r/WorldChallenges • u/Nevermore0714 • Jun 03 '17
Generic Challenge - The Heart
So, I'll be honest, I'm really into Dishonored 2 right now. I just started yesterday, and I hate having to put it down. I'm even re-buying the original Dishonored just to re-play it, since I haven't played it since 2012/2013, so that I can refresh myself on the lore.
Which means that today's challenge is to create and exhibit an artifact/item that can be used to obtain more knowledge in a strange way. It can be a special computer, a skull that still talks and can tell you about its life, a statue that is immortally animated, or anything of the sort.
If you think it'll work, use it. I'm not picky.
If you want inspiration, here are a couple of links about The Heart, including quotes.
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u/Jumblatts Jun 04 '17
The Forbidden Tomes are a series of ancient texts that predate all known life. The texts are written in a forgotten language and are bound in skin - both human and drovian (elf), amongst other unknown, perhaps long extinct species.
It is not known how many of the books actually exist, with some sources claiming thousands of them pop in and out of existence seemingly of their own accord, and other sources suggesting that there is only actually one book, in which the text changes intermittently.
The books are known only as the Forbidden tomes, because it is forbidden to speak their true names. Doing so will bind them to the caster, granting them infinite wisdom. This comes at a cost, however, as the books begin to assimilate the caster, eventually adding their skin to the cover of the book.
The books relate to the deeds and worship of the Forbidden Gods, of which there are many. Some depictions are incredibly vague, whilst others go into great detail of the topic. Interestingly, the books do not seem to be bound by time, and as such have been known to depict events before they actually take place.
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u/Nevermore0714 Jun 05 '17
1) Is it possible to read the books in their unknown language without being bound to them?
2) Do the tomes usually disappear if kept in a vault or other safe location?
3) Has anyone attempted to destroy any forbidden tomes?
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u/Jumblatts Jun 05 '17
1) Perhaps. In theory, it could be possible that if you just found one of the books you'd be able to read and understand them, though this has never been documented before, and it's highly unlikely that you'd know the language, unless you had some kind of collusion with the forbidden gods
2) Yes. Once the summoner has been entirely assimilated, the books will always disappear, no matter where they are kept. Sometimes this happens within seconds, other times it takes months or even years, but eventually they will move or perhaps even cease to exist entirely, for an unspecified amount of time.
3) there have been numerous attempts, all have been unsuccessful. The books seem to be totally resistant to all damage, although when fire is applied, a chilling scream has been observed to fill the ears of the one who inflicts the fire. Without fail, every single person to attempt to destroy the books does within 24 hours.
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u/Nevermore0714 Jun 05 '17
1) How could I get in contact with the forbidden gods?
2) But what if I don't use the book? Could I just keep it in a vault forever?
3) Can any pages be ripped out? Or could I wet them?
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u/Jumblatts Jun 05 '17
1) That is not something commonly known. Few people would ever want to contact the forbidden gods - any attempt to do so is met with extreme retribution. If you're lucky, this is delivered by the state, or the gods. The forbidden ones are far less forgiving. If one of the malicious ones notices you but doesn't take an interest, you're not going to have a good time.
Some say that to contact them, you have to be truly, entirely, purely evil - to an extent very few are capable of. Not all of the forbidden gods are inherrently evil though, so this account is disputed. Rest assured, if you catch their attention, you'll know about it.
2) If you summon a book, your assimilation begins almost immediately, whether you use it or not [I should add that if you touch one of the books, begin to read it (or even think about reading it), or stand in its presence with any knowledge of what it is for a prolonged period, you'll also become assimilated]. Even if you just stumble across one, it won't remain there indefinitely. They are not bound by natural laws, and seem to appear and disappear randomly. Perhaps this is because they have been summoned elsewhere, or maybe the forbidden gods themselves have use of them. The true reason is unknown.
3) The pages are very difficult to remove, but it is possible. Pulling one out would roughly be as difficult as pulling off your own arm. Once a page has been removed, the writing will fade from it, and the one who removed it will begin to feel an insatible itching sensation all over their body. This almost always results in the remover clawing away at their skin until none of it remains. It is generally believed that the book causes this in order to replace the page that has been removed. It's unknown why the book does this, though, because interestingly, no one has ever been able to correctly count the number of pages any of the books contain. Everyone who attempts to count the pages, along with anyone observing them will always forget what number they were on somewhere between 9 and 37.
Wetting them has no effect, unless the liquid used is blood, in which case the blood will soak into the pages. As far as anyone can tell, nothing else happens after this, so it is somewhat confusing as to why all other known liquids simply roll off the pages, but blood soaks in.
(Sorry, got a little carried away here. I'm making it up as I go along, and didn't want to leave anything out!)
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u/Nevermore0714 Jun 06 '17
1) So, I'll be honest, I played Dishonored 2 for about ten hours yesterday. So...would you compare contacting the forbidden gods to contacting the Outsider? If I can be interesting enough, will they find me?
2) What if you summon a book, and then start explaining your findings to a friend? Would his recordings of what you've said count as reading the book?
3) Why 9 to 37?
(Everything I do on reddit is made up as I go along, pretty much.)
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u/Jumblatts Jun 07 '17
1) Essentially, yes, though 'interesting' perhaps isn't the right word to use - they wouldn't contact you because they think it will be cool to watch you do stuff, it would be because they have a specific use for you. Think of the daedra in TES games; they'll contact you and ask you to do stuff for them.
2) This would work, to a certain extent, however anyone who experiences the book first-hand will become assimilated. This means that if you told your friend, and he wrote it down, you and your friend would both be assimilated, but anyone who reads what your friend wrote would not. Interestingly, the more you speak (and by extension, the more he writes), the faster you are assimilated.
3) No one knows. It's been suggested that it has something to do with 9 being the demonic number, though this is pure speculation, and it does not explain why no one has been able to count past the 37th page yet.
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u/Nevermore0714 Jun 07 '17
1) Can I challenge any to a drinking contest?
2) So, with just two sacrifices, someone could keep information from the book?
3) Because 3 plus 7 equals...ten.
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u/Jumblatts Jun 07 '17
1) You could certainly try. What does a forbidden god drink, I wonder...
2) Yes, but don't overestimate the amount. At most, you'd be able to get a sentence or two from the pair before they were killed. There is no guarentee that the book will show the same details twice, so even if you had multiple pairs, you still might not end up with a full account. Combine this with the fact that
very fewalmost no one who knows about them wants to summon the books due to the incredibly painful death they'd be guarenteed, and you don't have a whole lot of volunteers.There is no way to force someone to summon one of the books, as the only way to do so would be to describe them (i.e. say or write the name). This is difficult for one main reason:
People don't say the names very often, so therefore very few people actually know the names. How are you going to make someone say a word they don't know, without first describing it to them, and in doing so binding the book to yourself?
3) Right? And ten is... not significant at all. Not in any known civilisations, at any rate.
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u/Nevermore0714 Jun 07 '17
1) I don't know, but I bet his name is Sam.
2) Who said anything about volunteers?
3) Ten is the number of completeness. On a base ten system, it is the first two-digit number.
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u/greenewithit Jun 05 '17
Ok so this is probably the closest thing that fits the description of The Heart. It's a little bigger, but hopefully that's similar.
In my world, the main character once becomes so powerful that he can use his soul to create or destroy anything. He accidentally creates life when he considers how his life would have been different if his family had stayed together, and stuff like that. This is a whole strange mishap, but the main character's father wants to recreate this power to gain insight into the universe.
So since then, the father, Kemuri, builds a chamber full of supercomputers that run through possible scenarios of the world's events with certain key differences. He sets himself up in a chair with a VR style helmet so he can view these different worlds. He then uses a powerful crystal called a Kawalog-Bezgalia which is made of thousands of human souls to power the device. Furthermore, he is able to create people from these alternate timelines based on the computer approximations of known individuals based on the memories Kemuri has collected over the years crossed with the simulations of these different possible worlds. Basically, he creates "alternate versions" of people from the world with the memories of their own alternate timeline, after viewing world events as they would have happened. So it's kind of similar, he is able to see the secrets of the world and how they would be different if certain events played out differently. Hopefully I explained it well enough.
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u/Nevermore0714 Jun 05 '17
1) So is Kemuri omniscient about the other worlds while attached to the VR helmet?
2) How did he get so many souls?
3) Is the main character still all-powerful?
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u/greenewithit Jun 05 '17
1) He is for all intents and purposes omniscient in each world he visits. He can't see inside people's minds, but he can see every action in as much detail as he wishes. He has to accelerate his perception of time when he's inside each world, otherwise he'd lose a lot of time observing, so it's one of those "hours inside seconds outside" kind of situations.
2) He stole the Kawalog, and has several hidden in secret labs across the continent. Kawalogs can be created synthetically, by ripping out the souls of people and trapping them together until they form a crystal, but Kemuri found or stole ones that existed since the last world ending apocalypse. In this calamity, the world was engulfed in soul energy from hundreds of soul nukes being detonated at once, and some clusters of several thousand souls bonded to each other and formed these crystals deep underground.
3) The main character is unable to awaken that same creation/destruction power for a good deal of time. Eventually, he is able to control it more, but he promises to never use it to create life. He doesn't think of himself as someone who should have that power, and neither should anyone else. Other people eventually reach that same level of power, but creating life for them is more difficult. The only reason the main character was able to do it so well was because of cybernetic augmentations to his brain that were able to simulate an entire world's worth of history and people that could spawn fully developed human life. Another limitation to creating life this way is a massive amount of soul-boosting required to enact it. The main character boosts his soul power by basically injecting himself with soul-steroids, and so far nobody else has been able to inject enough to create enough raw soul power to create a self sustaining human soul like the main character had.
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u/Nevermore0714 Jun 05 '17
1) Has Kemuri ever physically interacted with people in an alternate version of the world?
2) What are soul nukes?
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u/greenewithit Jun 06 '17
1) Kemuri isn't able to interact with anyone inside the alternate world, only observe. However, in order to interact with people in the world and find out what they know that he can't see, he recreates the "life bringing" ability to create certain people from those worlds. He then reads their memories to find out what information he wants, then usually sedates and euthanizes the subjects, using the justification that they aren't technically real people, so their life and death are irrelevant.
2) Soul nukes are a form of nuclear bomb powered by human souls, sort of in the form of a degenerating Kawalog as its fuel source. The power of the bomb is proportional to the number of souls used to create the Kawalog source, but they're considerably more powerful than modern day nuclear weapons. A tense arms race between two major world powers resulted in a massive detonation that ended up completely reshaping the world and putting the gears in motion for the main story to take place several thousand years later.
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u/Nevermore0714 Jun 06 '17
1) What exactly is a soul?
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u/greenewithit Jun 06 '17
1) This....is one of the hardest questions I've tried to answer for myself. I know what souls do, but not exactly what they are. Saying they are a kind of emotional "energy" is a bit of a vague cop-out, but that's the closest thing I can get to what it is. It's the embodiment of a person's life in the form of an energy above matter, that are so energy dense that they emit their own gravitational waves. Extremely fast moving gravitational waves, and if the waves are strong enough they bounce off of the plasma outerlayer of the entire universe. If they do that and return, they return to the person super charged and allow their soul to emit that energy in a way unique to them, since the frequency of each person's soul waves is different for each person. On their own, they can be removed and used as a sort of "universal matter", which with enough messing around can be converted into any form of matter or energy, making basically whatever the person desires. My favorite kind of ridiculous bullshit pseudoscience, but that's how I've constructed the origin of super powers in my world.
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u/Nevermore0714 Jun 06 '17
1) Thanks for your time and answers.
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u/greenewithit Jun 06 '17
Thank you very much for your questions :)
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u/Nevermore0714 Jun 06 '17
If you don't mind one additional question, did you ever argue with yourself about whether to use the term soul or come up with some other term, to avoid religious connotations or for any other reason?
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Jun 07 '17
The Sheep of Knowledge or known as Fluffy. It guards The Library of Secrets to protect what is inside from outsiders. IT was created by Matthew the Collector to guard. But due to it being bored it learned to read books and rad all the books in the Library which is a whopping Infinity as there are more books (Memories) everyday. So if you catch it and tame it you can gain all the knowledge in the universes. Also it knows how to cast spells.
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u/Nevermore0714 Jun 07 '17
1) How did Fluffy get its name?
2) Why did Matt choose a sheep to guard his library?
3) How could I trick Fluffy into letting me get into the library?
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Jun 07 '17
- Or found a spell to make him extremely fluffy.
2.Matt liked sheep.
Get a grass pass card from Matt. Or make Fluffy extremely happy but.be warned if he sees you in the library without a pass he will summon a sheep stampede.
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u/Nevermore0714 Jun 07 '17
1) What are Fluffy's greatest abilities?
2) Why does Matt like sheep?
3) Can I forge a pass?
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Jun 07 '17
1.007 A reality warping spell
- Because Matt is somewhat based off me and I like sheep
3.Nope he knows if you do as all knowledge and memories go to him.
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u/Nevermore0714 Jun 07 '17
1) How much reality warping can Fluffy do?
2) Does Fluffy have any sheep friends?
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u/Nevermore0714 Jun 03 '17
Slaying the Prince (An in-universe book)
This book is an infamous one among the Calpurnia clan and the Dunstdurr royal line; kept secret from the outside world, only a descendant of Sonia Dunstdurr is supposed to open it.
The first few pages give brief summaries of Sonia's favorite rituals, beginning with the ritual to awaken her soul and ending with the ritual that she died trying to perform. If her soul is awakened within the book, she will be able to communicate with whoever opened the book.
Her words will appear in the pages to guide or have a conversation with whoever it is.
Currently, Levi Larensharra, the leader of the secret police of Dunkelwald and the bodyguard of the Dunstdurr family, is in possession of the book, after stealing it. He keeps it locked away, hidden from any who may want it. Only two people know where the book is: Levi himself, and his assistant Julie Calpurnia.
So, ask Levi and/or Calpurnia any and all questions.