Open Broadcast || Jaunt

[fighterpaladin]

... So that's how it works.

[Still weird. But hey, could be worse.

Could always be worse.]

What now?

[Because his Arcana basically told him to ~be himself~ and well, he couldn't not do that even if he tried, right?]

Comments

[leftbehindagain]

It's stuff that pings with their archetypes, most likely. ['Control' may be too strong a term, but they certainly have stakes in these worlds regardless.]

Fortune's one of the Arcana. She won the whole game the last time they did this, so she got to set the rules for this time. Death and Hermit had a match... just over a year ago, I think, and they both managed to win - they wanted two different things to happen, and they both did. The person who made the rules absolutely knows where the back doors and shortcuts are. I just don't know if she's using them.

They're looking for people who ping their archetypes. We're more than just those archetypes, so whether we always agree is an open question.

Isn't what weird?

[fighterpaladin]

So the power balance of this entire world is really just a game to them...? [Honestly, he would understand 'control' or 'power' better, as reasons.

And wait-- Wait, wait, wait.]

... So the Arcana who wins gets to set the rules for the next game? [His eyebrow rises.] So when does the game end? [Is Mortimer the only one interested in ending it?] And how can someone who made the rules be playing, too?! [Isn't that cheating? Man, the more he tries to understand what's going on here, the less sense it all makes.]

That they mark us to begin with. Even if we... 'ping their archetypes' or whatever, what's the point of marking us if that doesn't have any influence, if we can just do what we want in the end? [Like she said, right?] They could have just brought us here and let us do whatever. [Which feels, right now, like it's exactly what's happening: what Naoki says happens, anyway. If in the end they, as a group (or not) decide what they want to do and if the Arcana can't make them do anything... why are they marked by one to begin with?]

What did you mean earlier about how half of them have been knocked out of the competition by this point? Half of the Arcana already lost?

[leftbehindagain]

I think it's less that this is the game and more that it's the board this part of the greater game is being played on. It's complicated, and they're not very big on direct answers. The game ends when there's only one of them who hasn't lost anything, and at least so far, the winner's decided to start it up again, for one reason or another.

[Well, Tower was probably into the idea of stopping the Arcana's game for good, but even if Naoki doesn't approve of their murder, he wouldn't have wanted to see that end play out. A universe founded on archetypal chaos and disaster would not be pretty.]

We know the marks keep us connected to Liminal Space. That's not an aspect of all this that I've really dug into, though. Thorne-san might know - I think she's at least been part of some discussions about it after the fact, with people who did ask.

Since they started going head-to-head, we've only had to deal with two of them at a time. Even before that, more than two showing up on any given jaunt was... kind of a big deal.