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Spirit Sea
ed40e0
A damn mess. Slashed up rug, old rusty coat hangers, a ratty rug, and debris everywhere. No bones or skeletons though. This must be some kind of sanctuary, there’s a carved out section in the wall where they probably put some gaudy looking offering to their worthless Theotian.
This room’s relatively dark, not much light is coming in. Would be a problem for anyone else but me. There’s another door hanging open on the otherside. No strange smells either, and I’m not hearing much… at least there’s nothing in here.
Alright. Stepping away and moving towards the room where I placed the bone on the door, I see the hallway lined with a bunch of doors, one of which is the room where we fought Roderick. I smell Roderick and death in here, and lo and behold, his corpse is to my immediate right in the corner. It’s covered with a linen of some sort, it seems like they dragged him out of the room he was in judging by the blood trail.
There’s… more bones scattered about, some I remember, but there’s one that’s new. Seems like pieces of a foot? Probably belongs to our wayward skeleton, they’re losing pieces of themselves, haha. There’s definitely another one, ominous.
Even more ominous though is that there’s some kind of chain on the door to that cultish room. It’s being loosely held together with some kind of… crescent? One could easily remove it, though if you were on the other side you’d probably have a hard time getting out? Hell, you might be able to wiggle it off, that’s not at all secure. What’s going on there, who sealed that door? There’s no way Mina or Evel’yee did that. And why?
What in the hells is going on? It has to be Shi’zen, who else could’ve done it? Gods, I wanna investigate more, but… no, I got more to explore. I’m gonna head down to check out the room with the busted down door.
>Have we tried using that lever yet? Probably shouldn't while there's skeletons around though.
The lever? No, I don’t think so. Or at least I haven’t. I can’t imagine their group hasn’t tried at least once. With all the potential skeletons around though, I'm a little hesitant to try right now.
>An unnecessary but interesting foray into the lore of our world: History has led us to broadly reject the idea of magic, but that has not stopped magical thinking. While we had once thought the world was magical, we were able to create detailed theories describing nearly every single mechanism and predict how systems would develop further and further forward. Anything that can be theorized about and predicted, we call science. We call everything else magic. The ways of science have become so advanced, in fact, that it is widely believed that everything can be explained by it in one way or another, though we may not know it yet.
>Unlike Magic, Science is not a search for quintessential truth. Science is about determining what is impossible and calculating the improbability of what is improbable.
>with science? We find what is impossible for everyone, and then it is up to them to decide what they wish to do with the remainder; what may be possible for anyone.
Huh? What’re you talking about? Aren’t those… hold on, lemme re-read that.
Wait, so you differentiate science and magic? Those aren’t the same thing to you? Science is a bit of a loose term around here, I think it has something to do with the more mechanical aspects of the Weave… but it’s still magic. It’s very real and… wow. I mean, how do you even explain how you’re all talking to me? Aren’t you practicing some form of magic, or is that ‘science’?
I mean, from my perspective, plenty of things can be explained with the Weave, with magic, you know? The reason we need to breathe is because our bodies are sustained by the ambient threads around us. We all have these organs called lungs that help with the process, they do something with whatever we suck in and distribute it to our blood which in turn reinvigorates our vaelthread. You can call that science, but isn’t that basically just the same thing as magic as a broader concept? Can it really only be called magic when it’s ‘unexplained’?
Like, thinking about a little more, let’s say there was a person holding a pebble, and someone floating a pebble using a spell or something. In your world example, the person floating the pebble would be ‘magic’, and the person holding it would be ‘science’. But here, right, they’re both magic? I know that sounds stupid but I’m sort of taking it to a logical extreme, Weave would be acting on the pebble in both circumstances. The methods might be different, I don’t exactly know how it’d work with the pebble using a spell, but I’m sure it could be explained very easily. Probably something to do with creating a physical force to simply hold the thing. There’s a science to that, but that is magic?
And… well I guess you’d have to explain how that’s even possible in the first place, but that’s what we’re all made of! Our fur and flesh is made of these threads, the act of holding the pebble and floating it with an incantation can’t be that different… I don’t know. Maybe I’m just dumb. There’s so little that’s truly impossible though. Many of our greatest fables are based on some truth no matter how absurd they might sound.
That story about whatever his name getting his heart ripped out and still surviving to deliver a finishing blow? I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that isn’t a complete exaggeration. Hells, we got recorded instances of a tower that teleports around the world and our moons, sometimes in the middle of towns. It supposedly creates an extradimensional space around itself so it doesn’t wreck everything instantly. It sounds stupid and impossible, believe me, I think it is too, but it is real! Or people making trips to the plane of the Theotians, Indelcaun. They say no one’s ever returned… but like, it’s theoretically possible?
>Thus, the existence of magic is more of a philosophical question than a physical one. This leads to a big complication when it comes to the idea of a "soul", though. The word "consciousness" has come to replace the word "soul" in scientific discussions, but it hasn't replaced the idea. Fundamentally, the issue is that consciousness is pretty much impossible for us to define. We can describe aspects of our own conscious experience, but we can't actually observe consciousness in other people. A crucial step in the scientific method (The set of rules we follow to 'make' science) is observation, and since we can't make observations, we can't really apply science to consciousness. (There is debate about this, but the fact that there is debate at all is an indication of the issue)
Well… consciousness. The idea of self. That comes from the Soul, but it isn’t exactly our Soul. A person’s consciousness can be different from one life to the next even though the Soul is the same between them. I don’t know where consciousness comes from exactly, but if I had to guess, the Soul probably has something to do with it.
>Fox here. This one isn't urgent. So... Souls. In some parts of existence, as far as the locals are concerned, there is no empirically observable gods, no empirically observable souls, no empirically observable magic, no empirically observable afterlife, no observable aspects of reality with an inherent moral agenda at all. In those places, sometimes the word 'soul' even gets used to describe the body parts made of matter! In that part of things, there is a deterministic, matter-based reality, based on reductionist principles with bottom-up causation processes causing emergent phenomena. And this can actually make, over sufficiently large timescales, based on the concrete, unchangeable mathematical laws of physics, the following things: life, life with a basic level of awareness, and life with full intelligence and self awareness and the capacity to grow.
>The belief in an afterlife comes from a time before modern science, but it nonetheless stays relevant because of the questions science can't currently answer.
And that’s something that’s crazy to me. Souls themselves, they ARE real. At least in my world… and this is common knowledge. People way smarter than me have observed them, every living creature most definitively has one. It’s our most important tool, they let us walk within the world and act and have purpose. All of our capabilities stem from it, it is the root of our being. Breathing, touching, thinking. The idea of not having a Soul is akin to just being an object, a thing made of Weave but lacking the thing that makes it ‘it’.
So, I don’t know. It just sounds insane to me that you can claim that you all aren’t sure. That you have religions that believe in different theological ideas and…
>The belief in an afterlife comes from a time before modern science, but it nonetheless stays relevant because of the questions science can't currently answer.
That core topic of not knowing. There’s an allure to that… a kind of terror that rings deep inside, but also a kind of peace too. That wherever our Souls end up, we don’t really have a say and we just… have to go with it.
That’s making me feel things, surfacing thoughts… the idea that the Theotians so directly meddle with OUR Souls… and Mina was talking about how weird it was that you all touched mine, but how is that any different from them?! That’s a good talking point… I gotta use that against her later.
>I feel like a gave a pretty generalist overview of things. Death is an unknown and people have various ideas about it.
We’re quite different in this regard then. While you don’t know, we know that when we die we’ll return. That’s… Je’zik, I bet a bunch of our analogies haven’t really been making sense, huh? I’ll try to remember that and explain if they come up.
>Also, it should be noted that the information you receive about our world comes from a tiny self-selected slice of the population, so you aren't getting the full picture. It seems like your world functions somewhat similarly to what the buddhists/hinduists of our world believe: Souls are infinitely reincarnated into different bodies in a cycle called "Saṃsāra." You, however, seem to lead towards the buddhist belief that Saṃsāra is painful, and that you seek "nirvāṇa," which is the escape from such a cycle. Beyond this surface level comparison the analogy falls apart. (I don't think extinguishing your desires would really help you achieve nirvāṇa in your world) But it's an interesting similarity nonetheless.
Painful…? Hm, yeah, I suppose… that’s not a bad way to describe how I feel about it. This whole process of the Journey is… gross. That’s how I feel. Unnatural, wrong. I’m fairly certain this is an opinion that I don’t share with many others. It’s nice that I’m not entirely alone with this feeling? Saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa, seems people from your realm have similar ideas.
>It's mostly why I was so horrified by Mina's explanation of your afterlife. A ton of uncomfortable implications with the ways the gods are mucking about with people there.
Exactly! Our Theotians aren’t these perfect beings, who knows what they’re doing with our Souls once we die?! It’s… nngh…
Feeling those things, you all are good at getting that out of me. These existential thoughts, it makes me SO angry even thinking about this, head’s pounding again… I… for another time… for another time. Sorry.
>Truth to one person may mean something entirely different to another
Wonder what Bakoth would think about that one.
>The results speak for themselves. With a sandbox of unexplored possibility combined with a set of fundamental constraints restricting us from the contradictory, tools designed from such scientific inquiry are engineered to be usable by anyone. But these days, we find ourselves adrift in ignorance. Starved of magic, we fall into delusions and tribes. And the worlds are getting... stupider. When one cannot scientifically disprove that a tool of science is bereft of any magic whatsoever... well. It's not looking good.
Ah… I think I’m kinda entering that “I’m too dumb to know what you’re talking about” territory again. Hope that… all works out for you?
It’s crazy how much I can discuss with you all while I’m making my way. I’m moving down the stairs, but…
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