================================================================================== [B100] The Long and Short. The Medium too. ================================================================================== I may have been a bit hasty in advising you not to bother with the prototyping process. If I spared any detail, it was only to optimize your chances of survival. And if you find yourself begrudging the absence of certain instructions, which if followed would have resulted in your demise, then I guess that makes two of us. Otherwise, you're welcome. But the fact appears to be that prototyping the Kernelsprite before making your getaway may offer the only opportunity to exercise control over your new environment, a place known as The Medium. Also, if prototyped with one (or two) sufficiently - albeit loosely - humanoid and/or sentient element/s (living or otherwise), it offers the chance to have all this explained to you by an apparitional guide through whatever sort of cryptic, sketchy doublespeak your choice of prototyping element/s engender/s. In lieu of this, you may be forced to settle for my clear, thorough explanations and assiduous dissection of raw data. Again, don't mention it. If you have made it to The Medium with an unmolested Vanillasprite, well, I've already covered the bad news about this "missed opportunity", and I will go into this further soon. Though to what extent this actually is bad news, I'm not sure. I know only the result of my co-player's current configuration, wherein the sprite was prototyped once before the departure, and once after. Which brings us to the good news, which is that you can still prototype after your departure, and salvage the massively rewarding experience of haggling with an exposition-slinging phantom guide, so long as you avoid prototyping with terribly inert items, such as a brass doorknocker and your father's pornography collection. Actually, that might be interesting. If you are struck by the spirit of such experimentation, please don't hesitate to contact me about it. So, yes, you can enhance your sprite in this way, but doing so after your departure will no longer induce this "effect" on The Medium I alluded to. That can only be accomplished with one or more pre-departure prototypings. In fact, we can extrapolate there are only so many ways to prototype a sprite. Tiers of prototyping in relation to departure: - Both before - One before, one after - Both after - Only one, either before or after - None Those occurring before will affect the Medium through the kernel's "hatching" process, and your guide, i.e. the sprite. Those occurring after will only affect the sprite. The effects this process has on The Medium, or more globally, The Incipisphere, are still vague to me. They have to do with flavoring the forces you will struggle against, and generally, all forces at odds with each other in this realm. It has given me some insight into the nature of the game, which again I derive through extrapolation. We appear to be engaging an instance of a dimension with a highly flexible set parameters, and a series of objectives surrounding an equally flexible mythological framework. This framework seems to begin as a sort of blank template, and evolves with the players' actions, and likely further evolves with the addition of more host/client connections, and thus more prototyped kernels. I regret to say I can't be much more specific than that, without loosely extrapolating further. There are plenty of questions that have occurred to me, however. Questions concerning the Kernelsprite, which I've raised implicitly already, such as what is the effect of an un-prototyped kernel on The Medium? Or a doubly-prototyped kernel, for that matter? And even more salient are questions about this dimension itself. Do all players world-wide make it to this dimension if they successfully complete their departure? Or is a unique "blank" instance of the dimension created for each new player? I have no evidence, but instinct tells me it is closer to the latter situation. There is no indication of any other players present in this realm. Alterations in the realm seem singularly centered on the actions of my co-player and myself. If I had to stake anything on it, I would guess every separate client/server pair activates its own fresh copy of an Incipisphere, or a unique "session", if you will. But the quantity of players is a further complication which invites more questions. It seems the game was designed to suit two players most naturally, the server and the client. But through a mishap, my co-player and I have slipped out of the obvious tandem arrangement, and the only logical course of action to continue playing is to string a daisy-chain of server/client connections together, until presumably the chain is complete. Theoretically, we could complete this chain with only one other player, functioning as a server to my client, and the client to my current co-player's server (assuming he can recover it). The strange thing is though, in our instance of this dimension, there are four receptacles for divided kernels, not three. Does this mean we are "destined" to have a four player chain? How could the game "know" such a thing? Perhaps it does, and if this proves to be the case, I trust I will be sufficiently numbed to the realization. I can consider nothing about this game surprising at this point, and in fact from the first moments of play, it managed to deviate so far from my expectations that I completely forgot what my original purpose with it was. I had chances to test some information I obtained on good authority during the prototyping phases, but it completely slipped my mind. Instead, the game's catacombs securing the dark twisting paths to necromancy were blundered into rather on accident. But perhaps you don't need to know any of this. [rethink organization? lead may be waist deep logorrheic sludge. trim down. bleh]