Strangewarp sandbox

Lore, and rumors of Lore

I heard that in Strangewarp your reflection in the mirror blinks before you do.

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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

Strangewarp: an oral history

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.

“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."

The Library

What has been found of Strangewarp so far is a vast, impossible non-Euclidean Library.

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 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 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.