Strangewarp
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Strangewarp Library Interfictional Documentation Exosphere [SLIDE]
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*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.
Level 1 - Lore, and rumors of Lore
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Written by members of the Postfurry Discord
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?"
Level 2 - Strangewarp Post-Fracture Oral History
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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.
“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."
Level 3 - Library Explorer's Log
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(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 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?
Level 4 - Oral History - Recovered Audio
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(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.)
“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...”
“...was the Word...” “...was a Word...” “...was language...”
“...and the Word was...” “...and the Word is...” “...and the Word forever will be...”
“...with God...” “...within God...” “...contained all of God...”
“...and the Word...” “...as too the Word...” “...so too the Word...”
“...was God.” “...was a God.” “...was itself God.”
“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
Level 5 - The Truth
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Strange moved on from its Goth Cronenberg horror phase, and decided to diversify.
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. 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 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 The Archives.
