed with the fraction of genki chosen to be converted from genki to field, f_GF. Substituting for E_G,rem we get

Recall also from that section E_F is a function of E_G,amp, the converted fraction fGF and the efficiency of amplification from genki to field, a_GF,

Substituting through we get

And then simplified down:

Let’s take stock here. We’ve been able to break down the power level into a number of base stats - the amplification, the fraction converted and genki energy. As a sanity check here, if the amplification of genki (a_GF) is less than 1 this will lead to that central bracket becoming negative and the entire combined power level less than if it were from genki alone. This correctly mimics the disappointing early stages of learning to amplify genki, where you get less out than you put in. You will need to persevere!

We can further break down the genki energy into the flow rate of particles from the centre Q and the average charge per particle, q.

We use the average charge rather than an exact value due to the slight variation genki charge can possess, the variation of which is mirrored in the colour spectrum of the aura. In extreme cases (like the kaioken with a double peak in section 1-8) the two averages can be noted and incorporated in a full treatment. The assumption of only one smooth peak and therefore one mean is usually made.

From section 1-8 we also know that the flow Q is the flux Phi_p multiplied by the surface area A. This is simplified. The flux measured can be directionally dependent if the ki-user is focusing down an attack for example. For the most part though, the aura is isotropic (the same in all directions). In reality the calculation should be a closed integral over the centre surface, modelled as a sphere.This then all ties together as

and substituting in

The power level is not a static value. The surface area A can change with transformation or suppression, as can the average charge q. Both of these quantities are defined with dynamic variables. Remember from section 1-9 that yuuki (y, courage) can affect these manipulations of surface area and charge,

And

where A is the surface area at rest, q the average charge at rest, and f refers to the resultant fractional change the ki-user is affecting. e is the effort assigned to perform these changes. Theta refers to all the parameters needed to define the function translating effort and yuuki into that fractional change. From section 1-8 we know most ki-users step up in genki using those harmonically defined troughs of required effort and sit at one level rather than hovering in tricky spots. Yuuki modifies these curves by raising them, meaning the ki-user requires more effort to reach the same desired fractional change. Some levels even become ‘locked out’ entirely. These functions take the same wavey and upwards shape for everyone, though the actual width, height and ramp up of effort required will change between ki-users. Whilst these functions are complicated, a good approximation can be made with a relatively small number of parameters. Explicitly defining those functions is beyond the scope of this book, but suffice to say the parameters for those functions can be thought of as base stats, too.

Similar to yuuki, shouki (s,strength of will) feeds into the efficiency of conversion between genki and field energy in a similar fashion -

Where a_GF,0 is ones go-to conversion rate. Whereas yuuki affected the ki-users ability to change from natural outputs, in this case we do not perform any amplification naturally (though we have a habitual value) so shouki affects the ki-user’s ability to amplify genki at all - if shouki is 0, no amount of assigned effort will amplify genki.

There is an additional constraint on these values. One of course only has a limited amount of effort to give. Some must go into general thought and movement, so we can surmise

Knowing some manipulations of flow, charge and amplification would be downright impossible, this one inequality can help constrain the rest of the parameters considerably.

In full then, one rearranged form of the equation for a ki-user’s power level (omitting some nuances for legibility) is

Putting this all together, we have a number of default ‘base stats’ - A_0, q_0, a_GF,0 and Phi_p (along with the effort to flow rate, effort to genki charge and effort to amplification functions defined with θs) and the dynamic stats y, s, e_A, e_(A_GF)  and e_q. From these there are a number of derived stats like f_GF, f_q, f_(a_GF), Q, q and the most useful split of power level, E_G and E_F .

Given some loose assumptions and probabilities assigned to each of these variables - so-called priors that were discussed in section 1-3 - one can monitor a changing power level and narrow down these assumptions using increasing evidence as time passes to give parameter estimates.

What kind of priors? We know some states of particle flow and genki charge are difficult to reach due to the harmonics inherent in the process, and so ki-users are going to avoid particular power levels due to the increase in effort required to hold them. We can assume ki-users will default to a habitual level of genki amplification. Flow rate will never increase above base without particular techniques like transformation. Charge never drops below the default level unless the flow rate is unnaturally high or the ki-user is exhausted. All of these assumptions can be programmed into the model as prior assumptions.

One must be careful with priors to never attribute zero probability to a possibility otherwise that one-in-a-million chance will never appear in the probable results in the updating model. I could assume that no one with a Earthling appearance could have a power-level above 2, for example. If I turn these assumption on my Uncle Krillin the model will give the best answer it can, maybe trying to say that he has a very efficient genki to field conversion rate to compensate for the lack of flexibility in the model. Instead, by allowing some very small, highly unlikely chance for an Earthling to have such a high natural power level, the updated prior will be pulled to this region with every new data point, showing the unlikely to be more and more possible.

When encountering odd enemies one may ‘widen the priors’ to encompass highly unlikely scenarios like godly-powered Earthlings. ‘Flattening the priors’ means allowing all possible scenarios. Whilst that sounds like the best idea, flattening leads to a large number of possible solutions when you know some combination of base stats are more likely to occur than others. Choosing priors for any kind of succession analysis is an art form in itself.

There can be a lot of information and possibilities to process when building up a picture of a ki-user, but with a careful set of tasks to perform in a calm environment, someone’s base stats at least can be obtained and updated on a semi-regular basis. This narrows down the parameter space before entering battle considerably, reducing the uncertainty when finding the dynamic variables. Some tasks include running up and down ki output from fully suppressed to maximum, or how quickly one can amplify a set amount of genki. For new enemies the scouter has to work overtime, but with every second of new information our intel improves considerably. Even if all the enemies’ parameters haven’t been constrained, the more varied their attacks and strategy the faster we can build up a picture to start answering key questions such as whether the enemy is holding back their strength.

For our team, Mai is able to feed us updates about each other’s status, allowing us to adjust the plan should someone be running low and too proud to admit it, or the enemy be surprisingly resilient. For all the rudimentary single word or single image telepathy usually thrown around the field,hearing an articulate voice in your ear confirming that you’re tired  or Auntie Bulma yelling to calm down should the panic be setting in can be very disconcerting. I refer to ‘us’; I’m never very careful with the tiny earpiece and I blow it within minutes. As much as the data intrigues me I’m far too used to running from my own observations. I’m not the only one to have been on the sharp end of a scolding, the earpieces are notoriously difficult to keep intact. Pan has the longest survival time of forty-five minutes and even that’s contested as for the first half an hour she was deliberately suppressing as a feint.

The scouters are useful in the moment and for review, but their most interesting day-to-day function is how the software can track improvement. This of course leads to competition. Endless competition. From conversations I’ve overheard, the moment one of the kids feels they’ve improved the scouters are out. There are often disputes because someone is 'using the scouter wrong’ and Mai is dragged in to adjudicate or fix what turns out to be perfectly functional hardware… Bulma put her foot down very quickly on getting drawn into these arguments. Even the old guard cannot contain their curiosity and will play with them at parties for old times’ sake.

Realistically though, the live-feed technology is more a gimmick for us. We know each other well enough and are sadly so experienced that our gut reactions, whilst not quantifiable, are usually correct. In actuality, the technology as a whole continues to be developed for future use. It would be well-suited for personal status trackers across a large group to be fed back to a control hub, or to help tailor training for new ki-users to maximise their efforts.

“New ki-users”. For those who haven’t flicked to later chapters that phrase must be torture to read right now. I understand. This section now closes the ‘brief’ chapter on the theoretical framework behind ki and we will now move onto the practical elements. You can breathe. Speaking of, if you have been working on those centring exercises I’d hope you’d have found your centre by now, have fantastic posture and felt the first hints of the natural flow of genki with your breath. This is preparation that will, in the coming chapter, pay dividends.

Ah. During this chapter I did promise you a particular story. I hadn’t forgotten, nor have I left it deliberately late to tease. I wanted to put myself, friends and family in a wider context before tackling it lest there is any misunderstanding after. I also wanted to put the story front and centre in the textbook chapter I believe will be the most read because of the tale’s significance - not just to world history or tangentially to ki but to me.  

The story’s about the Cell Games, and how I came to be that little boy on the hill.

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