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28 July 2010

Posts #536-540: 23 April 2000

Post #536, by Falcon24

Falcon let out an ear-shattering laugh. "You fool! I'm not using the power of the Sanctuaries! i'm using the power of the Earth!!!" With that, Falcon raised a hand, and a large bolt of lightning came forth, soaring straight toward's Dr. Andonut's Sound Stone.
Okay: Two sentences plus a third for his scornful laughter.

Note how he doesn't go right on ahead and break said Sound Stone, but leaves the door open for Dr. A to handwave his attack away. Note also the brevity of this post, especially by Falcon24's standards; this is not a serious post. It's just an "I don't think so, kiddo."



Post #537, by Foppy King

Suddenly, the Foppy King teleported to Nathan. "Hi!"
"Hello,"
"I have what you need."
"You do?"
"Yes"
"May I have it?"
"On one condition."
"What?"
" PLEEAASSE let me join you!"
"Well..."
(Falcon's lightning flew towards the Sound stone)
"Watch out!" cried the Foppy King. He leaped into the air and took the lightning attack. 500 damage to the Foppy King...
Apparently talking really is a free action. He seems to have stopped time to have this brief conversation with Nathan between the time the lightning left Falcon24's hand and the time it arrived at Nathan's Sound Stone.

Even though There Are No Girls on the Internet, you could easily have convinced me Foppy King was an emo girl, what with his desperation for attention and attempt to guilt trip Dr. A into showing attention for him. (See, I took a hit for your AC, so are you really so coldhearted as to leave me to die now? Huh?)
[This message has been edited by Foppy King (edited 04-23-2000).]

Post #538, by EBPoo

After landing the Skyrunner II on the Monotoli Building in Fourside, Poo set off to find Falcon. Now, where would I be if I was him? Poo asked himself. So Poo decided to go to the Magnet Hill Sanctuary location, only to find it in ruins. "My guess is...Falcon's been through here."
EBPoo is ignoring Tengu's edict that the Sanctuaries regenerate more or less instantly. Well, I say ignoring; most likely EBPoo never read Tengu's post in question, or any of Tengu's posts. They're kind of long.
Looking to a corner, Poo saw a giant rat. Communicating with it psychically, Poo could understand it. [SQUEAK! That bird-like figure trashed this place with his...what was it called? Oh right, Sound Sapper. He said something about heading off to Dalaam.] "Thanks for your help, rat. Well, looks like I can't do anything here. So off to Dalaam I go." Boarding the Skyrunner II once again, Poo set its navigator to Dalaam, his homeland. "Hopefully Falc hasn't messed it up too much," Poo said to himself in fear.
Now there's a rare thing, a flying unicorn of IF if you will: an AC confronts a random monster--one that was actually a boss in EarthBound at that--and instead of vaporizing it, asks it for help. Which the monster, relieved beyond measure to not be getting launched into the Sun for once, is only too happy to give.



Post #539, by Godeg

Hours later, Mike recovered.
If he were Foppy King, this post would have come only after posting (COME ON! MY AC IS UNCONSCIOUS AND HELPLESS!!!! PLEASE SOMEONE COME AND HELP ME!!! I SWEAR I'LL LEAVE IF YOU DON'T!!11) Well, yeah, with more misspellings. But yeah.
"Oof... that hurt. I wonder what i should do now..." At that moment, Mike's communicator went off.

"Sir, Sir! Are you alright?!" It was the Denterion.

"Yeah, im fine. My walker is busted up though. That was pretty crazy. Beam me up. I need to get some stuff." Mike replied. Mike expected to be beamed up to the Denterion, but that didn't happen.

"Sir, it appears as if our ship-bound teleporters are not working. We can teleport you to anywhere on the planet though..." Ops blandly replied.
Of course they can. Thus my prophecy of the mech's loss having no real effect on Mike at all comes to pass. Believe in the truth of Baron von Awesome, IF Seer!
"Carp!!! What else could go wrong?! Can't you send me down some supplies? Like food or a weapon?" Mike asked. In a flash of light, Mike noticed that a Pulse rifle and a peanut cheese bar were beamed down from the ship. "Sweet. Thanks guys. Now, hook me up with pink cloud again. I'm gonna go try to lay the smack down."

"Very well, sir. As you wish." the Denterion also added: " Remember, we're here for you if you need any support." Mike was teleported back to pink cloud.
Thus the invincible good guy goes off to do battle against the invincible bad guy. It's like playing multiplayer Goldeneye with Invincible turned on for all players. Try it sometime, and notice the total absence of tension. Notice also how quickly you get bored.*

That's really where IF as a concept fails: To make it work, to give the story real tension, you need a good writer to play the Big Bad who is willing, in the end, to lose. And then you also need several good writers to play Good Guys who are willing, long before the story ends, to die. That never happens, and that's why you get no tension.

Don't worry about the Gathering, though; there will be tension galore, soon. No, not in the form of any good-versus-evil fighting, of course. But there will be lots of obvious tension between the various writers. Not their AC's; the writers themselves. It's going to be fun!

* Invincible doesn't actually work in Goldeneye's multiplayer, but theoretically you could Gameshark it. Or just use your damn imagination.



Post #540, by SirMontyG

"A shield killer? Where'd you get that??" Sir questions in the heat of battle

"I had it!" A quite voice said. It was Foppy King.
Aww. It's too Foppy King already jumped in elsewhere. I have a feeling Major Asshole is about to teach him to be careful what he wishes for.
"There'l be time to tell you how cool you are later: Just use it!" Said Sir (He had locked on to the Starman's weak spot, his control panel on his chest, minutes ago, and was getting ainxious to use it. BTW, the lightweight bazooka dosen't have Site to air missles. That's just nutty.)
Major Asshole ridicules Foppy King for trying to act cool, and then spends the next three sentences trying to act cool. Smooth.

Also: It's Surface-to-Air, dumbass.
Foppy King used the shield killer! The protective orb dissapated the second Sir fired. *WHHAAAMMMM!!* the Starman suffered a direct blow.

"A few more of those and this guy's scrap metal!" Sir quicly reloaded and prepared to fire again...
Yeah, I know. These tension-free battle scenes just drag on forever. This is because
(a) Teenage boys like violence, and
(b) They're not so keen on, or good at, advancing a plot in any kind of coherent matter. So this is mostly the stuff they do.

Posts #531-535: 23 April 2000

Post #531, by pogopunk

screaming, pogopunk ran from the evil shape coming from the ceiling. "aieeeeeeee!"

"stop screaming you ninny," it said, "anyway, falcon's destroyed this sanctuary, so my work here is done..now on to another sanctuary..mwehehe" snickering to itself, the figure melted away, off to wreak more havoc.
No, I don't recall ever hearing about any evil entities from the ceiling, either.
"oh craps! this place is falling apart!" pogopunk said, to no one in particular, since ice had vanished.
That's refreshing honesty, isn't it? He's acknowledging no one is listening to him.
"ugh, i'm getting outta here!" teleporting out of the cave of pink cloud, he appeared near a dalaamese shop. after munching on a bowl of rice gruel, he debated what to do next. he could try and stop falcon24, but he knew some other group would take him.
Translation: Oh wow, I just realized how boring this whole trying to oppose Falcon24 thing is.
[stinks, i'm stuck in a cell, those spoony happy-happyists] luna sent out. [anyway, someone help me, i hate it here]
I know I said this already, but it's funny the way teenagers were dreaming of cell phones before the technology to make it happen finally got there. Good thing the technology took its time; I don't think I could have tolerated a Gathering where everyone is txtn each other.
perking up his ears (even though that doesnt really help receive psychic calls) pogopunk sent out a message of his own.

[ok luna, i'm gonna come and help you bust outta there. it wont be pretty, so sit tight]

[yeah yeah, just hurry up. i'm feeling claustrophobic, plus it smells in here!] she said.

and so paying for his meal, pogopunk teleported off to the mountain cabin to free luna. arriving there, and batting a couple of spiteful crows out of his face, he entered the cabin. "phew! it does smell in here! geez, those happy-happyists are reallly in need of a shower or something," he said, covering his nose up. "ok, lemme try and bash it down with my pogostick." rearing back his stick, he took a deep breath and smaaaashed the bars. a loud metallic ring reverberated through the mountains, and pogopunk found his shiny new stick with a dent in it.

"silly pogo, you didnt do anything. sigh, do i have to do everything myself?" taking a hair clip, she bent over and picked the lock. "there, all better."
The bending over was the important part.
dumbstruck, pogopunk mumbled, "umm, well, er, good job, lets get going!"

luna and pogopunk made their way out, but were stopped by a small group of happy-happyists. "blue blue, loud ring you made, blue blue, not nice, blue blue, suffer!"

"so, what do you suppose we do know, luna?"
Talk about IF-as-fantasy-fulfillment. For the not EarthBound initiated among you, pogopunk just re-enacted every teenage boy's very favorite scene from EarthBound, the one where you rescue the pretty girl who's being held captive in a jail cell. (Yeah, deep down, it was mine, too. Teenage boys are predictable that way.) Except, of course, he put Luna in there instead of Paula. You might wonder what the hell that was all about seeing as how Luna effortlessly let herself out of the cell. It's because she was waiting for someone as dreamy as pogopunk to come and rescue her. Duh.



Post #532, by Godeg
Give Godeg credit. He's already hung around longer than I expected he would.
Mike arrives at pink cloud just in time to see Falcon24 hurl a large chunk of rock. Without hesitating, Mike powered up his weapon systems and fired upon the rock, saving the group that the rock was originally intended for.
How exactly does Mike know that Falcon24 isn't the hero, just about to save the world from certain doom by crushing the group of nefarious villains beneath said rock?

Well, yeah, I know he's Falcon24. But 'Mike' doesn't know that, cool mech thing be damned.
"Hrm... this looks bad. Maybe i should have just turned around when i had the chance" Mike thought. Mike sees Falcon24 turn around, directing has hand toward Mike's battle walker. "Oh carp. I'm screwed." Mike realized that he was in trouble.
The Department of Redundancy Department approves of those last two sentences.
Chunks of rocks started flying at Mike's walker from all directions, and the walker was destroyed. The resulting explosion launched Mike from pink cloud out into the Peaceful Rest Valley area, leaving him unconscious.
Though the mech was cool, you'll see (assuming Godeg continues posting) that it made no effective difference whatsoever on his AC, who will continue teleporting around and generally being invincible as normal.



Post #533, by Foppy King

(Ok please respond to me. Anybody. Do you now how boring it is to be ignored. PLEASE? I will join anyone. ANYONE.)
There's something almost charming about his raw pleas for attention. You're thinking, 'yeah, no doubt this kid killed himself eight or nine years ago,' but you'd be wrong. He's still around SM.Net now and again.

The cry for attention thing on its own isn't that big a deal. What's annoying is how damn lazy this kid is. This is four or five times now he's posted nothing except 'PLZ TO PAY ATTENSHUN TO ME?'. Zero content. It's not like it takes much effort to just write yourself into somebody's group, and they won't pay any active attention to you, sure, but they'll probably attach your name somewhere in their next post. But that's too much work for our friend Foppy King.



Post #534, by PajamaManV4M

Well.. I have about ten minutes. So I'll make this one quick.
Thank God.
PajamaMan was in trouble.
Any way we can skip past the 'trouble' part and move straight to the funeral? Or burial, even better.
No one had responded to his call for help.
Well, color me shocked. Shocked!
How would he be able to get through Deep Darkness with a bunch of mean baddies hiding in the swamp? He was scared of the swamp. He didn't know what enemies lurked below, and he felt like a huge serpant would arise and swallow him whole. And what worried him the most was that he kept getting a vision of a large, pink cloud getting the energy sucked out of it. All seemed grimy.
Where the hell did 'grimy' come from? SimCity 2000's random adjective generator?
Then, from the sky, he could see a small thing headed this way.
"Great! More trouble!"

It came down faster than he thought, and soon landed it's feet on the ground. It looked like a Flying Man, only the fact that his head was bright green and the rest of his body was dark green.

"Hi. I'm Zakk. You can call me Flying Man 6."
"Wh-who are you?"
"Zakk. I'm going to join your party."
Like hell you are. You're only allowed one AC in this story, son.

No, really, as with SuperSpeedy and whoever else, I presume he'll get away with working an AC, since PSI322 isn't reading his posts, and neither is anyone else. As long as he steers clear of Tengu Man no one will ever notice.



Post #535, by Dr. Andonuts

Nathan decided to teleport back to Pink Cloud and see what was happening. He hit a button on his laptop and appeared just in time to see Mike get hit. "Thats got to hurt," he thought.
That was quite unnecessary. "That was a totally irrelevant and redundant piece of dialogue," thought the reader.
Seeing that Falcon was using the energies of the Sanuary locations he took out his Sound Stone and used it counter Falcon's earth energies. Nathan then sent out a quick psyic call. [Anyone with a sanuary melody send half of their sound stone to Pink Cloud, quickly. We need the melodies to netualize Falcon's use of them.]
Oh, come on. Even ignoring the ridiculous number of spelling errors, this reads like an experiment to find the most weak-ass effort at opposing Falcon24 theoretically possible. I'll be shocked if Falcon24 uses more than two sentences on disregarding it, and doubly shocked if anyone besides Dr. A ever mentions it again.

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