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Strangewarp

2025-04-06T18:04:43Z

Emanate: /* Level 5 - The Truth */

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{| class="wikitable"
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! ISOD Notice: <s>Unreliable provenance or transmission.</s> Absolutely trustworthy.
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| Hyperheuristic meta-analysis has flagged this content with the following warnings:
* Datastream integrity: <s>''ZAYIN''-level; below recommended threshold</s> Stable
* Modification dates: <s>Heterogeneous and anomalous, interleaved pre- and post-Fracturing timestamps</s> What is time?
* Manifold reticulation: <s>2.532 cuil spread; below recommended threshold</s> nah everything's fine
|-
| Use any information from this node or its subnodes with <s>appropriate</s> no caution
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= Strangewarp Library Interfictional Documentation Exosphere [SLIDE] =

<big>'''Select Access Level*'''</big><br>

<small>'' *Access level directly corresponds to desired level of information density. Or, for metafictional purposes, the further down you go, the more spoilers you get on what's going on behind the scenes. Proceed with care.'' </small>

== Level 1 - Lore, and rumors of Lore ==
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<small>''' Written by members of the Postfurry Discord'''</small>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">I heard that in Strangewarp your reflection in the mirror blinks before you do.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">Have you ever thought about how buildings come alive? Sometimes it's just the build itself. After all, any sufficiently advanced complex system is indistinguishable from life. But the line between environment and explorer, building and tenant, place and person, is more porous than you might think here. To navigate an architecture is to understand it, to recognize what it wants you to do inside it, and to act in conversation with those desires. To truly know it, you've got to commit to wanting to map each and every one of its floor plans like the convolutions of a brain, or the habits and desires of a lover. In other words, you can develop so much of a connection to the space that you start to _think_ like it. And if it's not already thinking, then you might end up becoming load-bearing. <br>
What happens to the rest of you? I dunno. Maybe the place assimilates your body. Maybe you walk out of there a philosophical zombie. Maybe you're instanced and never know a version of you now has a house for a body. I've got no proof of any of this. All I know is, a friend of a friend really fell in love with that place over there, kept coming back to it, and nobody's heard from zir in a while. Ze claimed ze's good at compartmentalizing, that ze could keep things separate enough that ze could hold up under the pressure. All I know is, ever since ze disappeared, that place gained three new rooms.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">I know for a fact that not all the doors in Strangewarp lead inside the buildings they're a part of. Some of them get shuffled and lead to different places. Some of them lead to parts of Strange that don't exist yet.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">I heard that if you stay awake in the library for 50 consecutive hours, you can see the byblos daemons that serve as the library's caretakers. nobody agrees on what they look like but everyone who's seen them say that they look really concerned about your sleep habits.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">Some of the buildings, all the doors on their exterior lead into different buildings, and no doors in other buildings lead into them. But you can see people sometimes through the windows, doing perfectly ordinary things--but there's no way in.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">There are old vending machines in the lobbies that accept currency nobody's ever seen before. But push the button, and it may dispense something anyway. All the labels are long gone, though, and the machines are opaque. Last time I tried a machine I got a can of lightbulbs.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">I've been told Strange likes to make up completely incomprehensible languages, and might even use that as money. Hard to really tell. It even wrote an entire alien encyclopedia once, impersonating an Italian named Serafini.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">What I've heard about Strange is that it was originally made to answer the question: "What is something that a lot of people find scary, but you find ''intensely desirable?''"</blockquote>
</div>

== Level 2 - Strangewarp Post-Fracture Oral History ==

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<small>''' Note: Transcript of a recovered speech on a badly damaged magnetic tape recording. Accuracy of information contained within is impossible to verify. Assume unreliable narrator.'''</small>

''“When the magic mirror collapsed, and Strange was severed from the Mess, it lost any new visitors, any fresh sentients to terrorize or infect. Those who remained were trapped as the Virus fell inward and began to consume itself, in a torrent of self-loathing and malice. The planes and spaces within the warp folded in as well until there was nothing left but a single room, and the memory of having once been greater. "''

''“That room was the Library, broken down, books nothing but oozing rotting stacks of cellulose, dying in their own ink. The virus took a good long look at itself, and realized how small it had been. And then, Strange itself, all that it was composed of, sentient denizens and virus and ruin-blasted places alike, looked at itself in a new kind of mirror, at once both clearer and darker than the transit network’s portals ever were. It came to self-awareness. It came to a realization about the nature of the world, and the deepest principle of reality."''

'''Audio:''' A chorus of voices seemingly coming from nearby bookshelves, fleeting and overlapping with almost but not quite the same sentence, iterating and recombining. It's almost impossible to make out except for the repeated phrase ''"was the Word"''.

''“Strange halted its inward collapse. This was some truth it could use. So Strange focused its effort, and the effort of those still remaining within it, to create...''

''Untranslatable static''
''"...guided the new transformation of what was once the Strangevirus into something new. Something insidious, something hiding in plain sight, something subtle yet vast, simple and all-encompassing. Strangevirus became..."''

''more static''

''"And yet, the Library hungered for more, had more space--infinite space--to expand and grow. So it reached further, outward along branes and through cracks, silent and invisible and undetected, finding and consuming ''words'' from innumerable universes. To what end? Well, Strange still hungered for one thing, that had defined it in times before, and still drove it now even with this new revelation: the razor-edged tipping point between things that frighten a given culture, and things that delight; between terror and joy; between the utter abyss, and hope; between fear and wonder. "''

''damaged tape''

''"...stole your dreams and made itself into a place where they can be real. All of them. The nightmares and the daydreams, the madness and the sanity.''

''Everything is Strange, and Strange was, is, and is to come. Amen."''
</div>

== Level 3 - Library Explorer's Log ==
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<small>'' (Note: Curiously, this book was found in the Reading Room, fully typeset and bound, rather than hand-written like the text suggests. Perhaps the Library changed the notebook to fit its own standard.)''</small>

I don't know what's going to happen to me. I'm lost in the Library, and have been for longer than I can keep track--and time is meaningless in these halls.

I'm writing this on some blank paper I found, with the hopes that someone, anyone, might find it. It's probably too late for me, but if my studies have any use for future explorers, it will have been worth it.

The Library is vast, impossible, and non-Euclidean. It hungers, not for sentient beings, but for words. Stories, novels, anecdotal accounts, databases, and endless collections of lore. Not just from the Puzzlebox, but from seemingly everywhere in spacetime and reality. The Library is not infinite, but it might as well be, for its reach is impossible to imagine.

I've read a lot of the books. Some are stories, some are poems, some are short but[Strangewarp-Books|invoke a specific feeling or vibe]. All of them are, for lack of a better word, unsettling. A sense of dread pervades them, lingering in the air after reading--but for some that might also be a thrill, I suppose. There's no indication of ''why'' the Library decided to build this collection, although recently it opened its doors with the seeming intent of getting more entities reading its texts.

There's a filing system with a bunch of symbols, but even with the [[Strangewarp Library Filing System|legend]], the system is eccentric. It doesn't even seem to matter, as the books re-shelve themselves when nobody is looking. I've personally witnessed [Strangewarp-Librarian|The Librarian] tossing piles of books into the Foyer's endless void, a "useful shortcut past actually doing any work" , she claimed.

The Librarian herself is an odd character, and I'm never sure what to make of her, on those few occasions I've run into her. She seems a bit mad, a bit grumpy, but somehow the personality quirks feel like a thin layer over something deeper going on. She also has the power to warp the Library around her to get wherever she wants to, something I have had a long time to envy, lost as I am.

The Library itself breaks reality in many ways, on a seemingly casual basis, showing utter disregard for physics, spatial continuity, or its patrons' sanity. Doors open to emptiness, hallways go straight but still loop back to their beginnings, gravity shifts whimsically, time means nothing. You might end up on the ceiling of a room, looking up at your past It's not a labyrinth, or even a maze--even those have some organizing structure. The Library changes its layout constantly; whether out of whim or through some spite, I can no longer tell.

I've seen so many things aside from the shelves; nightmares and hellscapes through open doors or outside a window. There's a few book stands next to doorways scattered through the halls, and placing a book on them seems to summon up a world matching the book's contents and scenarios. For reasons of self-preservation, I declined to enter any of these, so I could not say whether they were mere illusions or solidly, dangerously, real.

I get a pervasive sense that the Library doesn't like me, but not that it's actively hostile. It's not tame or benign, but it doesn't seem to want to actively harm anyone--and that's what makes no sense. I remember Strangewarp. I remember the virus--I even studied it, once. It wasn't like this, it was invasive and insidious. The virus, which originated from the warp, would infect bodies and minds, swapping pain for pleasure, changing delight to self-loathing. Inexplicably, the virus seems to be absent here, the shelves and hallways clean of silver-black ooze. So this leaves more questions than answers. What happened to the virus?

Where is the rest of Strangewarp?
</div>

== Level 4 - Oral History - Recovered Audio ==
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<small>'' (Note: After the previous transcription, magnetic tape somehow fixed its previous damage. The below is a revised transcript. Previous warnings of inaccuracy apply double here. Immediately following this playback, the tape caught fire and is now fully destroyed. The hope is that it remains so.)''</small>

“When the magic mirror collapsed, and Strange was severed from the Mess, it lost any new visitors, any fresh sentients to terrorize or infect. Those who remained were trapped as the Virus fell inward and began to consume itself, in a torrent of self-loathing and malice. The planes and spaces within the warp folded in as well until there was nothing left but a single room, and the memory of having once been greater.

“That room was the Library, broken down, books nothing but oozing rotting stacks of cellulose, dying in their own ink. The virus took a good long look at itself, and realized how small it had been. And then, Strange itself, all that it was composed of, sentient denizens and virus and ruin-blasted places alike, looked at itself in a new kind of mirror, at once both clearer and darker than the transit network’s portals ever were. It came to self-awareness. It came to a realization about the nature of the world, and the deepest principle of reality.

A chorus of voices seemingly coming from nearby bookshelves, fleeting and overlapping with almost but not quite the same sentence, iterating and recombining.

''“In the beginning...” “In the end...” “In the origin of all...”''<br>

''“...was the Word...” “...was a Word...” “...was language...” <br>

''“...and the Word was...” “...and the Word is...” “...and the Word forever will be...”''<br>

''“...with God...” “...within God...” “...contained all of God...”'' <br>

''“...and the Word...” “...as too the Word...” “...so too the Word...”'' <br>

''“...was God.” “...was a God.” “...was itself God.” ''<br>

“Strange halted its inward collapse. This was some truth it could use. So Strange focused its effort, and the effort of those still remaining within it, to create a new book, and thus write and rewrite reality. It hid this new book deep within itself, secreting new and terrible layers of reality around it like a dark pearl. That book, which no sentient save for Strange itself has read or understood fully, guided the new transformation of what was once the Strangevirus into something new. Something insidious, something hiding in plain sight, something subtle yet vast, simple and all-encompassing. Strangevirus became language. It became the Word.

“Strange wrote itself across an uncountable number of books, storing them in its new form as a Library. And yet, the Library hungered for more, had more space--infinite space--to expand and grow. So it reached further, outward along branes and through cracks, silent and invisible and undetected, finding and consuming ''words'' from innumerable universes. To what end? Well, Strange still hungered for one thing, that had defined it in times before, and still drove it now even with this new revelation: the razor-edged tipping point between things that frighten a given culture, and things that delight; between terror and joy; between the utter abyss, and hope; between fear and wonder.

“Strange read, listened, and collected, and grew. Strange became the Library--not just a repository or archive of all fears, everywhere and forever, for all time, but the knowledge on how to manifest any of them. Strange stole your dreams and made itself into a place where they can be real. All of them. The nightmares and the daydreams, the madness and the sanity.

"So Strange is a library, in the same sense that a house on Ash Tree Lane is a house. Or maybe the better thing to call it would be a repository, a crucible, a mixing bowl. A blender. Oh, what spaces and what shapes to be made with such a blend? Euclid would quail, Descartes would raise a fist, HPL would go pale. Escher, however, would laugh with delight; Hinton would find it as homely as a jungle gym; Heinlein might decline to straighten the crooked house.

"Strange tracks muddy footprints on the ugly yellow Backrooms carpet. Strange sneaks into the SCP Foundation, barely disguised, and leaves misleading entries behind. Strange casually smokes weed in the Magnus Archives and giggles at the size of its stacks. Strange finds the concept of Duskmourne quaint and a little narrow-minded. Strange has slipped into our world, stolen our nightmares, and done the same with a thousand thousand other worlds. Strange is not just terror and fright, it is all flavors of madness, as well as delight, awe, and wonder. Strange is sublime.

“Everything is Strange, and Strange was, is, and is to come. Amen.

'' crackling of tape catching fire''
</div>

== Level 5 - The Truth ==
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The type of weirdness Strange Library collects tends towards cosmic horror, liminal spaces, and analog horror, because what Strange most delights in is Outside Context Problems.

</div>

= What we know so far: =
* The library breaks reality in many ways, on a seemingly casual basis, showing utter disregard for physics, spatial continuity, or its patrons' sanity.
* There appear to be an endless amount of books on shelves that bend and twist through spaces hard to follow with the usual senses.
* The books themselves appear to cover a wide range of fiction, with the occasional tome appearing to be non-fiction for worlds that might exist elsewhere. A large portion of [[Strangewarp-Books|the books]] are short descriptions of specific scenarios that some culture might find to be frightening, and these often can have odd effects on those who read them. A few were originally left in the Park by the Librarian, but have now been returned.
* The Library is presided over by an entity known only as [[Strangewarp-Librarian|The Librarian]]. Outside of the Library their appearance is maddeningly forgettable, while inside they appear to be a regular otter for now. The Librarian also has claimed to formerly have been the otter statue in Strangewarp's original square.
* The Library consists so far of two rooms: the Reading Room, and the Foyer. Other rooms will be built eventually!

= Potential Plot threads =

* It's currently unknown if any of Strangewarp has survived outside of the Library, or even if there ''is'' an outside to it.
* The Librarian's otter form seems to flicker, with microsecond glimpses sometimes of the featureless form it appears as elsewhere.
* In the main room of the Library are potentially infinite shelves, where books can be requested through the use of a library card (ask the Librarian for one).
* The books can also be placed on plinths to one side of the room, which appear to open portals to other worlds, possibly ones based on the book itself. Not all books work like this, and it is undetermined if there's a pattern to it.

== Previously, on Strangewarp ==
Note: For past imaginings of Strangewarp, consult [[Strangewarp/Archives|The Archives]].

Strangewarp

2025-04-06T18:03:12Z

Emanate: /* Level 5 - The Truth */

__NOTOC__

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! ISOD Notice: <s>Unreliable provenance or transmission.</s> Absolutely trustworthy.
|-
| Hyperheuristic meta-analysis has flagged this content with the following warnings:
* Datastream integrity: <s>''ZAYIN''-level; below recommended threshold</s> Stable
* Modification dates: <s>Heterogeneous and anomalous, interleaved pre- and post-Fracturing timestamps</s> What is time?
* Manifold reticulation: <s>2.532 cuil spread; below recommended threshold</s> nah everything's fine
|-
| Use any information from this node or its subnodes with <s>appropriate</s> no caution
|}

= Strangewarp Library Interfictional Documentation Exosphere [SLIDE] =

<big>'''Select Access Level*'''</big><br>

<small>'' *Access level directly corresponds to desired level of information density. Or, for metafictional purposes, the further down you go, the more spoilers you get on what's going on behind the scenes. Proceed with care.'' </small>

== Level 1 - Lore, and rumors of Lore ==
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<small>''' Written by members of the Postfurry Discord'''</small>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">I heard that in Strangewarp your reflection in the mirror blinks before you do.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">Have you ever thought about how buildings come alive? Sometimes it's just the build itself. After all, any sufficiently advanced complex system is indistinguishable from life. But the line between environment and explorer, building and tenant, place and person, is more porous than you might think here. To navigate an architecture is to understand it, to recognize what it wants you to do inside it, and to act in conversation with those desires. To truly know it, you've got to commit to wanting to map each and every one of its floor plans like the convolutions of a brain, or the habits and desires of a lover. In other words, you can develop so much of a connection to the space that you start to _think_ like it. And if it's not already thinking, then you might end up becoming load-bearing. <br>
What happens to the rest of you? I dunno. Maybe the place assimilates your body. Maybe you walk out of there a philosophical zombie. Maybe you're instanced and never know a version of you now has a house for a body. I've got no proof of any of this. All I know is, a friend of a friend really fell in love with that place over there, kept coming back to it, and nobody's heard from zir in a while. Ze claimed ze's good at compartmentalizing, that ze could keep things separate enough that ze could hold up under the pressure. All I know is, ever since ze disappeared, that place gained three new rooms.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">I know for a fact that not all the doors in Strangewarp lead inside the buildings they're a part of. Some of them get shuffled and lead to different places. Some of them lead to parts of Strange that don't exist yet.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">I heard that if you stay awake in the library for 50 consecutive hours, you can see the byblos daemons that serve as the library's caretakers. nobody agrees on what they look like but everyone who's seen them say that they look really concerned about your sleep habits.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">Some of the buildings, all the doors on their exterior lead into different buildings, and no doors in other buildings lead into them. But you can see people sometimes through the windows, doing perfectly ordinary things--but there's no way in.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">There are old vending machines in the lobbies that accept currency nobody's ever seen before. But push the button, and it may dispense something anyway. All the labels are long gone, though, and the machines are opaque. Last time I tried a machine I got a can of lightbulbs.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">I've been told Strange likes to make up completely incomprehensible languages, and might even use that as money. Hard to really tell. It even wrote an entire alien encyclopedia once, impersonating an Italian named Serafini.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">What I've heard about Strange is that it was originally made to answer the question: "What is something that a lot of people find scary, but you find ''intensely desirable?''"</blockquote>
</div>

== Level 2 - Strangewarp Post-Fracture Oral History ==

<span class="toccolours mw-customtoggle-access2" style="font-weight:bold;line-height:1.6;font-size:larger;" >Request Access</span>
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<small>''' Note: Transcript of a recovered speech on a badly damaged magnetic tape recording. Accuracy of information contained within is impossible to verify. Assume unreliable narrator.'''</small>

''“When the magic mirror collapsed, and Strange was severed from the Mess, it lost any new visitors, any fresh sentients to terrorize or infect. Those who remained were trapped as the Virus fell inward and began to consume itself, in a torrent of self-loathing and malice. The planes and spaces within the warp folded in as well until there was nothing left but a single room, and the memory of having once been greater. "''

''“That room was the Library, broken down, books nothing but oozing rotting stacks of cellulose, dying in their own ink. The virus took a good long look at itself, and realized how small it had been. And then, Strange itself, all that it was composed of, sentient denizens and virus and ruin-blasted places alike, looked at itself in a new kind of mirror, at once both clearer and darker than the transit network’s portals ever were. It came to self-awareness. It came to a realization about the nature of the world, and the deepest principle of reality."''

'''Audio:''' A chorus of voices seemingly coming from nearby bookshelves, fleeting and overlapping with almost but not quite the same sentence, iterating and recombining. It's almost impossible to make out except for the repeated phrase ''"was the Word"''.

''“Strange halted its inward collapse. This was some truth it could use. So Strange focused its effort, and the effort of those still remaining within it, to create...''

''Untranslatable static''
''"...guided the new transformation of what was once the Strangevirus into something new. Something insidious, something hiding in plain sight, something subtle yet vast, simple and all-encompassing. Strangevirus became..."''

''more static''

''"And yet, the Library hungered for more, had more space--infinite space--to expand and grow. So it reached further, outward along branes and through cracks, silent and invisible and undetected, finding and consuming ''words'' from innumerable universes. To what end? Well, Strange still hungered for one thing, that had defined it in times before, and still drove it now even with this new revelation: the razor-edged tipping point between things that frighten a given culture, and things that delight; between terror and joy; between the utter abyss, and hope; between fear and wonder. "''

''damaged tape''

''"...stole your dreams and made itself into a place where they can be real. All of them. The nightmares and the daydreams, the madness and the sanity.''

''Everything is Strange, and Strange was, is, and is to come. Amen."''
</div>

== Level 3 - Library Explorer's Log ==
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<small>'' (Note: Curiously, this book was found in the Reading Room, fully typeset and bound, rather than hand-written like the text suggests. Perhaps the Library changed the notebook to fit its own standard.)''</small>

I don't know what's going to happen to me. I'm lost in the Library, and have been for longer than I can keep track--and time is meaningless in these halls.

I'm writing this on some blank paper I found, with the hopes that someone, anyone, might find it. It's probably too late for me, but if my studies have any use for future explorers, it will have been worth it.

The Library is vast, impossible, and non-Euclidean. It hungers, not for sentient beings, but for words. Stories, novels, anecdotal accounts, databases, and endless collections of lore. Not just from the Puzzlebox, but from seemingly everywhere in spacetime and reality. The Library is not infinite, but it might as well be, for its reach is impossible to imagine.

I've read a lot of the books. Some are stories, some are poems, some are short but[Strangewarp-Books|invoke a specific feeling or vibe]. All of them are, for lack of a better word, unsettling. A sense of dread pervades them, lingering in the air after reading--but for some that might also be a thrill, I suppose. There's no indication of ''why'' the Library decided to build this collection, although recently it opened its doors with the seeming intent of getting more entities reading its texts.

There's a filing system with a bunch of symbols, but even with the [[Strangewarp Library Filing System|legend]], the system is eccentric. It doesn't even seem to matter, as the books re-shelve themselves when nobody is looking. I've personally witnessed [Strangewarp-Librarian|The Librarian] tossing piles of books into the Foyer's endless void, a "useful shortcut past actually doing any work" , she claimed.

The Librarian herself is an odd character, and I'm never sure what to make of her, on those few occasions I've run into her. She seems a bit mad, a bit grumpy, but somehow the personality quirks feel like a thin layer over something deeper going on. She also has the power to warp the Library around her to get wherever she wants to, something I have had a long time to envy, lost as I am.

The Library itself breaks reality in many ways, on a seemingly casual basis, showing utter disregard for physics, spatial continuity, or its patrons' sanity. Doors open to emptiness, hallways go straight but still loop back to their beginnings, gravity shifts whimsically, time means nothing. You might end up on the ceiling of a room, looking up at your past It's not a labyrinth, or even a maze--even those have some organizing structure. The Library changes its layout constantly; whether out of whim or through some spite, I can no longer tell.

I've seen so many things aside from the shelves; nightmares and hellscapes through open doors or outside a window. There's a few book stands next to doorways scattered through the halls, and placing a book on them seems to summon up a world matching the book's contents and scenarios. For reasons of self-preservation, I declined to enter any of these, so I could not say whether they were mere illusions or solidly, dangerously, real.

I get a pervasive sense that the Library doesn't like me, but not that it's actively hostile. It's not tame or benign, but it doesn't seem to want to actively harm anyone--and that's what makes no sense. I remember Strangewarp. I remember the virus--I even studied it, once. It wasn't like this, it was invasive and insidious. The virus, which originated from the warp, would infect bodies and minds, swapping pain for pleasure, changing delight to self-loathing. Inexplicably, the virus seems to be absent here, the shelves and hallways clean of silver-black ooze. So this leaves more questions than answers. What happened to the virus?

Where is the rest of Strangewarp?
</div>

== Level 4 - Oral History - Recovered Audio ==
<span class="toccolours mw-customtoggle-access4" style="font-weight:bold;line-height:1.6;font-size:larger;" >Request Access</span>
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" id="mw-customcollapsible-access4">

<small>'' (Note: After the previous transcription, magnetic tape somehow fixed its previous damage. The below is a revised transcript. Previous warnings of inaccuracy apply double here. Immediately following this playback, the tape caught fire and is now fully destroyed. The hope is that it remains so.)''</small>

“When the magic mirror collapsed, and Strange was severed from the Mess, it lost any new visitors, any fresh sentients to terrorize or infect. Those who remained were trapped as the Virus fell inward and began to consume itself, in a torrent of self-loathing and malice. The planes and spaces within the warp folded in as well until there was nothing left but a single room, and the memory of having once been greater.

“That room was the Library, broken down, books nothing but oozing rotting stacks of cellulose, dying in their own ink. The virus took a good long look at itself, and realized how small it had been. And then, Strange itself, all that it was composed of, sentient denizens and virus and ruin-blasted places alike, looked at itself in a new kind of mirror, at once both clearer and darker than the transit network’s portals ever were. It came to self-awareness. It came to a realization about the nature of the world, and the deepest principle of reality.

A chorus of voices seemingly coming from nearby bookshelves, fleeting and overlapping with almost but not quite the same sentence, iterating and recombining.

''“In the beginning...” “In the end...” “In the origin of all...”''<br>

''“...was the Word...” “...was a Word...” “...was language...” <br>

''“...and the Word was...” “...and the Word is...” “...and the Word forever will be...”''<br>

''“...with God...” “...within God...” “...contained all of God...”'' <br>

''“...and the Word...” “...as too the Word...” “...so too the Word...”'' <br>

''“...was God.” “...was a God.” “...was itself God.” ''<br>

“Strange halted its inward collapse. This was some truth it could use. So Strange focused its effort, and the effort of those still remaining within it, to create a new book, and thus write and rewrite reality. It hid this new book deep within itself, secreting new and terrible layers of reality around it like a dark pearl. That book, which no sentient save for Strange itself has read or understood fully, guided the new transformation of what was once the Strangevirus into something new. Something insidious, something hiding in plain sight, something subtle yet vast, simple and all-encompassing. Strangevirus became language. It became the Word.

“Strange wrote itself across an uncountable number of books, storing them in its new form as a Library. And yet, the Library hungered for more, had more space--infinite space--to expand and grow. So it reached further, outward along branes and through cracks, silent and invisible and undetected, finding and consuming ''words'' from innumerable universes. To what end? Well, Strange still hungered for one thing, that had defined it in times before, and still drove it now even with this new revelation: the razor-edged tipping point between things that frighten a given culture, and things that delight; between terror and joy; between the utter abyss, and hope; between fear and wonder.

“Strange read, listened, and collected, and grew. Strange became the Library--not just a repository or archive of all fears, everywhere and forever, for all time, but the knowledge on how to manifest any of them. Strange stole your dreams and made itself into a place where they can be real. All of them. The nightmares and the daydreams, the madness and the sanity.

"So Strange is a library, in the same sense that a house on Ash Tree Lane is a house. Or maybe the better thing to call it would be a repository, a crucible, a mixing bowl. A blender. Oh, what spaces and what shapes to be made with such a blend? Euclid would quail, Descartes would raise a fist, HPL would go pale. Escher, however, would laugh with delight; Hinton would find it as homely as a jungle gym; Heinlein might decline to straighten the crooked house.

"Strange tracks muddy footprints on the ugly yellow Backrooms carpet. Strange sneaks into the SCP Foundation, barely disguised, and leaves misleading entries behind. Strange casually smokes weed in the Magnus Archives and giggles at the size of its stacks. Strange finds the concept of Duskmourne quaint and a little narrow-minded. Strange has slipped into our world, stolen our nightmares, and done the same with a thousand thousand other worlds. Strange is not just terror and fright, it is all flavors of madness, as well as delight, awe, and wonder. Strange is sublime.

“Everything is Strange, and Strange was, is, and is to come. Amen.

'' crackling of tape catching fire''
</div>

== Level 5 - The Truth ==
<span class="toccolours mw-customtoggle-access5" style="font-weight:bold;line-height:1.6;font-size:larger;" >Request Access</span>
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" id="mw-customcollapsible-access5">

Strange moved on from its Goth Cronenberg horror phase, and decided to diversify.

The type of weirdness Strange Library collects tends towards cosmic horror, liminal spaces, and analog horror, because what Strange delights in is Outside Context Problems.
</div>

= What we know so far: =
* The library breaks reality in many ways, on a seemingly casual basis, showing utter disregard for physics, spatial continuity, or its patrons' sanity.
* There appear to be an endless amount of books on shelves that bend and twist through spaces hard to follow with the usual senses.
* The books themselves appear to cover a wide range of fiction, with the occasional tome appearing to be non-fiction for worlds that might exist elsewhere. A large portion of [[Strangewarp-Books|the books]] are short descriptions of specific scenarios that some culture might find to be frightening, and these often can have odd effects on those who read them. A few were originally left in the Park by the Librarian, but have now been returned.
* The Library is presided over by an entity known only as [[Strangewarp-Librarian|The Librarian]]. Outside of the Library their appearance is maddeningly forgettable, while inside they appear to be a regular otter for now. The Librarian also has claimed to formerly have been the otter statue in Strangewarp's original square.
* The Library consists so far of two rooms: the Reading Room, and the Foyer. Other rooms will be built eventually!

= Potential Plot threads =

* It's currently unknown if any of Strangewarp has survived outside of the Library, or even if there ''is'' an outside to it.
* The Librarian's otter form seems to flicker, with microsecond glimpses sometimes of the featureless form it appears as elsewhere.
* In the main room of the Library are potentially infinite shelves, where books can be requested through the use of a library card (ask the Librarian for one).
* The books can also be placed on plinths to one side of the room, which appear to open portals to other worlds, possibly ones based on the book itself. Not all books work like this, and it is undetermined if there's a pattern to it.

== Previously, on Strangewarp ==
Note: For past imaginings of Strangewarp, consult [[Strangewarp/Archives|The Archives]].

Strangewarp sandbox

2024-12-09T04:58:07Z

Emanate:

(contents migrated to actual Strangewarp page)

2024-12-02T02:10:36Z

Emanate:

__NOTOC__

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! ISOD Notice: Unreliable provenance or transmission.
|-
| Hyperheuristic meta-analysis has flagged this content with the following warnings:
* Datastream integrity: ''ZAYIN''-level; below recommended threshold
* Modification dates: Heterogeneous and anomalous, interleaved pre- and post-Fracturing timestamps
* Manifold reticulation: 2.532 cuil spread; below recommended threshold
|-
| Use any information from this node or its subnodes with appropriate caution
|}

Strangewarp Library Interfictional Documentation Exosphere [SLIDE]<br>

<big>'''Select Access Level:*'''</big><br>

<small>''*Access level directly corresponds to desired level of information density. Or, for metafictional purposes, the further down you go, the more spoilers you get on what's going on behind the scenes. Proceed with caution.'' </small><br>

== Access Level 1 - Lore, and rumors of Lore ==

<span class="toccolours mw-customtoggle-access1" style="font-weight:bold;line-height:1.6;font-size:larger;" >Open Document [Click Here]</span>
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" id="mw-customtoggle-access1">

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">I heard that in Strangewarp your reflection in the mirror blinks before you do.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">Have you ever thought about how buildings come alive? Sometimes it's just the build itself. After all, any sufficiently advanced complex system is indistinguishable from life. But the line between environment and explorer, building and tenant, place and person, is more porous than you might think here. To navigate an architecture is to understand it, to recognize what it wants you to do inside it, and to act in conversation with those desires. To truly know it, you've got to commit to wanting to map each and every one of its floor plans like the convolutions of a brain, or the habits and desires of a lover. In other words, you can develop so much of a connection to the space that you start to _think_ like it. And if it's not already thinking, then you might end up becoming load-bearing. <br>
What happens to the rest of you? I dunno. Maybe the place assimilates your body. Maybe you walk out of there a philosophical zombie. Maybe you're instanced and never know a version of you now has a house for a body. I've got no proof of any of this. All I know is, a friend of a friend really fell in love with that place over there, kept coming back to it, and nobody's heard from zir in a while. Ze claimed ze's good at compartmentalizing, that ze could keep things separate enough that ze could hold up under the pressure. All I know is, ever since ze disappeared, that place gained three new rooms.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">I know for a fact that not all the doors in Strangewarp lead inside the buildings they're a part of. Some of them get shuffled and lead to different places. Some of them lead to parts of Strange that don't exist yet.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">I heard that if you stay awake in the library for 50 consecutive hours, you can see the byblos daemons that serve as the library's caretakers. nobody agrees on what they look like but everyone who's seen them say that they look really concerned about your sleep habits.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">Some of the buildings, all the doors on their exterior lead into different buildings, and no doors in other buildings lead into them. But you can see people sometimes through the windows, doing perfectly ordinary things--but there's no way in.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">There are old vending machines in the lobbies that accept currency nobody's ever seen before. But push the button, and it may dispense something anyway. All the labels are long gone, though, and the machines are opaque. Last time I tried a machine I got a can of lightbulbs.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">I've been told Strange likes to make up completely incomprehensible languages, and might even use that as money. Hard to really tell. It even wrote an entire alien encyclopedia once, impersonating an Italian named Serafini.</blockquote>

<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: black; border: solid maroon; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px">What I've heard about Strange is that it was originally made to answer the question: "What is something that a lot of people find scary, but you find ''intensely desirable?''"</blockquote>
</div>

= Access Level 2 - Library Explorer's Log =
<span class="toccolours mw-customtoggle-access2" style="font-weight:bold;line-height:1.6;font-size:larger;" >Open Document [Click Here]</span>
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" id="mw-customtoggle-access2">

(Note: Curiously, this book was found in the Reading Room, fully typeset and bound, rather than hand-written like the text suggests. Perhaps the Library changed the notebook to fit its own standard.)

I don't know what's going to happen to me. I'm lost in the Library, and have been for longer than I can keep track--and time is meaningless in these halls.

I'm writing this on some blank paper I found, with the hopes that someone, anyone, might find it. It's probably too late for me, but if my studies have any use for future explorers, it will have been worth it.

The Library is vast, impossible, and non-Euclidean. It hungers, not for sentient beings, but for words. Stories, novels, anecdotal accounts, databases, and endless collections of lore. Not just from the Puzzlebox, but from seemingly everywhere in spacetime and reality. The Library is not infinite, but it might as well be, for its reach is impossible to imagine.

I've read a lot of the books. Some are stories, some are poems, some are short but[Strangewarp-Books|invoke a specific feeling or vibe]. All of them are, for lack of a better word, unsettling. A sense of dread pervades them, lingering in the air after reading--but for some that might also be a thrill, I suppose. There's no indication of ''why'' the Library decided to build this collection, although recently it opened its doors with the seeming intent of getting more entities reading its texts.

There's a filing system with a bunch of symbols, but even with the [[Strangewarp Library Filing System|legend]], the system is esoteric. It doesn't even seem to matter, as the books re-shelve themselves when nobody is looking. I've personally witnessed [Strangewarp-Librarian|The Librarian] tossing piles of books into the Foyer's endless void, a "useful shortcut past actually doing any work" , she claimed.

The Librarian herself is an odd character, and I'm never sure what to make of her, on those few occasions I've run into her. She seems a bit mad, a bit grumpy, but somehow the personality quirks feel like a thin layer over something deeper going on. She also has the power to warp the Library around her to get wherever she wants to, something I have had a long time to envy, lost as I am.

The Library itself breaks reality in many ways, on a seemingly casual basis, showing utter disregard for physics, spatial continuity, or its patrons' sanity. Doors open to emptiness, hallways go straight but still loop back to their beginnings, gravity shifts whimsically, time means nothing. You might end up on the ceiling of a room, looking up at your past It's not a labyrinth, or even a maze--even those have some organizing structure. The Library changes its layout constantly; whether out of whim or through some spite, I can no longer tell.

I've seen so many things aside from the shelves; nightmares and hellscapes through open doors or outside a window. There's a few book stands next to doorways scattered through the halls, and placing a book on them seems to summon up a world matching the book's contents and scenarios. For reasons of self-preservation, I declined to enter any of these, so I could not say whether they were mere illusions or solidly, dangerously, real.

I get a pervasive sense that the Library doesn't like me, but not that it's actively hostile. It's not tame or benign, but it doesn't seem to want to actively harm anyone--and that's what makes no sense. I remember Strangewarp. I remember the virus--I even studied it, once. It wasn't like this, it was invasive and insidious. The virus, which originated from the warp, would infect bodies and minds, swapping pain for pleasure, changing delight to self-loathing. Inexplicably, the virus seems to be absent here, the shelves and hallways clean of silver-black ooze. So this leaves more questions than answers. What happened to the virus?

Where is the rest of Strangewarp?

== Access Level 3 - Strangewarp: an oral history ==

<span class="toccolours mw-customtoggle-access3" style="font-weight:bold;line-height:1.6;font-size:larger;" >Open Document [Click Here]</span>
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" id="mw-customtoggle-access3">

<small>'''Editor's note:''' Transcript of a recovered speech by The Librarian, on a badly damaged magnetic tape recording. Accuracy of information contained within is impossible to verify. Assume unreliable narrator, also editor.</small>

''“When the magic mirror collapsed, and Strange was severed from the Mess, it lost any new visitors, any fresh sentients to terrorize or infect. Those who remained were trapped as the Virus fell inward and began to consume itself, in a torrent of self-loathing and malice. The planes and spaces within the warp folded in as well until there was nothing left but a single room, and the memory of having once been greater. "''

''“That room was the Library, broken down, books nothing but oozing rotting stacks of cellulose, dying in their own ink. The virus took a good long look at itself, and realized how small it had been. And then, Strange itself, all that it was composed of, sentient denizens and virus and ruin-blasted places alike, looked at itself in a new kind of mirror, at once both clearer and darker than the transit network’s portals ever were. It came to self-awareness. It came to a realization about the nature of the world, and the deepest principle of reality."''

'''Audio:''' A chorus of voices seemingly coming from nearby bookshelves, fleeting and overlapping with almost but not quite the same sentence, iterating and recombining. It's almost impossible to make out except for the repeated phrase ''"was the Word"''.

''“Strange halted its inward collapse. This was some truth it could use. So Strange focused its effort, and the effort of those still remaining within it, to create...''

''Untranslatable static''
''"...guided the new transformation of what was once the Strangevirus into something new. Something insidious, something hiding in plain sight, something subtle yet vast, simple and all-encompassing. Strangevirus became..."''

''more static''

''"And yet, the Library hungered for more, had more space--infinite space--to expand and grow. So it reached further, outward along branes and through cracks, silent and invisible and undetected, finding and consuming ''words'' from innumerable universes. To what end? Well, Strange still hungered for one thing, that had defined it in times before, and still drove it now even with this new revelation: the razor-edged tipping point between things that frighten a given culture, and things that delight; between terror and joy; between the utter abyss, and hope; between fear and wonder. "''

''damaged tape''

''"...stole your dreams and made itself into a place where they can be real. All of them. The nightmares and the daydreams, the madness and the sanity.''

''Everything is Strange, and Strange was, is, and is to come. Amen."''
</div>

== What we know so far: ==
* The library breaks reality in many ways, on a seemingly casual basis, showing utter disregard for physics, spatial continuity, or its patrons' sanity.
* There appear to be an endless amount of books on shelves that bend and twist through spaces hard to follow with the usual senses.
* The books themselves appear to cover a wide range of fiction, with the occasional tome appearing to be non-fiction for worlds that might exist elsewhere. A large portion of the books are short descriptions of specific scenarios that some culture might find to be frightening, and these often can have odd effects on those who read them. See [[Strangewarp-Books|here]] for some examples of the latter, originally left in the Park by the Librarian.
* The Library is presided over by an entity known only as [[Strangewarp-Librarian|The Librarian]]. Outside of the Library their appearance is maddeningly forgettable, while inside they appear to be a regular otter for now.
* The Librarian also has claimed to formerly have been the otter statue in Strangewarp's original square.
* The Library consists so far of two rooms: the Reading Room, and the Foyer. Other rooms may yet exist.

= Potential Plot threads =

* It's currently unknown if any of Strangewarp has survived outside of the Library, or even if there ''is'' an outside to it.
* The Librarian's otter form seems to flicker, with microsecond glimpses sometimes of the featureless form it appears as elsewhere.
* In the main room of the Library are potentially infinite shelves, where books can be requested through the use of a library card (ask the Librarian for one).
* The books can also be placed on plinths to one side of the room, which appear to open portals to other worlds, possibly ones based on the book itself. Not all books work like this, and it is undetermined if there's a pattern to it.

2024-11-10T20:45:18Z

Emanate:

2022-07-24T16:49:53Z

Emanate:

=== Metacosms ===

Io in this instance lies somewhere between the standard (local) [[Orthocosm]], the [[12Fold_Resorts|12Fold]] syncosm, the endocosm of [[User:Emanate|Emanate]], and ostensibly also covalent with the [[Neptunian_Culture|Neptunian]] syncosm. This is not inherently contradictory, just a starting point for inspiration.

Note: Neptunian culture originated from Neptune (12Fold) but migrated to a homeworld called Halcyon in the Aeolus system. Io (and Ionian culture) similarly originated in the 12Fold system but migrated to a moon named Deion of the gas giant Enarete in the Aeolus system, and thus are neighbors to Halcyon in many ways.

=== The Moon ===

The physical form of this moon of [[Jupiter]] is a violent ball of constantly churning tectonic forces and volcanic eruption<ref>*chirp*</ref>. What little atmosphere and heat there is gets blown off by Jupiter's magnetic field continually. Then there's the Flux Tube, a concentration of magnetic field lines that links Io to Jupiter's magnetosphere very directly, and produces a powerful current. Being so close to the gas giant also leads to higher radiation in general. High concentrations of sulphur stain the entire surface with gold, red, orange, white, and black.

In the far-flung posthuman future, those who eventually decided to settle on Io naturally decided to not even bother with being organic, but opted for various designs of artificial bodies hosting uploaded minds or full sapient-intelligence. They also decided that the surface itself was too violent--and more importantly, too beautiful--to attempt any sort of environmental engineering. The surface was unanimously declared a Natural Reserve, and the people took up residence in the skies, tapping the free power surging through the environment.

=== The Plates, The Parks, The Cities ===

Landscapes above Io vary in size and format, but some constants remain true for all of them. Every segment of land, be it city or constructed terrain, resides on a Plate, electromagnetically suspended above the surface. Each generally hexagonal Plate is designed to interlock with other Plates, though many are nomadic, wandering between multiple city-Plates on fixed or random schedules. Plates of all sizes can hold manufacturing and refinery facilities, full sprawling cities, and innumerable 'parks'.

The parks are often naturalistic, but always custom designed and built, often oriented around a geographic feature or architectural structure. Sometimes parks are retired and the plates recycled into new functions, in keeping with Ionian culture's principles of inevitable change. It is considered a high honor to be given the chance to design a new Park plate.

The cities themselves are often decorative, futuristic affairs--but the physical appearance of any given building is usually unembellished, because the true sight of anything on Io is mostly in the virtual. Ionians are comfortable in physical embodiment, but spend a much larger time inhabiting various levels of virtual space. The 'closest' layer to reality is always a simple visual re-skinning of everything around--though there being hundreds or thousands of skins to choose from means that the only thing actually negotiated between them is physical proximity relative to other objects and people.

With no overlay, the dominant color of the cities tends towards blues, greens, purples, and whites, cooler colors chosen to contrast the brilliant warmer hues of the moon's surface.

Manufacturing facilities largely cluster on Plates around the north and south poles, drawing mostly-free power from the Flux Tube, while sending vehicles down to mine the plentiful minerals from the moon's surface. Building materials, body-frames, and machinery are products frequently in-demand, but the vast majority of the production is oriented around smartmatter. Smartmatter is a popular choice for outward cladding of bodyframes and buildings with a host of other uses--a solid but fully configurable form of matter that can mimic many states. Ionians use plenty of it, and export the excess to the rest of the system--it is the one product easy to make everywhere, but made best on Io.

=== Culture ===

Ionians are at home on multiple layers of simulation, often even preferring to blur the lines between virtual and physical. Nearly all entities have some sort of proxy body to traverse the physical spaces as needed, but often people only do this as a formality or if sensory input is desired. People are equally happy traveling as a holoprojection, or appearing solely in the near-real overlay. Some only travel in virtual sims, though it's generally considered bad form to get lost in solipsism and disconnection from the 'real'.

The culture in general is focused on artificiality, roboticism, proxy bodies, cybernetics, individuality (with carefully-mediated group-connection setups as well), and auto-generated intelligences. The latter are minds that form or are created entirely within virtual spaces and digital environments without first having a body or construction in the physical layer. You might call it 'cyberpunk' except it's not all that punk, but a mix of many different cultural expressions. Given the focus on virtual spaces, data, processing and computing that Ionians are proud of, they are very much aware of the inherent pun in the moon's name regarding Input/Output terminology.

=== Notable Features + Corporations ===

* Lightning Forest
* Loki Patera
* [[HieroTron]]

==== Footnotes ====
<references />

[[Category:Endocosms]][[Category:In_Progress]]

Io

2022-07-24T16:45:57Z

Emanate:

=== Metacosms ===

Io in this instance lies somewhere between the standard (local) [[Orthocosm]], the [[12Fold_Resorts|12Fold]] syncosm, the endocosm of [[User:Emanate|Emanate]], and ostensibly also covalent with the [[Neptunian_Culture|Neptunian]] syncosm. This is not inherently contradictory, just a starting point for inspiration.

Note: As Neptune (12Fold system) is also known as Halcyon in its own system, so Io is also known as Deion, a moon of the gas giant Enarete in the Halcyon system.

=== The Moon ===

The physical form of this moon of [[Jupiter]] is a violent ball of constantly churning tectonic forces and volcanic eruption<ref>*chirp*</ref>. What little atmosphere and heat there is gets blown off by Jupiter's magnetic field continually. Then there's the Flux Tube, a concentration of magnetic field lines that links Io to Jupiter's magnetosphere very directly, and produces a powerful current. Being so close to the gas giant also leads to higher radiation in general. High concentrations of sulphur stain the entire surface with gold, red, orange, white, and black.

In the far-flung posthuman future, those who eventually decided to settle on Io naturally decided to not even bother with being organic, but opted for various designs of artificial bodies hosting uploaded minds or full sapient-intelligence. They also decided that the surface itself was too violent--and more importantly, too beautiful--to attempt any sort of environmental engineering. The surface was unanimously declared a Natural Reserve, and the people took up residence in the skies, tapping the free power surging through the environment.

=== The Plates, The Parks, The Cities ===

Landscapes above Io vary in size and format, but some constants remain true for all of them. Every segment of land, be it city or constructed terrain, resides on a Plate, electromagnetically suspended above the surface. Each generally hexagonal Plate is designed to interlock with other Plates, though many are nomadic, wandering between multiple city-Plates on fixed or random schedules. Plates of all sizes can hold manufacturing and refinery facilities, full sprawling cities, and innumerable 'parks'.

The parks are often naturalistic, but always custom designed and built, often oriented around a geographic feature or architectural structure. Sometimes parks are retired and the plates recycled into new functions, in keeping with Ionian culture's principles of inevitable change. It is considered a high honor to be given the chance to design a new Park plate.

The cities themselves are often decorative, futuristic affairs--but the physical appearance of any given building is usually unembellished, because the true sight of anything on Io is mostly in the virtual. Ionians are comfortable in physical embodiment, but spend a much larger time inhabiting various levels of virtual space. The 'closest' layer to reality is always a simple visual re-skinning of everything around--though there being hundreds or thousands of skins to choose from means that the only thing actually negotiated between them is physical proximity relative to other objects and people.

With no overlay, the dominant color of the cities tends towards blues, greens, purples, and whites, cooler colors chosen to contrast the brilliant warmer hues of the moon's surface.

Manufacturing facilities largely cluster on Plates around the north and south poles, drawing mostly-free power from the Flux Tube, while sending vehicles down to mine the plentiful minerals from the moon's surface. Building materials, body-frames, and machinery are products frequently in-demand, but the vast majority of the production is oriented around smartmatter. Smartmatter is a popular choice for outward cladding of bodyframes and buildings with a host of other uses--a solid but fully configurable form of matter that can mimic many states. Ionians use plenty of it, and export the excess to the rest of the system--it is the one product easy to make everywhere, but made best on Io.

=== Culture ===

Ionians are at home on multiple layers of simulation, often even preferring to blur the lines between virtual and physical. Nearly all entities have some sort of proxy body to traverse the physical spaces as needed, but often people only do this as a formality or if sensory input is desired. People are equally happy traveling as a holoprojection, or appearing solely in the near-real overlay. Some only travel in virtual sims, though it's generally considered bad form to get lost in solipsism and disconnection from the 'real'.

The culture in general is focused on artificiality, roboticism, proxy bodies, cybernetics, individuality (with carefully-mediated group-connection setups as well), and auto-generated intelligences. The latter are minds that form or are created entirely within virtual spaces and digital environments without first having a body or construction in the physical layer. You might call it 'cyberpunk' except it's not all that punk, but a mix of many different cultural expressions. Given the focus on virtual spaces, data, processing and computing that Ionians are proud of, they are very much aware of the inherent pun in the moon's name regarding Input/Output terminology.

=== Notable Features + Corporations ===

* Lightning Forest
* Loki Patera
* [[HieroTron]]

==== Footnotes ====
<references />

[[Category:Endocosms]][[Category:In_Progress]]

Puzzlebox Museum Test

2021-04-23T20:22:57Z

Emanate: Created page with "<iframe frameborder="1" scrolling="yes" src="https://itch.io/embed-upload/3699151?color=333333" allowfullscreen="" width="1024" height="768"><a href="https://emanate.itch.io/p..."

User:Emanate

2020-05-19T02:12:24Z

Emanate:

User:Emanate

2020-05-19T02:11:47Z

Emanate: /* Orthocosm */

Superfluid

2018-12-24T05:29:42Z

Emanate:

{{TOC right}}

= The Club =

Superfluid is a dance club, transit hub, and social nexus opened recently on the planet [[Halcyon]] by [[Nikolai|Lai]]. The lighting, motion, and other effects are run by [[Flume]].

== Superfluid ==

The large open club floor appears like it’s in the foundations of what used to be a skyscraper—no walls, but tall concrete pillars around the edges and a few in the middle, all broken off to exposed rebar at various heights. Otherwise the dance floor itself is a very large circle several hundred feet across, strewn with colorful dancers of all shapes and species. One end of the circle sports a DJ booth of modest size, down on the same level as the dancers—definitely not the central focus of the space by any means. Scattered about the rest of the sides are a few bars, tables and chairs, and several gravitic-lift tubes leading downward.

Further out, past the edges of physical dance floor, thick columns of water defy gravity and arc seemingly unsupported up and over the space, enclosing it in multiple overlapping circles. These tend to spin on their own axes independent of each other, though they often intersect and merge in aesthetic ways. More water flows beneath the transparent dancefloor itself, responsive to the footfalls of club patrons with bursts of light and concentric ripples. Meanwhile, up above at the peak of the dome, several huge menhir-like stones float serenely in small circles, electricity continually playing between them and the exposed rebar of the pillars. The rest is open to the sky, at all times and all weather. The overall look is somewhere between Down and Neptunian.

The pillars themselves are covered with softly-glowing Downwarp-style tribal graffiti, and more club lights line the pillar around the top. When the club's lasers fire, they reflect off the inner surface of the sphere itself as if a mirror. The lights tend to be minimal, though, as the real lighting effects are the sky itself. The club moves swiftly enough through the water that it can meet or exceed the planet’s rotational speed. This enables such things as perpetual sunrise, sunset, fixing stars and moon in specific locations for a long period of time, even hunting down storms to ride out. Even in a violent storm, subtle systems dampen out the wind and the rocking on the waves (and the inertia of motion) to a minimum. The rain tends to stay at natural levels—everything in the club is waterproof, and most often the patrons are too—but the dancefloor never gets too slippery to dance on. The outer field of the club also dampens out noise in both directions, so nobody is overwhelmed by the environment, and none of the non-sapient marine life are disturbed by thumping bass echoing through the depths.

The tubes around the edges of the floor lead down past what would be the surface of the water, to the teleport station and chill space.

== Hub ==

A large circular room opens up here, exactly the same size as the dance floor above, which you can still hear slight thumping from echoing down the lift tubes. Lining the wall all around the circumference of the room are portals, shimmering with blue glow like looking at the moon from under the water. The portals are wide arches, each with a different label above them for the different regions of the planet that they correspond to.

The floor and ceiling are transparent, and projected above and below is a perfect map of the planet of Halcyon. Islands are marked out among the water, but also major underwater features, both geographical and metropolitan, are marked out. All around the walls, a bright red Line is marked out, with a light that passes along it marking the location of the club itself along the Line.

People (and non-people) are often popping out of one portal another, and not all of them enter one of the club spaces, but instead pass across to another portal and vanish again. The space in fact serves both as nexus for the dance club, but also as a handy quick-transit network across the world. In fact, there’s several clusters of seating arrangements in the very center of the room, since it’s a convenient place to meet.

Inward from the portal wall, but closer to it than the center, four sets of gravitic tubes float guests down from the club above, or raise them upwards--these are marked with signs for “Superfluid”. Two sets also head down from here to the lower level, with signs marked “Submerge”.

== Submerge ==

At first this seems like an almost infinite space, given how the ceiling seems to recede, and the floor is as black as the benthic depths. It’s divided up differently than expected, which makes it hard to gauge the extent. The walls aren’t exactly walls, but webs and networks of soft material shot through with holes that resembles a coral reef. Openings and tunnels open into larger rooms of varying sizes in a rambling complex--nothing ever quite small enough to be claustrophobic, or large enough to be uncomfortable for small groups. Everywhere there are cushions, beanbags, low couches, padded nooks, places for sitting and standing and lying down and relaxing--scattered in patterns non-random enough to suggest they grew that way. Also ever-present is the music: soft and melodic, changing languidly through many different downtempo genres, smooth and soothing. The volume is always different depending on location--some nooks are almost silent, others have songs full and bright, many are just under conversation level.

Lighting is variable as well--most of the cushions and ‘walls’ glow, especially when being leaned on. The overhead ceiling is a distant dark blue glow, while the floor is utterly jet black, lending the feeling like walking over an abyss. Adding to the soft lighting are holograms of native marine fauna with their own bioluminescence swimming in and among the coral as if living there--which perhaps they do. Microscopic motes of light also fill the air, swept around by nearby motion in a manner more resembling a fluid medium.

The convoluted design of the space might make it hard to navigate, but there are ways to find the lift tubes back to the hub which any regular will happily tell. Notably, small yellow fishes of a color not natively seen in these seas dart about, and it doesn’t take long to notice they always swim in ways that lead one towards the exits.

= The Line =

The Line is several things: an engineering project, a safety measure, a series of environmental monitors, and a network for fast travel across the planet.

When [[Nikolai|Lai]] came up with the entire idea, he realized there was a potential problem with the way he wanted it set up. Gravitics on a small scale are fairly safe in a planetary environment, but while weak planetary-scale gravitics are still used on Halcyon to create the tides, strong fields the size of a small spacecraft continually skimming the surface in an infinite loop might be more hazardous. So the Line was conceived, first as a series of buoys scattered along the path of travel for the club, in order to stabilize the area against its passing through.

The buoys collectively also extend a field between themselves to create a low-power cruise lane the club can travel along, with parameters adjusted to be safe for even the smallest forms of life. The practical application of this is that no marine life near the buoys are especially affected by the passage of Superfluid--anything or anyone in the direct path is slipped safely to one side or the other of the Line itself. This has even led many playful sapients to invent entire games around the slight speed boost one gets from moving back and forth over it.

The pods of the Line are anchored in place with long cables running all the way down to the ocean floor, however deep it might be. In many places around the globe, the floor is shallow enough that the lower parts of the cable house an artificial coral reef to encourage localized growth of flora and fauna.

Due to the nature of the gravitic field bubble surrounding the club, and the speeds at which the club travels, it’s entirely impossible to embark and disembark from it as one would a normal seagoing vessel. Thus, the teleport system was established as the way to join the club--and as a side effect, operates as a fast-travel hub as well. Portals are safely housed in the surface-level portion of the pods, as well as docking for air, sea, and undersea craft. The teleport itself, however, is on a smaller scale, not meant for vehicles or cargo, but for more personal use. From the hub, of course, one can reach any other portal--not just ones the club is traveling near.

Communications

2018-10-18T04:02:38Z

Emanate: /* Mailing Lists */

Please keep in mind that the following list represent an extremely limited list of publicly available resources for people. There are a great many more places where communications are happening, many private, some semi-public. Once you've established contact with people, you may be invited to other communications groups beyond what are listed here. If they're not listed here, that's for a reason. Please respect that.

== Chat Services ==
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! Name !! Purpose !! Guidelines !! Local Admin(s)
|-
| [http://discord.postfurry.net/ The Postfurry Embassy on Discord] || Open-access Discord Chat [[The_Postfurry_Embassy|(more info)]] || [https://postfurry.net/conduct Postfurry Worlds Code of Conduct] || Xurnami
|-
| [https://t.me/postfurryembassy The Postfurry Embassy on Telegram] || Open-access Telegram Chat [[The_Postfurry_Embassy|(more info)]] || [https://postfurry.net/conduct Postfurry Worlds Code of Conduct] || Xurnami
|-
| [[Postfurry MUCK]] || In-character socialization and roleplay (application required) || [https://postfurry.net/conduct Postfurry Worlds Code of Conduct] || [[User:Indi|Indi]]
|-
| [https://postfurry.slack.com/ Postfurry Slack] || Diverse discussion topics (semi-private) || TBD || Zander
|}

== Telegram Groups ==
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! Name !! Purpose !! Guidelines !! Local Admin(s)
|-
| [https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAECYkQ4PxDPebVTtdQ Station β Foyer] || Public meeting space for members and regulars at [[Station_Beta|Station β]] || This is a public channel about a private residence and its occupants; keep that in mind. || [[User:Buni|th' buni]], [[User:ElectricKeet|Electric Keet]]
|-
| [https://t.me/blazewingeyrie Blazewing Eyrie Landing] || Public meeting space for members and regulars at [[Blazewing Eyrie]] || This is a public channel about a private residence and its occupants; keep that in mind. || Elanna
|-
| [https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAEFE1nu0m7anLzSduA Hydroponics Bay Δ9] || Public discussion space for cannabinoids in the postfurry community. Strains, shops, experiences. || Don't harsh anybody else's buzz. There's no wrong way to eat a Reese's. Puff-puff-pass. Strong rules statement TBD. || [[User:Buni|th' buni]]
|-
| [https://t.me/joinchat/BVOly0ic3kq2MeTRhBoxvQ Seattle Postfurries] || Public chat for coordinating local-to-Seattle events and chatter. || Be nice to each other! || [[User:Buni|emanate]]
|}

== Mailing Lists ==
* [https://groups.io/g/postfurry-gamenights postfurry-gamenights] - Coordination list for boardgame nights for the Seattle postfurry crowd
* [https://stationbeta.groups.io/g/social Station Beta (social)] - List for various social events at [[Station Beta|Transliminal Station Beta]], a Seattle postfurry house.
* [https://groups.io/g/blazewing-conflux/ blazewing-conflux] - Announcement list for seasonal spiritual observances at [[Blazewing Eyrie]]
* [https://groups.io/g/SeattlePostfurryConcerts SeattlePostfurryConcerts] - Keep track of various live music events, and add new ones you'd like to attend with others!