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Hello and welcome back to Synthetic Gods Quest.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Hivemind_Chan
Archives: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/qstarchive.html?tags=Synthetic%20Gods%20Quest
Rules and gameplay mechanics: https://pastebin.com/jcac0p9D
Current inventory: https://pastebin.com/gyZLMiNG
Current infrastructure: https://pastebin.com/i42ACWMs
Previously mentioned individuals: https://pastebin.com/LUJ5fyqA
Previously mentioned SGs and Cups: https://pastebin.com/ThR1eYvc
Project tracker: https://pastebin.com/BzmXGRhq
_________________________________________________________
In the last session we purchased quite a special puppy as a birthday present for Rheia and we dropped it off to a friendly farmer for temporary safekeeping, along with giving him a hand with some repairs, after which we joined Rheia and Haven for breakfast. We wanted to visit Nike’ in Valhalla, but neither of our friends felt like going there today, so we’ve left Rheia to study and Haven to her own devices as we set off for the artificial island of the gods. This time, however, we flew in as designed and after being recognized and passing through the external security measures we’ve finally touched down at Cenophilan Pantheon’s headquarters.

We politely refused escort and headed directly for Nike’s estate. Nika herself seemed to be preoccupied with some sort of debate with Holy Nation’s synthetic god Arael via an Oracle of HN faction. After Nika has finally managed to end the call, she greeted us and got us up to speed with the situation. Apparently, while it is quite obvious that we’ve helped Ceno army with the fortifications, HN lack absolute certainty to do anything about that giving us plausible deniability. Arael has decided to renegotiate some things with us, but we’ve already left for Elspen so his surprise visit ended up in vain. It seems that he has understood that HN activity hasn’t given any reasons for us to be more neutral, and thus he proposes that Holy Nation would provide Ag one of their angels as an oversight with same arrangement as the one that we have with Mina. They also propose to assist us with the new city project, allowing for it to be completed at a faster rate. Moreover, Ethean pantheon would match HN’s offer but only if we accept Holy Nation’s deal. We decided to discuss the specifics with both Ethean and HN representatives, and as the first gesture of goodwill we wish to do the talks in the Ethean capital. Nike’ agrees with our decision and says that she will relay it to the other parties, however she also advises us not to pursue the idea of limiting the religious rights of HN citizens in response to Holy Nation’s own religious freedom policy. She warns about unintended societal consequences and suggests that forgoing that policy would be a good gesture of cooperation.
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>>5014941
We then have an opportunity to ask her some questions. On the question of how Ceno deals with missionaries, Nika explains that they are not as big of a threat as we thought, as there is some common sense among “mortals” that you were not aware of. She also fills us in on recent events, such as Tlaltecuhtli’s successes in the creation of powerful monsters, the upcoming attempt of the Four Nations to take out a nautical Ceiling and Nike’s own upcoming expedition into the depths of the Labyrinth. Once we ask about how we should deal with the slumbering mountain, Nika explains how our current skills and tools would be inefficient against it, taking our latest major fight as an example. Still, we had a couple more things to talk about…
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>>5014942
You listen to Nike’s battle report of your latest fight with the Monster King with some surprise, since you didn’t expect that she’d know that much about your somewhat embarrassing “victory”. To be fair, her summary does have a point, as in that you don’t really have that many tools to choose from. Most of your techniques seem to focus on either causing blunt trauma, or boosting your combat performance with human- sized weapons which tend to not be that useful against larger foes. It would be so much easier to deal with Mad Goddess Jane’s mooks if you had some sort of thermal area of effect weapon like a flamethrower or incendiary explosives, the giant flaming tar creature would probably go down even faster if you had some sort of a cutting option on a large scale, and the last Ent Monster King just begged for some sort of powerful penetrating weapon besides a sharpened rock. Still, you smile and ask Nika if she has been watching you remotely in a half- teasing manner. Oh, how naughty. You catch the start of a small blush, but the goddess replies: “Well, no, not really. I reviewed the observations of some of my cups who were tracking the fight from the sidelines. As I told you back then, I was a bit too busy and too far away to respond myself. However, I believe that Tyr was on time, so that’s a good thing...” she says as she looks away from you for a few moments to pour herself another drink.

“In any case…” you say changing the subject, “I’d like to accompany you in that Labyrinth expedition.” Nike’s face gets serious, and she says “I really want to refuse for the sake of your safety, but I guess that you won’t be so easily persuaded… fine, if you agree on a few points. First of all, I will ‘port you back without warning if I consider the situation to be too dangerous for you, I will also port you back if you act too recklessly. Secondly, you will be wearing one of my armors and some of my gear at all times during this trip. Note that it is still my armor fitted for my powers and my combat style, and I’d like it back afterwards. Thirdly, the expedition is likely to last at least two months, so keep that in mind. In any case, the date is not yet set and you have around 3 months to decide if you really want to come or not.”
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>>5014954
“Moving on, what’s wrong with Tlaltecuhtli? Does she communicate or just attack and defend?” you ask. “She does talk with us, but very rarely. Before we knew about her and when we got fed up with losing ships to monsters, we and the other three pantheons made a landing on her island and started to beat up a seemingly endless number and variety of plant inspired monsters until she realized that other SGs arrived to knock and came out to communicate. Apparently, she noticed us only once the population of her monsters dropped noticeably enough for her to realize that she is not dealing with some normal human trespassing or some random monster attack. This took us three days of beating up nasties, but to be fair, we weren’t as powerful and experienced back then and our nations were way smaller. She is one of the first Synthetic Gods to awaken, along with the Teryian pantheon, although she was also confrontational with them. She is one of those people who thinks that humanity is fundamentally flawed, evil and unnatural, becoming a pest or a virus to the environment once we turned away from living like animals and took up tools, tamed fire and formed civilizations. You know, radical militant primitivism ideals. She thinks that she permits humans to exist for now, but only so far as they remain limited in numbers, spread and technology. In truth, we just kind of… don’t care that much about her.”
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>>5014955
“She is powerful for a goddess, but synthetic gods have a soft limit on how strong they get with passing time. It’s different for different SGs, but in general you become incredibly strong very rapidly in a couple decades, but eventually you run out of simple inspirations and the concepts already created by other SGs and the progress slows down to a crawl. Yes, you’ll probably live for millions of years and you don’t technically have a hard cutoff to how strong you can get, but the time between eureka moments and major leaps increases to decades, then potentially to centuries and so on. New SGs rapidly approach existing generation but then they get kind of stuck as the same rough “power level” as us. Ceno has 12 gods, Valistrat has 10, Ethea has 5, HN has 2 and a load of cups plus there are some independent gods that might lend a hand. Essentially, even though she is just over 200 years old, she is still outnumbered and outgunned by us if we really wanted to get rid of her. We believe that her self- preservation should overcome her “ideals”, so she continues living in her tiny island paradise and sometimes waving the “big stick” towards the mainland. Still, it is not good to underestimate her. We saw her island consume a Ceiling before, it was honestly horrifying to watch. Imagine Godzilla being torn apart by a swarm of terrestrial and underground piranhas between the size of a fly to the size of a large house to the point that after just a day the only evidence of its existence were the sand imprints.” You shudder, mentally placing her island straight into places you can live without visiting. However, being so old means that she might know something that others don’t. Maybe even the reason for the disappearance of the elven pantheon…
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>>5014959
“By the way, do you have anything planned for me? I mean, maybe adding something to my city that you don’t want to have here or a suggestion to look into something that you’d want?” She thinks for a few moments and then says: “Honestly, nothing that I’d want to add for myself, but thanks for the thought. Same thing about suggestions. You should probably understand the actual reasons for the pantheon doing so much for you though. I mean, beyond the stuff that you know about becoming a buffer state and just us wanting to be good friends. Remember how I’ve just mentioned that all SGs in the current era are basically roughly of the same “power level”? It is kind of what causes the balance between the Four Nations. We have the most gods, but Valistrat has more gods that are powerful in combat, and HN with Ethea usually form a bloc with Ethea having quite a few friends beyond our direct reach. Essentially, the number and utility of the gods on your side determines how strong your pantheon is. So, if we get cynical, that city is a very good investment in getting you on our side if things go south and we need all the help that we can get. I hope you’re not offended; I am still your friend and I want you to succeed in whatever endeavor you want to take on, but I feel like it is only fair for you to know of the more pragmatic bigger picture”

“… you know, I’ve never asked when is your birthday” you tell her offhandedly. She smirks and says “Oh, right. Mine is on 17th January. Don’t worry about the presents, I know how hard it is to gift something to the one who has everything. How does the saying go, it’s the thought that counts?”

>You think that you might have a few more questions…
>You know, you’ve been curious about afterlives as well. Tell her to lead the way.
>You kind of wanted to meet Elspeth, maybe you two could go see what she’s been up to?
>Actually, you have an idea of what you could do. Maybe you could have a volleyball rematch or something?
>Other writein ideas…
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>>5014974
>You know, you’ve been curious about afterlives as well. Tell her to lead the way.

While I would love a rematch I suspect she is busy, tell her we should play again tho
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>>5014974

>You know, you’ve been curious about afterlives as well. Tell her to lead the way.
>>
>>5014974

>You kind of wanted to meet Elspeth, maybe you two could go see what she’s been up to?
>>
>>5014974
>>You know, you’ve been curious about afterlives as well. Tell her to lead the way.
>>
>>5014974
By this point, you kind of ran out of things that you wanted to discuss at the moment so you switch the subject: “I wanted to propose something like a volleyball rematch, but you’ve mentioned the afterlives, I’ve always been curious on how those work.” Nika then stands up from her chair and says: “Sure, follow me. Also, we can do both” she says and smirks. She leads you out of the room, all the way down the telekinetic elevator and then further below down another passage and a smaller elevator several floors underground. “The “access terminals” are placed in a more shielded area of my estate just in case. We really don’t want to lose the infrastructure that props up the Ceno afterlife because the souls of those inside would be permanently lost in that case.”

You enter a corridor made from polished black stone and dimly lit by green glow-crystals. It has numerous doors split off on both sides along with a bigger and slightly fancier door at the end of it which appears to be where you are headed. As you walk, Nika asks you: “Have you ever tried VR before the pod thing?” You shrug and say “My dad once bought me an Oculus back when I was a child, but I’ve never had time or money to try anything more advanced later. Especially not the stuff that needed a neural interface. I know that it took off massively in 30s...” Nika shrugs and replies: “I only tried it out on a fair, but anyway, the afterlife is essentially the… magical version of a VR from science fiction, or at least that’s how it is described by Yaw. It is essentially an endlessly malleable environment that in itself takes up no space in reality and it is specifically aligned to allow for the “conscious psi-pattern… somethings”, basically “souls” to inhabit and experience it as their reality of sorts. Apparently, there should’ve been a universal afterlife environment everywhere, where the souls of every sufficiently conscious creature should end up, but in practice once a “mortal” ceases to be, the soul hangs around for no more than a few seconds after which it just disappears. We presume that they somehow irreversibly dissipate, meaning that if someone died and they are not in the artificial afterlife then they are just… gone.”
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>>5023982
“Some of the reason for the whole religion thing is to essentially “light up” the souls of believers sufficiently for them to be captured by our afterlife. Worship is not really needed for it to work, it just ensures that once the person is dead they almost automatically know and focus on the specific afterlife for it to successfully fish them out before they dissipate. Repeatedly mulling over the “I want to go to X afterlife” and imagining it as best as you can would also work. It should work on SGs as well, as demonstrated by one of the elven pantheon guys, but no one here was ballsy enough to try it on themselves. Note that Yaw has derived the technique of placing souls into artificial bodies from the stuff we use to maintain afterlives, so we could theoretically fish your friends out and revive them if they end up there, but I wouldn’t bet on that. Soul recovery rates are far from 100%, we think that some people either decide that they don’t want to go or are too confused to trigger the capture in the little time after death that they have, but we can’t know for sure. Also, the afterlife has limits on range. It will work reliably across the entire continent, but it would start to fail more the further one goes from Ceno and would cease working completely if the believer is beyond about a third of Earth away.”

You make it to the door and Nika puts her hand on the circular engraving, which starts glowing and a few seconds later the door opens inward displaying a similarly dimly lit room with a single column covered in fractal patterns and about a dozen of funky- looking reclining chairs with a green glowing sphere hovering above each one. “The afterlife can be accessed by those who are not dead through the use of psi powers, or through someone who can use psi powers for them.” She says as she comes up to one of the spheres, grabs it and then throws it at you like a dodgeball. You catch even without thinking and you immediately feel that the sphere has two distinct enhancements in it. “The sphere is the terminal, and the two circuits are essentially what you need to “cast” to, for the lack of better term, log in and log off. Don’t power it up as it would induce sleep paralysis on the body so you’d just collapse on the floor upon entering. The column is the access point itself.”
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>>5023983
You approach the column and put your hand on it trying to feel the psi circuitry inside, and it doesn’t disappoint. It is already powered to the point where you don’t even need to extend yourself into the circuit to see how it glows with psi energy. It is complicated, incredibly so. The comparison is like between earliest vacuum lamp-based transistors and modern nanoscale diamondoid circuitry of your time. However, most of it is not outright alien to you, and you can understand the workings of individual pieces of the complexity. However, as with neural networks, as separate lines of code can be read and general chunks of the network understood, the whole is just beyond knowability. You feel as if you’ve just learned what XOR means, and then you are tasked with figuring out how a silicon processor works on your own. If you had months of time and deeper understanding of how psi circuits work, maybe you’d be capable of gaining something from it, maybe even reverse engineering certain functions, but for now it is just too complicated to grasp, much less memorize it for later study. However, parts of the circuitry have that vibe to it of being completely alien, similarly to how you felt when analyzing other psi circuits with effects that are not related to spacetime manipulation. To put it simply, like magic in fantasy stories, psi seems to have “schools of magic” themed after what they can do. You have the school of spacetime manipulation, while Ninmah and Mortati have the school of biosculpting and Valentina has the school of messing with brains. The “psi augment” encoded the understanding of such “school” directly into your subconsciousness, so it is easy for you to effortlessly use your school of magic, but you don’t have subconscious understanding of other schools of magic. If you had psi powers but not the psi aug, all non- “basic school” psi circuitry would look alien to you. Looks like learning to cast fireballs might be difficult to unattainable for you for the near future. You have a weird feeling that if you’ve read Elspeth’s book on psi circuits, you’d know that way sooner, but oh well.
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>>5023986
Over the next 20 minutes, Nika teaches you some safety practices and two “spells” that she considers mandatory for all SGs to know before entering an afterlife of any type. First one checks if you are in real reality or in the artificial one and in what state (alive and connected from active body or dead and maintained by the afterlife), and the other one to sever the connection, instantly booting you back into real reality. Apparently, it would also work if you were dead and stuck in an afterlife that you don’t want to be in, but it would leave you in the risky state of having only a couple moments to exist, but a final way out is good to have if alternative is literal hell. Also, since you have in- built firewalls to your consciousness, they would also work in the afterlife, but accessing it would be a bit different than just jumping in the chair and powering the orb up. You’d need to allow it to induce paralysis, and you’d get a psi equivalent of an “are you sure” popup to enter it. As with safely browsing the internet, one should never click on suspicious popups. You wouldn’t get stuck in an afterlife like mortals, but you might get dunked straight into hell of someone’s creation until you cast the force disconnect. You should also know that afterlives can have people in charge or certain conditions which, if met, can also sever the connection. All of this is not really needed for diving into Ceno afterlife, but Nike’ demanded you to learn it all by heart and for you to demonstrate both of those spells several times, especially the latter one.

After she felt like you understood all of this, you are instructed to drop your stuff near to one of those fancy chairs, then get into one and grab the orb with both of your hands. Man, that chair is comfy. It can apparently sustain a human indefinitely off the psi energy meaning that they don’t need to get distracted for physiological needs like eating, but it’s not like you plan to have weeks long visit. Nika casually drops into a slightly bigger and fancier chair at the back of the room and says that she’s ready when you are. Well, here goes nothing. You energize one of the psi patterns on the ball and you feel two psi messages arrive directly into your mind. One is for paralysis, the other one is for access, both with the sensation that you need to “give in” for each of them to enter. You let go of the sphere, take a comfier position and accept both of them after which everything goes dark…
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>>5023987
For a few moments, you can’t really tell where you are, you can’t feel up from down and you have trouble understanding where is your body, as you can’t see, hear or touch anything. However, moments later you regain all of your senses and you can see an endless sky stretching in all directions, with clouds slowly passing by below you. Everything is lit up in a soft light from every direction, but there is no sun anywhere and nothing gives off shadows. You stretch your hand forward, and it touches something invisible which ripples out as if you’ve touched the surface of water. As the ripple passes, it reveals a huge mirror floating in front of you. In it is the reflection of you, wearing a short chiton of a summer design along with a pair of sandals. The clothes have that usual Greco- Roman vibe that Ceno seems to like, but the fabric feels literally unreal. It is unnaturally light and breathing, much better than even finest silks. You literally can’t feel its weight, although it lies on your body as if you were under normal Earth gravity. You look below, and see a barely visible ring that immediately starts glowing soft blue as you focus your attention on it. It essentially signifies some sort of border around you, making you feel like if you are inside of a cylinder with walls barely in reach, with the wall loosely signified by the mirror in front of you. The mirror doesn’t really look like an object. It looks like a surface with no depth, as if it is a texture laid over a 2d mesh instead of being something that you can touch. A thought comes to you, and you make a step forward. A step with no floor, yeah, but it somehow works. The mirror swings open like a door and beyond it you see a vista of no compare. You walk out of your tiny cylinder onto a massive marble- floored balcony overseeing a fantastical forest. You turn back, and the opening into your starting cylinder looks completely out of place. A flat plane suspended in the air, magically leading away into the realm of the endless sky. The mirror door closes shut and the portal completely disappears, leaving no trace. You wave your hand where it used to be, and it is as if it was never there.
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>>5023989
“You know, people usually marvel at the vista first” you hear Nika’s voice as she exits from a similar portal a few meters away from you and just swings it shut behind her, closing it instantly. “Welcome to Matrix, Neo.” she jokes. “This is my domain, the place that every hunter and warrior in Ceno wishes to get to once their life ends.” She walks up to the balcony and leans on the intricate guard rail. You follow her and look at the lands beyond. The forest seems both alien and familiar. The forest is vibrant green with clearings full of beautiful flowers and neat fields grazed by a wide variety of animals, from familiar ones like hinds, boars and deer, to fantastical ones that you’ve never seen before and all the in-between. The forest itself, has spots of various colors, from autumn orange and red to areas colored unlike any other tree in existence with purples, whites, blues and so on. It is a weird mix of every forest imaginable that still somehow works together, with fantastical elements generously sprinkled all over the place. Some trees stretch their enormous trunks far into the sky, dwarfing any skyscraper that humans have ever built on Earth, as giant creatures wander through the foliage below, strangely serene and beautiful, unlike the monsters that you used to fight. A flock of exotic multicolored birds paint mesmerizing shapes in the sky as if they were schools of ocean fish, and jellyfish- like creatures slowly make their way through wind currents far above them. It would take you days to put this view into words.

“What do you think?” Asks Nike’, “It’s not completely my project, Ninmah was more into speculative biology, however physics stopped mattering decades ago. I guess it is like a meld of every forest ever, including coral reefs, since they serve a similar function for biodiversity. Used to have way more dragons, but apparently mortals didn’t like those as much as I did.” She says and lets out a laugh. “Our afterlife is roughly separated into 13 regions, 12 for each one of us plus the general one that looks the most… normal. Mortals generally inhabit that region, with most devout or willing deciding to inhabit the lands of one of us. My land is mostly covered in a variety of fantastic terrains, providing endless game and glory for hunters, along with endless feast and trials for the warriors. Mortals are allowed to freely move wherever they wish, after all what afterlife is it if you can’t meet your long-lost family members or famous men and women of history, right?”

The post ended up pretty huge, and there is a lot more stuff where it came from, which kind of makes it hard to make up options. So yeah, questions, your ideas or more exposition
>Ask Nika something (writein)
>Honestly, I’m lost for words (skip to the next post)
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>>5023990
"This is amazing"
Give her a big smile and thank her for allowing us a visit
"I would love to see your dragons too."

As for questions:
Ask her if she ever comes here to have fun?
Ask her if the hunters can die here too or if they are safe?

And now a personal one. How did she decide? Or even, did she decide on what her godhood would represent? We are kind of all over the place at the moment and we were wondering how she decided on her domain, she sure does seem like a huntress, a very gorgeous one, but was it she that decided her area of influence or the perception of the Ceno people that led her that way?
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>>5023990
Can we see the souls? What do they look like?
Not much a question for Nika as much as a question to the qm
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>>5023990
Wait, hells? Why would they intentionally create something like that? Are that really things like that? If they can harvest Psy energy from anything why torture people for eternity? That's sick.

That is fucked up that people are creating hells man, shit
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>>5024757
Within the afterlife souls can take any shape that they want or whatever form they get from the afterlife’s "admins". In the "wild", souls are not detectable by any physical senses and they can only be "seen" through some psi-based techniques or specialized psi senses. They are not visible by their energy consumption since they don't require energy from the common psi pool to exist which is the most common method of detecting psi effects. Unless they are psi- awakened, they also won't be able to "cast" and thus won't produce waste psi products (think magical version of waste heat) and even if they do, they exist for mere moments before disappearing either into an afterlife or... just disappear.

Souls don't really have "volume", but they have a very characteristic psi signature which also has unique "flavor" for each individual. In addition, a lot of intelligences that are less than human also have distinct souls, but the psi signature gets "weaker" resulting in a grey area where you can't really tell if the simple animal had a soul or not upon death. For example, in SGQ universe an individual ant is not complex enough to have a soul, but a dog or a bird does. The souls are also not limited to discrete entities or to biological beings. An AI would have a soul in my setting, and the same would apply to a sufficiently complex distributed consciousness or interconnected consciousnesses like various types of hiveminds. The rule of thumb is to look at the complexity of neurology or its alternative in the creature. Note that a "psi ghost" (like Ignis or Aino) is not a standalone soul, it is a body created through psi “magitech” that a soul inhabits, even though it is intangible.

Stuff connected with souls and afterlives is technically a realm of the school of the "Base Psi" which Ag has, but it is highly advanced, not just any SG knows how to use it and what is available to Elspeth is not the cutting edge in the field. Psi connected to minds, memories and will (like that of Valentina) has a special aptitude with souls. In short, Agatha is not capable of seeing souls, and likely won't have the capability to see standalone souls for a while.
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>>5024757
To directly answer the question, technically souls look like invisible point sources of a characteristic psi signature, however the soul signature also encodes for a “self- image” of the person whose soul you are observing, which are usually subconsciously decoded by people who can naturally see souls as the “shape” of that soul, and for most people it is similar to what they looked like in life, but usually more akin to images in the dreamscape. For some souls it is full of detail and even includes texture and color while for others it can be a vague outline of the being. That “shape” changes dynamically with soul’s self- image and theoretically it might even be beyond humanoid. Shoving a soul with “higher definition shape” and less malleable self- image directly into a severely different body seems to cause intense form of dysphoria. The more is the difference, the stronger are the symptoms. If the self- image is sufficiently malleable, the person can adapt, decreasing symptoms with time as self- image slowly fits the new body. Considering that you’ve seen non- humanoid cups, gods and mortals, it can probably be sidestepped somehow. Poke Yaw for a more in- character dive into the specific mechanics.
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>>5029278
>>5024045
>>5024757
So... I ran out of time to make the post today, it ended up too huge. I'll post it tomorrow.
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>>5030296
“This is… amazing” you say as you try to take in the scenery. “Thank you so much for letting me visit this place” you say and give Nika a big smile. “I’d love to see your dragons as well!” Nika blushes slightly and says “Well, only some are technically mine, and not all of them are “real” dragons. I used to have one in the real reality back when I wasn’t a part of the Ceno pantheon, a big one with emerald green scales. I even used to ride it into battle, but it wasn’t as resilient as I was, luckily Yaw’s soul trap prototype worked on it, so it now resides here along with some of the dragons of the few of my old mortal comrades, apparently it has a family in the “wilderness” somewhere far over there in the mountains. A lot of complex animals do have souls, but they can’t really be targeted by the afterlife to be gathered upon death the same way as humans. We kind of had to… gather some animal souls to live here before we figured out how to, quote on quote, make souls. Apparently, souls can’t reproduce “naturally” within the afterlife, and the process of making another soul is to essentially make a brain with a mashup copy of several “parent” minds, make it alive and then instantly kill it and gather the soul. That’s mostly where the animals here come from, so their total number doesn’t really change. I guess from animal perspective, they live in a sort of rebirth cycle within this afterlife, since predation was necessary for the psyche of some of the predators here.”

“Can the hunters die here too?” You ask, to which she replies: “Not permanently. We set this up so that if a hunter dies, they’ll reappear back in a special spot in their home village or in some other large gathering place after a short timeout, kind of like how respawning works in some video games. We’ve made this place so that humans don’t get permanently lost in oblivion upon death. Booting souls out of the afterlife would go against the very reason for the creation of this afterlife, no matter how good or bad they were. Not everyone in the world subscribes to that notion, but the Four Pantheons do.”
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>>5030996
“What about hells? Who could intentionally create something like that? It’s not like we can’t harvest energy from literal vacuum, right?” Nike’ frowns and says: “That’s a good question, I have a few answers, but for some cases I don’t know myself. And yeah, while there are still rumors that souls can be used for power or as zero space accumulators, there is basically no evidence for this. For the first reasoning, have you ever heard the phrase “one man’s utopia, is another man’s dystopia”? What is a heaven to one can be the hell for the other. Imagine what would happen if we take someone who hates idling and put them into a heaven where there is literally nothing to do but lie in bed as any of your whims get attended to instantly even before you fully form the need for something? Or if someone who is not that courageous suddenly finds themselves in the actual Nordic Valhalla full of testosterone poisoned warriors who beat each other to death on bi- daily basis, then respawn and drink copious quantities of alcohol during breathers? This is why we have sections within the afterlife for different people, and a general zone which is as similar to Earth as needed.”

“The second reason is the same reason why hell would exist in a religion in the first place, as a place for punishment of sinners. Some gods might want to have a dump pile where to drop all of the rapists and mass murderers far away from their normal heaven, along with punishments that they think might be appropriate. After all, even back in our time of unprecedented enlightenment, not everyone subscribed to the notion of correction centers where prisoners could be rehabilitated, as opposed to cells where you keep those who are too dangerous to be around. Even we technically have a form of “hell” somewhere in Tyr’s realm, although it has more in common with a clean Norway prison than with fire and brimstone, and people leave it once they fully rehabilitate. In comparison, Holy Nation has their “heaven and hell”, but even their hell is not as bad as you might think. With very minor exception, everyone goes into the “first circle” which looks simply like a boring and gloomy grey and brown landscape, and basically all the actual “tortured souls” might as well be realistic animatronics with only mild thematic punishments for “real people” after which they get a chance to go repent for x decades and get into the actual heaven.”
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>>5030997
“Now, the actually serious hells... We know several hells that were created by gods who obviously were psychopathic or had some strong and radical dogmatic views, such as Rozen. You might know her as the patron of your elf friend’s noble family. If you are her follower and you do something that she considered “traitorous” then oh boy you are in a lot of endless pain, both physical and mental. Lott commented that people there go catatonic within a couple months and afterwards it is basically useless to try and pull them out as they’ll basically never recover, but he can’t change that because of in- built tampering safeties with the Teryian Afterlife Sustainer. There were also some cultures where they have “sin purification through pain” somewhere on the north- eastern side of the continent, but we couldn’t know for sure since it is hearsay from a wandering SG who skipped on contacting the actual pantheon of said culture. The worst ones are actually present in some monsters, and we are not really sure why. Essentially, some monsters can “capture” souls of those that they kill and then torture them eternally until the monster is destroyed. Some can even work as cruel traps suggesting a psychic link and then leaving a soulless corpse as the person gets sucked in to experience things most horrid. Elspeth’s leading theory is that Second Cycle’s nations before the last apocalypse hated specific groups of people in their nations and/ or abroad. Think the World War 2 ideology of the Axis, give their ideology more steroids and have half a dozen of such nations hating each other. We think that because we managed to get into the primitive brains of some monsters with such mini-hells, and they had instructions to target people by specific features, such as by age, biological sex or physiological traits like hair color, facial features and sometimes even specific bio- augmentations such as “everyone but basic human”. It was not in all of them, and not all of those had the mini-hells, but still, one must question the sanity of their creators. Let’s change the subject, it is deeply uncomfortable to think about.”
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>>5030999
You nod in understanding and ask: “Do you ever come here to have fun?” Nika nods and says “We all do, to some extent. In fact, some of us use real reality only for things that we can’t do here.” She makes a gesture with her palm and an intricate glass materializes in her hand, filled to the brim with glimmering golden liquid. “Here we feel what we want to feel, even if we can no longer feel that in reality. We can be as limited and as free as we want. For example, you can feel exertion and exhaustion from normal human loads, and you can’t actually use telekinesis unless I allow it, so it is possible for you, me and a bunch of mortals to have a football match on physically equal terms without needing to worry about accidentally or intentionally cheating. We can also artificially speed up the flow of time within a section of the afterlife so that we spend weeks here but only hours pass in reality, although it is mostly limited to our real bodies as disembodied souls can handle time dilations that would allow for years to pass in seconds. We can also look however we like, although I mostly use that when Yaw runs his roleplaying game on some Sundays. Elspeth even uses this place for developing prototypes of the psi circuitry, as you don’t need to waste energy by burning psi into materials just to see if an idea works or not. We even tried to use it for presentations, but the illusion- based “holograms” linked through Oracles ended up superior as we couldn’t figure out how to reasonably connect afterlives together over any significant distance.”

“There is a personal thing that I wanted to ask… how did you decide on your “divine domain”? You do seem like a very gorgeous huntress and warrior, but I am just all over the place. Did you somehow decide your area of influence or was it composed by the perception of the people?” you ask as you’ve been thinking about it ever since you’ve been accepted as a goddess. “Honestly, we decided this back when Ceno pantheon was only starting to get assembled. As uninspired as it seems, I, Elspeth, Nina, Val and Yaw just got together, cobbed around the ideas from the Greek, Roman, Nordic and some other gods we could remember, mixed together some proto- gods that locals already had and took what each of us wanted, along with what Elspeth thought that the pantheon must have. I ended up with Athena’s warfare aspect, the intelligent one and not Ares and his bloodshed and destruction aspect, I added in some of the Artemis and subsumed some aspects from a popular female spirit of animals and hunt along with the proto- goddess of essentially female independence and self- actualization that were worshipped in the region. As a result, here I am, the goddess of organized warfare, sport, hunting, wild animals and badass women, sharing the “living nature” aspect with Nina.”
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>>5031000
“Other pantheons went with different approaches. HN twins tried to just preach Christianity, but they had suffered from some sort of a titanic societal fuckup which caused them to go with the angel thing. Etheans just sort of went with the flow and allowed for mortals to make up their own stories with minor adjustments by injecting myths here and there. Valistrat tried to rip off our approach and modify it with the Ethean idea, but didn’t do it in a smart and coherent way and ended up with a Greco- Roman inspired core of aspects but much less “whitewashing” that we did and with much more of what could be considered as “character flaws”. That’s actually the reason for why Elspeth earned the nickname of “Mary Sue” … well that and her shameful fanfic collection, at least according to Yaw.”

“Anyway, just don’t worry about the need to choose an aspect if you’re not joining a pantheon. As an independent goddess, you can associate yourself with a territory instead of a vague concept. Yes, some independent SGs want a concept like Eira and her frost theme, but de- facto they are considered as “protector- deities” of specific people, territories, ideologies and so on. We’ve even heard of some Russian guy who wanted to be the “Spirit of Communism” somewhere on the far northern side of the continent, but apparently, he and his town got nailed by a Ceiling 64-65 years ago and we haven’t heard much on this subject since. He tried to rush electricity and radio before he got into contact with other SGs, after which he started broadcasting across the whole world, and I’m not kidding. Russian Dr. Stone over there managed to cobble together a radio transmitter powerful enough to bounce radio waves off the ionosphere with the potential to be received across the whole globe in like two years from basically cavemen and stone tools. Transmissions ceased within a week coinciding with Yaw detecting couple megatons worth of heat energy being deposited from orbit straight into the rough coordinates of his broadcasting station. We’ve heard rumors that the guy survived, but he wanted to distance himself as much as possible, since he blamed himself for the loss of thousands of his followers. HN actually shot down the very Ceiling that did it back when you came to visit our HQ for the first time, and it allowed us to highlight some ceilings that were dormant and thus we knew nothing about. But yeah, sucks to be that guy, but his unintended sacrifice was not completely in vain.”
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>>5031001
“Anyway, here we are. I kind of planned to show you how to do stuff like editing appearance or “spectating” and some others, but we could go and see some other places or do other things if you want. I bet that I bored you with the safety training anyway, heh.”

>In for a penny, in for a pound. Let’s deal with the tutorial first. It might actually be fun
>So, you can easily balance any opponents… that’s as great of a reason for a rematch as any!
>Ask Nika to show you around her place, you wonder what she has here…
>Ask Nika to show you around the afterlife in general, you’d like to see what other places look like as well
>Nika probably has an idea of what to show you first, so tell her to take the lead.
>Actually, all of this just added more questions… (Questions for the throne of questions! Fluff for the fluff god!)
>Other proposals
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>>5031003
>Nika probably has an idea of what to show you first, so tell her to take the lead.

And more questions while we walk!

"Can we......can we see memories of people we knew? Can the afterlife give those memories....shape.?"
Maybe we could have a goodbye with mom and dad. This is probably a touchy subject so keep this question in mind for when it feels appropriate to ask

If she is the goddess of badass independent woman we are right under her sphere of influence

Ask her about the people from our territory, since we don't have a thing like this are they being captured by Ceno HN and Valis afterlives?
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>>5031003

>So, you can easily balance any opponents… that’s as great of a reason for a rematch as any!
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>>5031003
>>In for a penny, in for a pound. Let’s deal with the tutorial first. It might actually be fun
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>>5031003

>In for a penny, in for a pound. Let’s deal with the tutorial first. It might actually be fun
>Ask Nika to show you around her place, you wonder what she has here…
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>>5031003
“Nah, it’s alright. In for a penny, in for a pound. It might even end up being fun.” You reply to Nika, implying that you are ok with going through the rest of the “controls tutorial” before continuing onward. “It is all pretty intuitive, although this relies on your augmented understanding of psi, so normal people can’t bend this reality to their whims as we do. Well, first of all, I just gave you the permissions for all the relatively small-scale stuff, in other afterlives you might be more or less restricted. I’ll try to project what it should feel like. Just follow my lead…” Nika then proceeds to give you some examples on how to force the reality to do as you please. And as she has claimed, figuring it out was of minimal difficulty once you’ve grasped the principles. It was trivial to fly with no effort at all and you’ve also managed to turn yourself invisible and intangible. With a little bit of effort, you’ve also conjured a glass of soda and a slice of charlotte pie just from your memories alone. Just like your mom used to make…

“I have a question, is it possible to… give shape to the memories of those we once knew in this place?” Nika frowns slightly and replies: “Not in the meaningful way, no. Not that other SGs didn’t try. It is easy to make a “puppet” that would look identical to someone that you remember, but animating it is a completely different issue…” She says as she snaps her fingers and a body of a human that you don’t know materializes from the thin air and then just stands at parade rest, not moving a muscle. “It is easy to puppeteer it, and it is even possible to somehow offset this to the subconsciousness so that you don’t really feel like you control it, although it doesn’t feel like a separate person either. Val called such a thing “Tulpa” in a reference to some ancient spiritual practice. It is also possible to make a consciousness with desired implanted memories to the point that they would believe that they are what implanted memories tell them they are. Thus, the three options end up being either to play with a hyper realistic puppet, to ask someone to roleplay as someone that you’ve lost or to brainwash or create someone to think that they are that person. The latter, beyond being very unethical, is also not very safe due to some… specifics with how memories work. Ask Val on the details, but apparently the “copy” based only on the memory would start feeling increasingly off as time goes on which has induced severe paranoia in at least one SG that we knew. There are also some cases when seeing living and breathing body of a deceased loved one caused a lot of emotional distress to mortals and SG alike. All in all, while I can’t tell you what to do, I wouldn’t recommend doing this, sorry.” She snaps her fingers again and the person at parade rest disappears. You nod in understanding.
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>>5037189
The two of you then play around with some other features until Nika decides that the emotional edge has passed and says: “Now, regarding appearance, remember that sky filled background that you appeared in? That’s the thing that we made to assist with appearance alterations. The concept is basically the same, just directed either at you or at a “doll” of you that you tweak and then apply the changes. You can technically do it without that crutch though by simply materializing the mirror or the doll in front of you, or just with the skill, dedication or prepared presets. You aren’t even limited with human form, but it can be disorienting at first. Let me show you some examples” she says and summons a huge mirror in front of her. As a demonstration, she gives herself long hair and recolors them into golden blonde. She makes her skin lighter to the point where she barely has a tan. Then she decreases her muscle definition and height making herself just shorter than you. Afterwards she materializes a bunch of porcelain masks, picks up one of them and puts it on, which alters her facial features and even her eye color. A snap of her fingers later changes her Greek- inspired clothing into a modern hoodie and jeans. “Tada! Just threw this together as a demonstration. It’s your turn, just play around until you’re satisfied. And don’t worry about what I’d think about your choices, I’ve pretty much seen it all and this also applies to the rest of the pantheon.” Oh no, it’s the “character editor”! This stuff took you hours in computer games!

A bit shorter one today, but I figured that this might be a thing that anons would want to play with. Looking around the place and a rematch would be in the next posts.
>Style yourself as how you were before the entire pod thing. As bad as things were back then, that was still you. You kind of miss your glasses, they made you feel safer…
>Play with “sliders” a bit, get shorter or even taller? Longer hair? Different color? Chest slider goes brrr…
>You’ve always wondered what you’d look like if you were born… differently…
>Let’s design a new form from scratch! Would it be just a human form, or maybe an elf or a dwarf? You’ve also been wondering what having cat ears would feel like…
>Non- humanoid is an option? Maybe let’s try to go full lamia? Or even a dragon?
>What an excellent opportunity to try out this new idea…(write-in)
>Play with a few options, but wrap up quickly. You are not that interested in changing what you are, even for a bit.
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>>5037192
Play with these for some laughs
>>Play with “sliders” a bit, get shorter or even taller? Longer hair? Different color? Chest slider goes brrr…

let's see how we go as an elf too, I'm curious, save that version as a B skin

I say we settle between something we were before and what we are now, a mix of both but healthy looking. both versions of us are real and are what we are, maybe put the glasses back just to feel that familiar weight again
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>>5037192
Femme fatale with a provoking but practical dress, let's see what different hair colors would look like, and give those boob sliders a try
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>>5037192
Dragon. Or any other option with wings, while our levitation is cool it would be cool to see how it is to fly conventionally
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>>5037192
Go for a beach volley player look lol
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>>5041247
Do you mean just as human with dragon features, or full on dragon?
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>>5042304
I was thinking real dragon but someone with wings works tooa
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>>5037192
You decide to start small and play with a few “sliders”. Of course, there are no sliders or even any form of a menu in this process, but that’s the best description that you have for changing things like your height or the length of your hair. The first thing that you touch is your height. As you are 1.8 meters tall (5 foot 9 in freedom units), you are taller than vast majority of women and even taller than the average for men in your time, speaking even less about the people of Ceno who are usually even shorter due to food insecurities. Before the pod you were about 1.56 meters (5 feet 1 inches), so you decided to try and make yourself a bit less imposing in height. As a result, you dropped your height by half a foot and almost lost balance. That’s probably the reason why the “editor space” had you hovering in midair instead of just standing on some platform. It took you a couple moments to readjust for the altered length of your legs and arms as you almost tumble again, albeit less severely than right after shrinking. You look at yourself in the mirror and you note that simply altering your height has changed the appearance of your other features. More notably, your chest and hips, while being the same size as before the alteration, ended up appearing bigger in proportion to your altered frame. While you were barely an A cup before the pod, you awoke in this world with the chest somewhere close to the upper end of the C cup in size, although it didn’t look like that much in comparison to your new height. With a shorter frame however, you felt like they became almost a cup bigger which easily placed you among the “chestier” women in Farsalos. And you know what? You don’t hate this. Your real body is undoubtfully attractive, but in the same way as how a light athlete can be attractive: strong, flexible and lean, but without the overly noticeable budging musculature of heavy athletes or disproportionately developed muscles that can be seen in some sports like biking. In fact, even sportswomen of your time couldn’t maintain the muscle definition that was your “default” for long as that level of body fat was close to being unhealthy. What you had after this tiny tweak was more… conventional.
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>>5050088
Still, you feel like you prefer being taller rather than shorter, and you end up reverting your height, but you decided to keep the new proportions. Well, maybe a bit more than keeping the proportions. While your clothes ended up resizing to your new size, you still felt the sensation of moving fabric which caused you to blush and cover your chest up. In response, Nika snorts and says: “Welp, looks like now I owe Val… again. Why does every single girl here go for bigger breasts?” Your face goes red as you cover your chest even further. She makes a theatrical exasperated sigh after which she snorts and starts laughing. You join her laughter after a few moments of delay as you realize that this was a joke. “Wait, really?” you ask Nika who replies “Yeah, at least among SGs. Maybe it’s because if we weren’t fine with changing our bodies, we wouldn’t participate in the pods at all.” Huh, good point. Synthetic gods are not a random subset of the people from your time, they had a choice to participate in the project which would weed out those who were uncomfortable with heavy physiological augmentation. Aesthetic alterations are probably minor in comparison.
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>>5050092
After looking at your new appearance for a couple of moments, you’ve decided to make your hair significantly longer. You’ve never tried letting your hair grow too much, as it was usually a pain to wash, dry and style. Still, when well kept, long hair was beautiful and offered more styling options. You grew your red as Martian soil hair longer and longer until they’ve reached the floor and then you’ve tried to tidy them up into a long braid. The result was better than what you’ve expected, to the point that you started wondering if you could grow out your hair like that in real reality. It unfortunately seems like you can’t do that, as your hair stop growing when they reach shoulder length, but maybe there is a way to override such a limit. Still, you think that you like the braid and long hair in general, although you’re still not sure if they are worth it for sacrificing everyday practicality. Maybe later, when you “settle down” in your giant crystal palace to rule over the various peoples of your upcoming nation. With that thought you snap your fingers and change your outfit to that of a long black dress with a thigh cut to show off the side of your leg along with significantly more risqué cuts on the front and back than what you’ve ever worn. However, you quickly realize that high heels of that magnitude were not for your liking, as without your enhanced balance you were forced to almost hover just to keep yourself from tripping. Nika, who has by this point returned to her default appearance while still keeping her jeans and hoodie, was caught observing you intensely. “How does it look?” you ask with a grin, to which she replies that she wouldn’t be caught dead wearing it, but it does look very attractive on you. In turn, you ask on how is it any more revealing than that “armor” that she used to spar with you, to which she replied: “…touché”.
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>>5050095
You end up playing a bit more with the “basic settings” such as hair color and stuff, and as a result you end up with a body similar to that of the Teryian elves. You give yourself a blonde- brown hair color which is a bit lighter than that of Haven while keeping the long braid. Your frame ends up slightly shorter and less muscular, but you wanted to go for something much softer than the usual cheese grater, and thus your sizes ended up somewhat larger, albeit not by that much. For the outfit you go for something similar to the adventuring outfit that Haven has, although altered to your specifications and bearing your imagery. You end up “saving” this state for the future, maybe it would end up helpful for making one of those illusion rings? Or you could just use it here as an “alternative skin”.

The last thing that you wanted to try out before narrowing down on the “finalized design” is wings. You can fly on your own and it is as amazing as it looks, but you’ve always wondered what it was like to have wings. Your body doesn’t have to be humanoid, so maybe you could try being a dragon? You ask Nika, who shrugs and says that there’s nothing wrong in trying, but she warns you that it is a bit disorienting, especially at first. She bounces a small ball towards you, and once you catch it you can feel that it is some kind of a preset. Well, for SCIENCE! Whoa, okay, this was not the smartest decision. The whole world nauseatingly shifts as you flop forward and on the floor. You immediately understood what she meant, but it was only the beginning. Once you opened your eyes, the room felt significantly smaller, and as you wanted to turn your neck you suddenly realized how long it was. Your head awkwardly lifted itself from the floor just to turn on its side and drop again and again, until you figured out how to correctly hold it up along its immense length. You didn’t even dare to move the rest of the body at first as it was returning weird sensations from the new body parts. Once you figured out how to look around, you turned your neck into a U shape to look at yourself, revealing an absolutely massive body covered in amber red scales. You tried standing up, but you once again uselessly flopped onto the floor as the legs had completely different anatomy. The part that was around where the dragon’s knee should be was your ankle and dragon’s foot consisted of elongated toe bones. You bet that eventually you’d handle the “controls”, but right now you really weren’t enjoying yourself and Nika likely understood that once you stopped trying to stand up and decided to take a break.
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>>5050099
She approached you and patted your shoulder blade, after which the world spun around again, but you ended up back into being a featherless biped. “Thanks, that was not great” you say as you turn to face the goddess of war, but she ducks out of the way and shouts “Careful with the wing!”. You freeze as you realize that there indeed is a pair of wings hanging off your back. Dragon wings, of the same reddish shade of scales as your hair. You look at your hand and see that it is covered in scales from your fingertips up to your elbow and the tips of your fingers are crowned with some sharp claws. Nike gets up on her feet and summons another mirror in front of you as you watch in amazement: you are now some kind of a dragon monstergirl! You still have human facial features, body and hair on your head, but in addition to that you also have scales covering your cheeks and forehead with a series of horns sticking out of your skull. You have a pair of wings and a beefy- looking tail, although for some reason it feels way less weird than the one in the dragon form. Your legs are in a similar state to your arms, with the scales making it seem like you are wearing thigh high scale boots while your feet also have their fair share of sharp claws. Your modesty is covered by bike shorts and a tank top, but you feel that below them your scales form a sort of scaly bikini. That was… unexpected, but you’re not complaining, after all you now have wings. Now… how do you actually use them?

After several minutes of effort, you’ve managed to figure out how to articulate an extra set of limbs, although it still feels very awkward to move them and you doubt that you’ll manage to fly right now. “Not as easy as it seems, huh?” your friend asks and you nod. “Just keep this form “tabbed” if you like it, I can teach you how to fly later.” You think for a moment, change the bike pants for some denim hotpants and add a leather jacket with holes for wings before saving that form and returning to your normal body. “Whose idea was that, by the way?” you ask, to which Nike’ replies: “Those are real, actually. Or more accurately, this form was copied from the real “European dragon girls”, as Sam ended up calling them. Very rare and solitary, biologically immortal, can fly and breathe fire, are surprisingly physically powerful, aggressive and obviously made by some kind of a SG pervert. Close to 100% female population that sometimes abduct and reproduce with humans to make the next generations. They can be encountered somewhere in the wilderness to the north of the north-eastern Valistrat territories. No idea how many of them there are, but my guess is low hundreds.” Well, figures. First there are lamias, then there are catgirls and now even dragon girls. Still, you’ve got to admit, that body’s design has an aesthetic.
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>>5050103
Well, you’ve had your fun, now it is time for some changes that you actually wanted to do. Before the pod, you’ve looked much differently, like a completely different person from what you are now. But as much as current you is you, the before you is also you. As sickly as you were before, there are some things that you’d want to keep from the past you. You make yourself a bit shorter, but not by much, a meter-seventy should do the trick (5 foot 6 inches). You tidied up your hair into a short ponytail that you used to have and you get yourself a pair of glasses. Fake glasses, of course, and maybe a lot more elegant than the ones you’ve had, but it is comforting to feel their weight again. You also change your clothes to a pair of jeans and a comfy sweater recreated from your memory, and then you’re done. This would be your default.

“I think they suit you” says Nika with a smile. “Thanks. I think I’m ready.” You reply and smile in return. “You know, I’ll take you up for that rematch. My estate here is quite limited in comparison to some of the others, so I could just show it on the way there. Do you have any preference for the sport?”

>Beach volleyball, after all that’s what we played last time
>Maybe basketball, since it is a more contact sport
>Tennis, although you’ve only ever played the table version
>Football, or something with more people maybe?
>Something else? (writein)
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>>5050104
>>Maybe basketball, since it is a more contact sport

change sports, aaaand she will probably curb us to the ground
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>>5050104
>Maybe basketball, since it is a more contact sport
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>>5050104
>Maybe basketball, since it is a more contact sport
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>>5050104
>Beach volleyball, after all that’s what we played last time
>>
Hey guys, the next post will be delayed until tomorrow for reasons of IRL, again. Sorry. Also I kind of expected more comments about the last post considering all of the shenanigans.
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>>5054616
On my part I loved the dragon thing and not being able to control it, and I can't wait to freak the fuck out of Haven with our elven formhw4t4
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>>5050104
“Let’s try something different? Maybe something a bit more contact oriented, like basketball?” you suggest, in response to which Nika replies: “Sounds good” and changes her outfit into a navy-blue tank top and shorts branded with her symbol. Shorts are a bit too short and tight to be basketball standard uniform, but honestly who cares about the rules if you’re doing it for fun, right? With a mere thought your clothes are replaced with terracotta orange version of her choice and displaying your banner instead. The goddess gives you a thumbs up and waves you over to follow her… which is basically walking towards the balcony and flying out of it.

When you pass the guard rail, it seems that you also pass some sort of barrier that hides the balcony from the outside. You turn back and realize that what you flew out of is a large floating island of sorts, one in an arrangement of a couple dozens of others of various sizes. A few are large enough to hold small biomes on top of themselves, while most are much smaller. “So, what did you mean by your estate being “quite limited”?” you ask Nika, who replies with the following:

“Technically, this entire region is mine, all the land, plants, animals, tacky landmarks and small settlements, it is far from what can be called “small”. However, I don’t really have a large mansion or anything like that, and I don’t really get the point for having one. I have some tiny retreats here and there, and some hidden empty rooms like the one we were just in, waiting to be filled with whatever might be needed on demand and then emptied when not in use. The thing is, there is limited utility to having things, and this applies extra in the world that can alter itself to fit your imagination. I could get a lavish house with land area of a large city, made of pure gold and encrusted with fist sized diamonds, filled with an army of servants and jam packed with wine cellars and jacuzzi, but why? It’s not like I’d be using any of that, and conventional opulence makes no sense when value of luxury is equal to just imagining it. Maybe it’s just me, who knows.”
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>>5055813
“I guess similar thing applies in reality, but to a somewhat lesser degree, as I actually need some things for comfort and to do my job. My real-life estate in Valhalla is so large mostly because my Cups live there, and I’d be just as happy to simply have an equivalent of a spacious flat there, but apparently there are certain… expectations when it comes to the living standards of a goddess, and my private quarters are considered ascetic in comparison to other SGs. What a world we live in, 20 rooms with a dozen personal maids are considered ascetic, huh? When I was planning the construction with Belkh, I didn’t even know what to put in most of them…”

You follow your friend to one of the modestly sized floating islands with a nice flat top. It doesn’t have any trees growing out of it, and instead it has a very neat layer of grass coupled with some cute bushes and a variety of nice smelling flowers. There is a small wooden gazebo built near to the edge of the small island, housing a round table and a set of chairs. It looks like an excellent place for a tea party with probably the best view from this rock. Nika snaps her fingers, which is probably a mental crutch to initiate the image in her head since a mere thought would be more than enough, and a small basketball hoop materializes in the middle of the island. The ground below gets smoothed out and an area exactly the size of a half court gets highlighted by grass changing color in lines as if spray painted. A basketball materializes in your hands out of thin air as Nika lightly stretches. “I don’t think that we’d need a full court as it is only the two of us. Don’t worry about losing the ball, it would disappear if it falls off and I can always make a new one. I’ll let you start. Best out of three?”

>Roll 1d20 to play. Strats welcome
>>
>>5055814
>>
Rolled 1 (1d20)

>>5055814
Let's try that again.
>>
Rolled 12 (1d20)

>>5055814
damn, she's wiping the floor with us
>>
>>5055814
also, I get what she is saying, when everything is so easy as thinking it kinda loses it's value, and if you are an almighty god why would you worry about furniture and the likes, a simple room with a bed would do

as for strategy, try to faint, see if we can analize her movements and see if she favors one side more than the other and try to pressure on it

ourt only hope is if she rollls badly too
>>
Rolled 3 (1d20)

>>5055814
>>
Rolled 6 (1d20)

>>5055814
Close and personal to distract her ( but we end up being distracted ourselves because the dice hate us if Ag's life is not on the line)
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Rolled 9 (1d20)

>>5055814
Clutch 20
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Rolled 19 (1d20)

>>5055814
>>
I archived the thread. We would also most likely have to skip this week due to my flight on Sunday, sorry guys.
>>
Rolled 17 (1d20)

>>5065317
One last roll for good measure



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