Don't poke me! And we are not talking about her looks. Subject over, dropped, gone, forgotten, the end. Hit on her at your own risk if she ever shows up again.
But before moving onto Sgrub, that does remind me--I always forget something, I swear--death doesn't last here. You die, and you get up again five days later, death wounds healed. But no, this is not free reign to kill whoever you want, and there are apparently going to be punishments for wanton murder if what the head nurse said is true. And I'm not doubting it after she made Eridan go mute for a week just for being a contrary little shit to her.
[But Sgrub... Hell, where to start?]
Anyway, Sgrub is a game, one that directly affected and manifested within reality, regardless of computers having a part in it. If you know anything about video games, it's a mixture of a building and creature-creation simulator, and an RPG. If you don't know anything, it's a game in which we built onto our hives through the computer interface, and later went on to create a whole new universe via breeding frogs. Not that we all contributed directly to the last part - the frog breeding is generally the domain of the space player, but I helped her with that, and all our actions contribute somehow to the end universe. It's complicated.
Anyway, the players form a chain. One person is the client, and the other is the server. The server builds onto the client's hive and deploys various machines that aid progress through the game, the previously mentioned alchemiter being one of many. Generally, though, they're for creating objects - things like weapons, namely, but also whatever useless doodads you can come up with depending on what components you combine. Building and alchemy both require a commodity called grist. How do you get grist? defeating enemies.
Enemies, namely called underlings, consist of various classes of monster. There are imps, ogres, giclopses, liches, basilisks... A number of things. They each serve a sort of boss creature called a denizen, which exists in the Land assigned to each player.
You reach this Land via an entry process via the first item you create, and basically, this means leaving your base planet and universe to the previously mentioned Land, which exists in Paradox Space. Each Land is its own small planet. At the center, instead of a sun, is a big blue orb with clouds called Skaia. Beyond that is the Battlefield, a checkerboarded... area, for lack of a better term. More on that later. Skaia is also orbited more closely by a golden planet with its own moon, called Propsit. Beyond the Lands is another planet with a moon, like Prospit, but purple and named Derse. There's also a ring of asteroids out in that region, and beyond that, a dark area called the Furthest Ring, populated by tentacled beasts called Horrorterrors. The name sounds ridiculous, but they live up the literal meaning, trust me.
You're probably wondering what each of those is for. When a player enters the game, their hive is transported along with them to their Land. The building is meant to reach gates above the hive, which transport you either to other Lands, or different areas of your own Land. There are seven total. The Lands also have different quests, puzzles, and so forth designed to test the player and I guess facilitate some kind of bullshit emotional growth in the process. They relate the titles and aspects we each have, which can also grant powers if you figure out how to unlock them. Each Land also has a dual theme to it, but I'm not going into that.
Prospit and Derse, in turn, are the planets where dreamselves lie. Each player has a dream self. The idea is that when your real self sleeps, your dream self is awake on that planet - and when your dream self sleeps, your real self is awake. But before that can happen, your dream self has to wake from this lengthy lasting sort of sleep in the first place. There's different things that can trigger it, but hell if I understand it. I didn't even wake up on Prospit until after the game had ended, and that was just in time for it to be killed. Lucky me!
[Eyeroll.]
But depending which planet your dream self exists on, you get a benefit. Prospit dreamers see portents in the clouds, and Derse dreamers hear the whispers of the Horrorterrors. Both these are designed to aid progress through the game.
Dream selves also serve extra purpose: they can be a fallback extra life if you get killed, or they can be used to reach a sort of super powered level called God Tier. In each land is something called a quest bed, and if you die on it, you revive with fancy powers and an ugly pajama outfit, and gain conditional immortality. This means that if you die, you will forever revive, unless the death is either just or heroic.
But eventually, all this progress through the Lands - fighting underlings, confronting denizens, building on hives, hopping through gates - gets you to the Battlefield. Here, the forces of Prospit and Derse, these carapaced beings, fight a sort of war. Derse always wins, no exceptions. But Derse, you see, is led by a Black Queen and a Black King. Both of them gain power, as do the underlings, from a process called prototyping.
Remember the devices I mentioned earlier? When you activate one, it also releases something called a kernelsprite. You put up to to things in it, which can be literally anything but usually include at least one dead thing, and that grants physical traits and powers to the underlings and the Black King and Queen. We all, except Aradia, prototyped our dead lusii - which is another story, don't ask. The sprite serves as a guide through the game, which is why you'd want to prototype in the first place. The benefit to your enemies is just the drawback.
The idea is that they serve as the last bosses, but with the help of a Dersite we exiled the Black Queen and destroyed her ring, which is what grants her her power. The Black King, though, has a scepter, and he just has to be fought. One of the prototypings that went into him was Gl'bgolyb - you know, Speaker of the Vast Glub, gets too hungry and we all die, the empress's own lusus. But we were awesome, so we owned the King's ass anyway, won the game, and proved how badass fucking awesome we all are.
And remember the frog breeding? The goal of that is to create the Genesis Frog, which is itself literally a new universe. The idea is that you get to enter this universe as a reward for beating the game. We were going to, and I was literally right about to open the door to it, when this demon appeared and cut it in half. Aradia managed to fling us into this thing called a transportalizer which sent us to a lab on one of the meteors, so we didn't die, but we were basically stuck hiding there to avoid the demon.
But another thing about those meteors. The whole point of entering the game is to escape the end of the world, which comes via those meteors being sent back in time to your world to pulverize it until nothing of use is left. These also affect the game itself. When you're getting close to the final battle, you see, they start to fly towards the battlefield, and it acts as a time limit. If you don't defeat the Black King quickly enough, you all get killed by meteors. Skaia does have defense to give you more time than you'd have originally, though, via portals, which are what send it back to your planet in the first place. Stable time loops are huge part of Sgrub.
You never get to "save" your home planet, though. If anyone wants to do that, that's left to exiles, carapace beings from the dream planets that get sent back to repopulate or do whatever. Exiles also serve as one of the many guides you get in the games, via subtle to overt influence to your mind, or in some cases, direct interaction. I met my exile in my Land and together we orchestrated the plan I mentioned earlier that got the Black Queen exiled. Of course, another one got him exiled later, thus the term.
Also, a big theme of the game is cyclical creation. Frog breeding includes a cloning process via something called ectobiology, in which a clone literally goes back in time to become the thing from which it was cloned. Creating the Genesis Frog, or Bilious Slick as he was nicknamed, involves trying to encourage failed clones via controlled and subtle genetic mutations.
Frog breeding, however, is not the only place ectobiology comes up. I mentioned before that the space player is the one tasked with the frog business, and I helped her with it. That's because I was the one to deal with the other place that ectobiology comes up: creating all of us. By us, I mean both you, our ancestors as a whole, and my team, including myself. You were never an egg: you were created from slime, in a lab, via a series of button presses and failed attempts to appearify you from the past. It's weird and again, complicated, and it ended with me herding twenty four grubs until they disappeared by meteor back to the past, to crash land into our planet and eventually grow up to be our present selves. Not that I knew I was making our ancestors at the time; I just thought they were twelve extra wigglers with no purpose, until the Dolorosa told me about how she found the Signless in a crater.
There's more stuff that comes after the game that I could and do plan to go into, but I'm going to pause here so you can ask questions. And yes, I know that was disjointed, but imagine being the one to actually play the game and have to figure it all out.
[Action!]
Don't poke me! And we are not talking about her looks. Subject over, dropped, gone, forgotten, the end. Hit on her at your own risk if she ever shows up again.
But before moving onto Sgrub, that does remind me--I always forget something, I swear--death doesn't last here. You die, and you get up again five days later, death wounds healed. But no, this is not free reign to kill whoever you want, and there are apparently going to be punishments for wanton murder if what the head nurse said is true. And I'm not doubting it after she made Eridan go mute for a week just for being a contrary little shit to her.
[But Sgrub... Hell, where to start?]
Anyway, Sgrub is a game, one that directly affected and manifested within reality, regardless of computers having a part in it. If you know anything about video games, it's a mixture of a building and creature-creation simulator, and an RPG. If you don't know anything, it's a game in which we built onto our hives through the computer interface, and later went on to create a whole new universe via breeding frogs. Not that we all contributed directly to the last part - the frog breeding is generally the domain of the space player, but I helped her with that, and all our actions contribute somehow to the end universe. It's complicated.
Anyway, the players form a chain. One person is the client, and the other is the server. The server builds onto the client's hive and deploys various machines that aid progress through the game, the previously mentioned alchemiter being one of many. Generally, though, they're for creating objects - things like weapons, namely, but also whatever useless doodads you can come up with depending on what components you combine. Building and alchemy both require a commodity called grist. How do you get grist? defeating enemies.
Enemies, namely called underlings, consist of various classes of monster. There are imps, ogres, giclopses, liches, basilisks... A number of things. They each serve a sort of boss creature called a denizen, which exists in the Land assigned to each player.
You reach this Land via an entry process via the first item you create, and basically, this means leaving your base planet and universe to the previously mentioned Land, which exists in Paradox Space. Each Land is its own small planet. At the center, instead of a sun, is a big blue orb with clouds called Skaia. Beyond that is the Battlefield, a checkerboarded... area, for lack of a better term. More on that later. Skaia is also orbited more closely by a golden planet with its own moon, called Propsit. Beyond the Lands is another planet with a moon, like Prospit, but purple and named Derse. There's also a ring of asteroids out in that region, and beyond that, a dark area called the Furthest Ring, populated by tentacled beasts called Horrorterrors. The name sounds ridiculous, but they live up the literal meaning, trust me.
You're probably wondering what each of those is for. When a player enters the game, their hive is transported along with them to their Land. The building is meant to reach gates above the hive, which transport you either to other Lands, or different areas of your own Land. There are seven total. The Lands also have different quests, puzzles, and so forth designed to test the player and I guess facilitate some kind of bullshit emotional growth in the process. They relate the titles and aspects we each have, which can also grant powers if you figure out how to unlock them. Each Land also has a dual theme to it, but I'm not going into that.
Prospit and Derse, in turn, are the planets where dreamselves lie. Each player has a dream self. The idea is that when your real self sleeps, your dream self is awake on that planet - and when your dream self sleeps, your real self is awake. But before that can happen, your dream self has to wake from this lengthy lasting sort of sleep in the first place. There's different things that can trigger it, but hell if I understand it. I didn't even wake up on Prospit until after the game had ended, and that was just in time for it to be killed. Lucky me!
[Eyeroll.]
But depending which planet your dream self exists on, you get a benefit. Prospit dreamers see portents in the clouds, and Derse dreamers hear the whispers of the Horrorterrors. Both these are designed to aid progress through the game.
Dream selves also serve extra purpose: they can be a fallback extra life if you get killed, or they can be used to reach a sort of super powered level called God Tier. In each land is something called a quest bed, and if you die on it, you revive with fancy powers and an ugly pajama outfit, and gain conditional immortality. This means that if you die, you will forever revive, unless the death is either just or heroic.
But eventually, all this progress through the Lands - fighting underlings, confronting denizens, building on hives, hopping through gates - gets you to the Battlefield. Here, the forces of Prospit and Derse, these carapaced beings, fight a sort of war. Derse always wins, no exceptions. But Derse, you see, is led by a Black Queen and a Black King. Both of them gain power, as do the underlings, from a process called prototyping.
Remember the devices I mentioned earlier? When you activate one, it also releases something called a kernelsprite. You put up to to things in it, which can be literally anything but usually include at least one dead thing, and that grants physical traits and powers to the underlings and the Black King and Queen. We all, except Aradia, prototyped our dead lusii - which is another story, don't ask. The sprite serves as a guide through the game, which is why you'd want to prototype in the first place. The benefit to your enemies is just the drawback.
The idea is that they serve as the last bosses, but with the help of a Dersite we exiled the Black Queen and destroyed her ring, which is what grants her her power. The Black King, though, has a scepter, and he just has to be fought. One of the prototypings that went into him was Gl'bgolyb - you know, Speaker of the Vast Glub, gets too hungry and we all die, the empress's own lusus. But we were awesome, so we owned the King's ass anyway, won the game, and proved how badass fucking awesome we all are.
And remember the frog breeding? The goal of that is to create the Genesis Frog, which is itself literally a new universe. The idea is that you get to enter this universe as a reward for beating the game. We were going to, and I was literally right about to open the door to it, when this demon appeared and cut it in half. Aradia managed to fling us into this thing called a transportalizer which sent us to a lab on one of the meteors, so we didn't die, but we were basically stuck hiding there to avoid the demon.
But another thing about those meteors. The whole point of entering the game is to escape the end of the world, which comes via those meteors being sent back in time to your world to pulverize it until nothing of use is left. These also affect the game itself. When you're getting close to the final battle, you see, they start to fly towards the battlefield, and it acts as a time limit. If you don't defeat the Black King quickly enough, you all get killed by meteors. Skaia does have defense to give you more time than you'd have originally, though, via portals, which are what send it back to your planet in the first place. Stable time loops are huge part of Sgrub.
You never get to "save" your home planet, though. If anyone wants to do that, that's left to exiles, carapace beings from the dream planets that get sent back to repopulate or do whatever. Exiles also serve as one of the many guides you get in the games, via subtle to overt influence to your mind, or in some cases, direct interaction. I met my exile in my Land and together we orchestrated the plan I mentioned earlier that got the Black Queen exiled. Of course, another one got him exiled later, thus the term.
Also, a big theme of the game is cyclical creation. Frog breeding includes a cloning process via something called ectobiology, in which a clone literally goes back in time to become the thing from which it was cloned. Creating the Genesis Frog, or Bilious Slick as he was nicknamed, involves trying to encourage failed clones via controlled and subtle genetic mutations.
Frog breeding, however, is not the only place ectobiology comes up. I mentioned before that the space player is the one tasked with the frog business, and I helped her with it. That's because I was the one to deal with the other place that ectobiology comes up: creating all of us. By us, I mean both you, our ancestors as a whole, and my team, including myself. You were never an egg: you were created from slime, in a lab, via a series of button presses and failed attempts to appearify you from the past. It's weird and again, complicated, and it ended with me herding twenty four grubs until they disappeared by meteor back to the past, to crash land into our planet and eventually grow up to be our present selves. Not that I knew I was making our ancestors at the time; I just thought they were twelve extra wigglers with no purpose, until the Dolorosa told me about how she found the Signless in a crater.
There's more stuff that comes after the game that I could and do plan to go into, but I'm going to pause here so you can ask questions. And yes, I know that was disjointed, but imagine being the one to actually play the game and have to figure it all out.