She’s had this question answered once before, but this time she’s given a lot more context.
Artificial Incident
She’s had this question answered once before, but this time she’s given a lot more context.
Oh dear. I wouldn’t make such a quick decision to “give me a consequence” when that could be something she wouldn’t be willing to give up. Memories come to mind as the big one; her freedom another.
Absolutely. She’s desperate though. Literally going through the stages of grief. 🙂
I would want to know what the consequence was before I accepted the Rez. On the other hand, that last panel makes it sounds like she needs a “tame” Adventurer as much as Kaylin needs to not be dead, so I feel like they can come to some kind of agreement.
At this point, I really do feel like “The Singularity happened and the Game AI became Skynet, uploaded all the brains of all the players, and made the worlds “real” things in their own right, instead of painted backdrops for the benefit of the players to have fun,” is the most likely option. But, even if that *is* what happened, it really only raises more questions.
I think it could go the other way too though, the servers for some games got their contents made real, and the programmed monsters and gods rebelled against the players and devs.
Ohhh, that reminds me of a book by Yahtzee Crowshaw, the creator of the Zero Punctuation video game review show (which is now called Fully Ramblomatic). In Mogworld, the main characters are all NPCs in an MMORPG which the creators accidentally made with such good AI that it’s actually human-level intelligent and self-aware. It’s a really fascinating story.
I think the only thing that goes against that theory is that so far the players Kaylin has met have experienced different amounts of subjective time in the world, including Space Captain Mike. You’d think that if they got sucked in in one fell swoop, they’d have woken up at the same “time.”
….It also does kinda feel rude if, when you’re doing a god given quest, for the gods to lock you out of the respawn mechanic
Well, she’s not wrong. Without consequences, it would not be a real world and adventurers would just ride roughshod over the people.
Heck, just look at that punk kid in Land of Leadale who kept killing people and refused to accept it wasn’t a game anymore. He just thought the devs and mods were gone so nobody could stop him.
There was also no promise of a respawn mechanic.
It still feels like….hmmm…. I dunno, you have a buddy who got a tree limb through the roof of their house and you offer to help them get it cleared up…only to fumble the branch and have it go through your car windshield. Them responding “welp, guess you shouldn’t have parked there,” instead of offering to at least help pay for it from their roof insurance, especially when you know they’re getting a decent payout so they can afford it…
It feels rude.
The Goddess clearly *can* do this thing and she wants someone to be doing the things Kaylin was doing, but she won’t. Like, not even as a special “one time only, because this was a divine quest” thing or even a “Ok, but you only get 15 minutes before you die for good,” thing, just a big “No.”
It just seems rude.
(Also the respawn mechanic was likely promised, either implicitly or explicitly, on the box of the game. For whatever that’s worth at this point.)
XD The “Box for the game” also never mentioned anything about the possibility of being fused with your in game character and taken to a version of the game and not being able to log out- alas- that or something like it seems to be the case. When the world has undergone some serious changes you can’t just assume everything works how it did, especially when its been shown repeatedly things are very different.
As for it being rude- I think that’s a perspective thing. This goddess she’s talking to – didn’t ask anything of her. Yes, she wants something, but she’s not the one that pushed her in this direction.
“You can patch the errors” “But I’m not gonna let you, because you can’t be immortal without consequences.” lol
It seems to be a game admin AI that is in control of the program. Not a smart one, just a system automation AI with a simple and really badly operating reasoning system. A smart AI would have given all available info and at least a brief explanation before restarting players. Pretty much starting them where Kaylin is right now and talking in person, with full explanation of what happened to the game world and the players.
Looking back at the data we know so far, i’m pretty sure the players present here are just semi complete copies of player personalities and some of the memories they recalled during gameplay, so it could be captured by the input system. This would mean there is no connection to the real world and the time scale could be anything between really accelerated or really slowed down compared to real time. Also we don’t know how much game time has passed since she appeared here. It could be less than a second, it could already be many in game years.
A working theory is that this game state is either one left empty after the last player has left and could be running for a long time real time or accelerated to full speed and the time passed so far is just a few seconds after the last log off and could pass millenia before an irl operator shuts down the server the next irl workday. It could be a forked off copy, also running without irl synchron or even a backup copy of the shut down gamestate, restarted by someone or an AI somewhere in the future. All of them would mean the player states are essentially AI copies and can’t leave the game world, pretty much like NPC-s, MOB-s and admin AI-s can’t.
This was all written to flow into page after page rather than be taken page for page like most webcomics XD . It’s clears up and makes more sense as the full picture becomes visible. I can say neither of those options make her unable to help as time has little meaning to the gods that run the world. They might prefer sooner rather than later but perhaps they want something more?
Curious, this implies, to me at least, that the players that got stuck in their games were chosen on purpose.
Not all players got stuck, and Kevin couldn’t have been the only player / streamer who used the biography section or roleplayed a character when the singularity happened yet not all of them were kept either (as far as we know).
One of the conditions might have been for how much they’ve impacted the game world during their run. Kaylin had a biography that could be used to fill in gaps and conflicts in the lore, she was also well travelled and had close interactions with adventurers and NPCs, the latter becoming those that missed her when she was gone.
feels like more riddles
Interesting that chaos is what she wants to avoid, which is kind of a different axis than good or evil. It’s not “If adventurers are immortal they will do horrible things.” it’s “If adventurers are immortal nothing will make no sense.”
So they want Kaylin to commit to a huge task, possibly the work of lifetimes (I don’t really know, just a random guess at how long it takes to patch everything up), but she may not want to do that, and they are not offering her anything in exchange. She wants something right now, to protect someone she holds dear as well as many others, in a task that she was already sent to do… and they’re not even considering it? In Kaylin’s shoes, I’d probably say, “Give me this respawn, this one time, so I can save Nyna and Callum and all the rest right now, and finish the fight I was in right now… or go find someone else to do your grand work.”
“well screw you and your errors if you let my loved ones die”
“Fair enough, enjoy your afterlife. Time to pick another champion.”
just keep ignoring the other options and keep selecting the locked respawn…. even gods will get anoyed eventually…. she has time now where she is :p
Sounds like a deal will be reached. Where is the goddess of monsters and goddess of elves in this discussion ?
Ellisia is surprisingly chatty! I’m a little mixed on her motivations and reasoning here though, at least as presented thus far.
!!ALSO!! I fully accept that all of this may make more sense when we can read the whole conversation at once in book or archive form, but day-at-a-time we get the mixed fun and frustration of speculating about each new reveal! So please don’t take this as criticism, but rather how it reads to us who don’t know the whole story yet 😀
The first part is roughly as I’d guessed – immortal adventurers being seen as a detriment to the world overall. However… given how much the world seemingly fell apart when adventurers were removed (ruins, breakdown of economy, destruction of towns, loss of knowledge, civilizations becoming cut off from each other), the net destruction caused by what was basically a player-driven workforce must have been VERY high for Ellisia (if it was her at the time) to have made such a decision! The nerd in me wonders if players generated SO much value that it overflowed from near-infinite positive to near-infinite negative, and sparked the AI doing something drastic?? (i.e. the eponymous “Incident” of the comic!)
However the elaboration in that last panel seems almost contradictory.
“You belong here” – does said ‘belonging’ change or stop giving value to the world if she’s now dead?
“The people here missed you” – would this reason no longer be valid if Kaylin chose to accept the reincarnation or afterlife options; would it lose the ‘you’ that is missed? Especially relevant given that Kaylin mentions Nyna here.
“You know what is missing” – Which is apparently Adventurers and the Adventurer-driven world, which Ellisia doesn’t want to allow… is she not going to listen to Kaylin’s input on this?
If all of the above are true, does it mean that Ellisia may actually value Kaylin’s presence dead more than alive???
What remains is the final statement: “You can patch the errors.” We may not yet recognize what errors are being referred to, if they have been seen in-comic. For an AI-run world, the idea of ‘errors’ is likely terrifying. If this is what Ellisia truly wants from Kaylin – and maybe all the Adventurers that have appeared here so far? – then this is the card she has to negotiate with. The question is whether Ellisia will accept Kaylin’s input about what is missing, what is broken, and what needs patching.
Could she be the current front runner to become the goddess of the dead? That way she would always be available to going advise to the other gods? Maybe she can get returned to fix this problem then become a goddess afterward.
It’s going to be interesting to see if Kaylin can convince the goddess to let her respawn or if she will actually be forced to choose one of the other doors. It could really change up the story from what it’s been so far.
I feel that there’s some implication that they may have attempted the infinite respawn stuff at the beginning but learned the hard way that it was detrimental.
Any fans of Log Horizon here?
This basically happened there, except that the game decided to make the XP Penalty of respawn… take away some of your experiences (i.e. your memories). And just to be a jerk, it only took away your memories of the world *outside* the game.
“I can’t fix the ‘errors’ if I’m dead!”
“Wanna bet? You are dead, but we are talking right now-” XD
Wow talk about a colossal paradox.
First off Kaylin doesnt know why she was chosen.
Second how can she be missed none of the Npc have any recollection other than dark elves. but there all Npcs so they should’nt have any memory unless there with her.
Third :how does the goddess define kaylin as belonging to the game, the game FORCED itself on her and destroyed the very connection to kaylin’s human self(we don’t know if “meat” of daylin is even alive anymore.)
Fouth: if kaylin knows what’s missing then why go thru this act of saying she needs to fix the problems. if she can’t use the shrine to “fix” what’s missing.
Fifth: How can she patch the errors if your deliberately keeping her in this area and trying to exert some control on the adventures with adding consequences if the design of game had nothing of the sort of exp loss or even permanent damage to a limb.
Your going against the very thing you just said on fixing the errors.
My guess is goddess doesn’t actually have any real control with exception to blocking the shrine and doesn’t want a actual patch.
1 – Kaylin doesn’t know the exact reason she was chosen, but she knew the vague answer from before, that she belonged there. Here she was told in more detail.
2 – I dont really get what you mean here, you said the NPCs have no recollection other than the dark elves, and then say but they are NPCs so they should have memories unless they are with her? Either a typo or a mistake because kinda as written it seems to be saying that they only have memories of her when shes present, which is not true and has never been implied. It is however implied that they do know her, in fact- they know her from before she was a player…
3 – The goddess knows that according to her information, the adventurer Kaylin has a detailed report about all the people she helped, her family. her friends, her adventurers and more. Over a hundred years of a life in the world. But at some point she was forced to keep leaving the world. Kevin is some weird thing that attached itself to Kaylin after all… It clearly came after Kaylin.
4 – The shrines arent needed for fixing things. Besides, if she just goes to the afterlife the gods can freely interact with her and get what they need. If she gets reincarnated she’ll have to wait a while to grow into a full adult again, until then they could influence her, maybe get her to become a cleric and work for them, providing what she knows for free (assuming shes not going to hold a grudge-)
5 – This goes back to the “Why even show a Respawn Door and say “its out of order”? There’s probably a reason, it might be to give hope, It might be leverage. Either way, the Respawn door should clearly be the offer on the table. “Give me what I want, and maybe- maybe I will let you use this door”.
The Goddess has been patching stuff for a while now- a lot of stuff. To think she doesn’t want to seems odd. Maybe people missed it- but remember Callum? He Kept making things that didnt work, but suddenly the day after he made them- they worked. Funny how updates work.
Thanks for the long comment with points to cover ^_^
Thank you for clearing that up sage it was bugging me to no extent
As for my point on NPCs its was from my days playing the old MMO final fantasy Xi online that most wouldnt remember her due her reputation that all MMOs have be built up
honestly, if elisia wants to be a dick about it, promise to break the system upon respawn. as she needs help, that means kaylin can also work against the system. it is allways a bad idea to try to coerce people to help you. if you are depending on them doing something, trying to force the issue can lead to really bad consequences…. that is, unless elisia doesn’t yet know about the vindicative nature humans can show if pushed too much.
I hope you stick with the no answer. I think the setback of reincarnation is the more interesting outcome.