Twilight uses the Perseverance of Insight 57%
“Anything I should know before I try this thing, Node?” Twilight said, hesitating on the edge of the chair. But after considering her options, there was really no way around it. Node’s loyalties were still questionable, and Rainbow Dash just didn’t have the mental fortitude to withstand the effects of an alien device. That left her.
Node shrugged one plastic shoulder. It was a convincing imitation of something Twilight might’ve done. “You will have seen more of my creators once you use that machine. It is likely they anticipated similar mental patterns, or else there would have been no reason to construct it. I do not know how correct they were in their estimates. But I am certain they were wise.”
“How do you know that?” Rainbow spun her rifle around on her shoulder, but didn’t draw it. It was a twitch, something she did when she was uncomfortable but didn’t have any way of fixing things. “I don’t mean to be a jerk, but it seems like they’re all gone. How wise is that?”
Twilight ignored them both. It was clear she wouldn’t be getting any “wisdom” of her own from Node. It was time to use this thing, before she second-guessed herself and changed her mind. Twilight hopped up the uneven steps, then settled her back against the cold metal seat.
It responded instantly as it had the last time, opening in several mechanical sections. Clasps reached out for her on all sides, holding her still. They ended in firm rubber grippers, strong enough to keep her from moving but not actually cause harm.
Rainbow Dash jolted, raising her gun at once and pointing it at the back of the huge chair. “Say you want me to get you out of there, captain, and I’ll do it!”
Something metallic was lifting towards the back of her head, something that sparked and clicked. Twilight twitched and squirmed, and very nearly asked Rainbow Dash to let her go. But no, she’d made up her mind. She was going to go through with this. The Signalers would share their truths with her.
“No,” she said, her voice tense. “Stay back, Rainbow, no matter what. If you pull me out before it… finishes. It might kill me. We have to trust them.”
“If you say so,” Rainbow sat back on her haunches, though the gun was still within reach. “If I see anything even remotely fishy, I call Fluttershy. And node will help me, won’t she?”
“Uh… I will help you,” Node repeated. “She? I’m not organic.”
But Twilight missed out on whatever explanation Rainbow decided to give to that particular question. Something pressed against her skull, and there was a surge of pain. Her whole body twitched and spasmed, from every muscle. Her vision went foggy, and she was falling, even though she never left her chair.
Is Twilight’s mind swallowed forever by the Conflux? Critical no.
Does Twilight retain her memories of what she sees? Yes.
Twilight drifted forever through a sightless void. She had no body, no breath, yet somehow she could feel herself moving. She moved back until she floated high above a world.
Words whispered in her ears, their volume deafening in her sensory deprivation. They spoke alien tongues, confusing her so much that she couldn’t think. They were trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t understand what it was.
She didn’t recognize the place, or the creatures living there. But she didn’t have to know what they were to know they were intelligent. Time blurred past, and she saw wooden huts turn into stone cities, launching little rockets into orbit before filling the sky with satellites. Her vision expanded, and she saw the alien creatures do exactly what Equestria had done, filling their home system with stations and domes and orbiting habitats. They sent out ships, grew wiser and more powerful, and she found herself seeing pony existence in the aliens. Their bodies were strange, but what she saw them do was not.
Then she saw something come, a ripple through space that crossed the system in a single moment. It left only dead matter behind—stations floating empty, lights slowly going out.
But something was moving ahead of the darkness—a ship that began to accelerate in the void. As it traveled it grew, swallowing asteroids and capturing the interstellar debris along its path until it was a fleet of billions. It grew faster as it advanced, approaching that invisible threshold that would distort its perception of time.
But that was not what she was being shown. The Genesis fleet passed from one system to another, capturing what matter it could and often leaving little pieces of itself behind. On each world they reached something grew, passing rapidly from tribal primitives to a civilization of their own.
But every time, the hunger eventually came. Systems full of life went silent and dead, brown husks. Some had whole fleets of ships ready for the hungering darkness. Others sheltered in deep ravines. All died.
But while some images made sense to her, the vision passed in front of her so quickly that so much else she saw was lost on her. The Genesis Fleet wasn’t just trying to create, it was searching for something. It had a destination in mind, why couldn’t she understand it?
The voices were still screaming at her, they hadn’t stopped after all that time. It seemed like she’d finally been there long enough for their shouts to resolve into words. “Be the ending,” said the voice. “Or if you aren’t, reach us. Before the void finds you.”
Twilight sat suddenly upright, hacking and coughing. The fur on her head was steaming, and her whole body felt like it might catch fire at any moment. But she wasn’t dead, that was the important thing. “I’m gonna…” she leaned forward, and the chair released her. She dropped to the ground at Rainbow’s hooves a second later.
This time, the blackness that found her was a welcome relief.
Oh thank goodness for those rolls!
Okeey, Cozy was partaly right.
Hmm we went full prothean beacon here ^^;;;
It's interesting how this sheds some light on some of the more unusual options in the past. I feel we just got a lot to think about.
All my joy is in this one statement.
Critical No!
Right, so there's an all-consuming wave of You Are Dead approaching, and it quite possibly has already consumed Equestria.
Oh boy.
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So...Reapers then, only this time its a progressive wave of life and death without end.
Well this worked out in the end, and got us solid information, I still don’t think that it was worth the risk. In the discord, star scribe even mentioned just how freaking high the chance of death was there after the fact, and it was way more than we have any right to be comfortable with, and there is a solid chance that either AB or Sunset could have given almost all the same relevant information
Well, it looks like there's a wave of death spreading across the galaxy. That explains so much. So the question now is: what do they do now?
Well then, here we go.
*Exhales deeply. And the some more.*
Found a typo:
Should be uppercase.
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Seems that way.
Now they must either flee or try to fight back; optionally combined with trying to warn Equestria, if it still exists.
After seeing that, I think we need to wake up Sunset to see what she knows, maybe she was sent here ahead of the wave or something?
You know, for all that we've been joking about Twilight's luck, she sure came through in the clutch.
I'm glad I was wrong about this being a destructive-upload deathtrap. (Though I don't think I was too far off, given what's being said about the odds she faced.) And hey, now we know what they were so scared of that they put a black-hole generator in the building. The proverbial gun with one bullet.
We got insanely lucky with those rolls! So many things could have gone wrong but they didn't, thank the Gods.
This is worrying however. This 'Void' doesn't seem to be willing to negotiate at all, much less have the capacity to do so. Me thinks we'd best prepare for it in any way possible.
Signalers were attempting to reach intelligent species to save them.
Calling it now.
Oh thank GOODNESS that all succeeded!!! I have a feeling Twilight's odds were much higher than Rainbow Dash's, and now that it was successful, I'm glad Twilight has it; Node probably wouldn't be great at sharing all that information, although perhaps it would have processed it better, being a computer downloading computerized information. I'm happy it worked out, and now we know some very important missing details about the threat! They need to stop whatever the Void is, or if they can't, find the Signalers in their place of refuge (if I understand that part right). I wonder what they were searching for? Something the ponies have, perhaps?
Great plot twist, can't wait to see what happens next!
Oh boy... I don't think Equestria is screwed (because it would've hit the Equinox too), but if it isn't stopped here...
Here’s a possibility. You can create a machine that is not alive in any form, but contains enough matter to recreate life. Since Death seems to leave machines intact, keeping a digital copy of an ecosystem’s worth of DNA, and then, bring back the sapients so they can reterraform the nearby planet.
So if this death wave is just that, a wave, then it’s possible the wave already passed through Equestria and this system. So ponies are the product of such work.
Oh good, now we get to speculate on whether the void is really just the inevitable overtaking life in the vastness of time and space (you know, heat death of the universe, all matter eventually being sucked back into a singularity as black holes reverse the big bang, or some such plot...), or if it's actually a sapience in it's own right with it's own agenda that is not necessarily favourable to life as the ponies know it. Knowing our luck it will more likely be the latter. If so the question becomes will Twilight try to teach it friendship?
Looking forward to the next post...
I wonder if everything already has been solved. I mean, they might be the usual bearers, but maybe the wave already has been defeated. Or maybe equestria already has been engulfed, and they survived... Somehow.
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Unless hibernating doesn't count as alive?
So I finally caught up with the story, and it's no poll chapter...
Ooohhh. Graduated. I get it now. So no more bad rolls from Purple Smart, right?
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And wouldn't ya know every pony we've found so far is a filly or a mare. Guess ponies are fast-tracked for extinction.
Unless Spike decides to make some pony-dragon hybrids.
Well, we got lucky.
Crayak, is that you? Elimist has some choice words for you...
Well, that's some information, but not enough pertinent. How does one starve hunger?
Well. Everything went better than expected. And it's clear what the message means: If you can't find a way to stop or endure the Void, find a way to join us before it's too late.
Now to see how horribly the revival attempts went...
I saw that "critical no" before I read up to it and panicked thinking it meant a nat 1 got rolled.
Could we be seeing the beginning of Sanctuary?
Finally found it. Now here's a throwback to Chapter 30.
So, for what it's worth, it sounds like the death chance was not as huge as I and probably some others thought it was. It was actually 30%, which yeah is still not tiny, but it wasn't as drastic a bad as some may have thought.
Also it wouldn't have been full blown death but more of a 'brain in limbo' sort of thing that she could have poooosssibly been retrieved from.
Part of me was thinking we might have a false vacuum scenario. Problem with that is that a false vacuum would expand at the speed of light, I think, so unless the Genesis fleet can go faster than light, there's no way they would be able to outrun it. Even if they could, they shouldn't be able to realize that it exists, cause, you know, speed of light. Though, if you have FTL travel, you probably have FTL communications, and if you have that, FTL sensors might not be that far-fetched.
Oh hell, I really hope this isn't a false vacuum, because I'm not sure there's anything they could do besides flee the universe entirely at that point.
Thank you dice for having mercy upon us this day.
Wow, space is unfriendly.
I'm curious about how the story would be supposed to proceed if we'd failed this roll.
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Even without sensors or communications just ftl travel would be enough. The absence of ships returning and worlds loosing trade to other worlds would signal that something is coming.
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Also it wouldn't leave a universe behind as such a event would effectively destroy the universe. I think we have a race that effectively made and used a weapon too wipe out all other life not like it.
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We would swap perspective characters. To Spike first, then the other ponies in turn as they die. So long as one member of the crew survives, the mission can continue.
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I was more thinking along the lines of hoping multiverse theory is true in this universe and hoping a false vacuum wouldn't affect connected universes.
(Well that's a bit of a mouthful, but whatever.)
Well... that could definitely have gone worse.
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Oh I got that just the fact the stars and planets are still there indicate that it's not a false vacuum as that would leave no "there" to show Twilight or well anything that sat in the chair and as you stated there's no stopping a false vacuum event as it's a change of that universe's base energy rest state and all the laws of physics in it. They would have left the "gate" to leave at the site or the blueprints to make it. The facts we have now point to the weapon idea as that could be stopped.
Well that turned out better then a feared.
Hopefully Twilight will be able to understand more of what she was told from the beginning as time goes on.
Interesting. So this hunger stripped this planet bare of all its organic material... Except here. And something below ground has Hunger as it's main part of its identity. So does this mean that a chunk of the end of the universe is in this planet? I thought it might be a mutated Chrysalis.
But now we have a bigger puzzle here. Was the heart left behind to contain this beast or left here to draw attention to this location? Because now that I think about it, the Heart is probably why life is growing here in the first place.
wait, so when are they gonna thaw out Applebloom and Sunset?