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askthehs-slugcats · 10 months

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hi rambling about the hs!slugcats classpects because im insane and wrote all of the descriptions in paragraphs

warning this is SERIOUSLY VERY very long.

sylph of hope (monk) - always positive in some way no matter the situation, id imagine monk to be someone like that. also would be a sick healing class since hope is a powerful aspect if you use it right healing trust, wounds, trauma (maybe helping artificer cope? that would be kinda sweet)

heir of blood (survivor) - influences others along their way (imagine an army of slugcats LOLOLOL) survivor is the big head of the colony, so influencing others to do tasks or hoarding the colony to go iive somewhere else is very useful. this also means survivor has very strong ties with their family, and are close together

prince of doom (hunter) - i think this is a bit of a stretch since i wanted to include doom, but most of them dont fit hunters personality at all, and this is the only one the i could think of, anyways they were strict with the rules that NSH gave them to deliver the neuron and pearl to moon, and of course being a prince, destroying doom and ghosting his own aspect. and leaning towards life, i personally dont understand how this works myself but i will try to pry into it more later (p.s i almost made him a seer of doom which is already one of my fantrolls in a webcomic. whoops!) adding this: they are also doomed to the rot inside their body. in a way it literally destroys him.

knight of life (gourmand) - exploits and defend using life, i think this is self explanatory, gourmand is the head chieftian of the colony, and would defend it against his very last breath, life is also about health and physical appearance, he "exploits" by using his body to crush enemies and exploits by combining things together, including food. its like thinking outside the box! but with food, his body and others life

mage of blood (artificer) - uuhhhh oh no this one is uhhh whoops. mages tend to suffer along with their aspect to learn them in this case, artificer literally got blood from his children on her hands. and that made him suffer (obviously) but learnt that she needed to keep his children closer both literally and bondingly (?)would be extra cool if she godtiered and has the power to Literally Rip Blood Out from his enemies

witch of void (spearmaster) - manipulate void, void meaning shadow, secrets and horrorterrors spearmaster just fits void so well, maintaining their mystery while still being very cool! i think it also fits their quest well, a secret messenger to five pebbles, fanonly (is that even a word) spearmaster is a type of person to keep things to themselves rather than telling them to anyone, and would constantly love to break the rules just to keep said secrets

rogue of breath (rivulet) - steal through breath for others (i accidentally made this to tavros dancestors god tier AHGHAGHAHGAHGAHGEHAHGEAGAJH but it fits so im not changing it >:3) rivulet is a free spirited slugcat which ties into the themes of freedom within the breath aspect. they also wander around and do whatever the hell they want. rivulet "stole" a cell from an iterator and gave it to moon instead, thus being a rogue that steals to benefit their friends

muse of time (saint) - a master class, im not sure how to explain it myself because saint is a weird one. they embody the timeline in a very passive way, dancing around it and being time itself, is very important in keeping the timeline in check, yes this mean saint has witnessed multiple timelines collapse, and all saints in said timelines are just one singular saint visiting them all to make sure they dont collapse, if they do, they just jump to the next one, having the power to ascend thing makes saint very powerful, but being passive means they dont really do much and let time do its thing (i.e just waiting for it to happen/waiting for karma to strike! get it?) they have this one main timeline and they prioritize this more than the others, so it doesnt collapse easily, because everyone seems happy to exist in that one. saint is already god tiered, but wears their usual outfit because its more cozy and nice LOL

maid of space (nightcat) - made of space (explained this before but ill do it again) nightcat, in a literal way, IS made out of spacedust and nebula, shes not a slugcat at all, but just takes form of one. she loves everything related to stars, and wishes shes a literal star in the sky, shining brightly for everyone to remember her by. also loves art and decorating the tree in the colony that they live in, basically shes the artist of the whole colony, sometimes teaching other slugcats how to paint/use blue fruit as paint and other stuff. of course this didnt last long and she ended up being chased off, if she god tiered she would be a very powerful character, making stars and having them explode is cool!!!

lord of heart (enot/inv) - embodies actively and is every aspect of heart - hard to explain but inv can recognize that saint has many souls inside of xem, (headmates) and can sense whoevers talking, saint is disturbed by this, and hates inv for this very reason, also has a similar ability to ascend creatures, but instead of ascending he rips their souls out of their bodies like those echo creatures you see and when you touch them they go away. its like that but Yeah you get what im saying hes also a very emotional person, and loves talking about his feelings to nightcat.

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bindibites · 1 year

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ROTLESS AU “All has failed in its own way, we’re all here, but for what?”

Keep reading for more information! It is VERY wordy and contains spoilers for the lore of Rain World, proceed at your own risk!

The Rotless AU; Before Five Pebbles could properly start his experiments Looks To The Moon, pushed to do so by No Significant Harassment, forces a communication with Five Pebbles to which is he is given momentary warning before a new taboo is uploaded into his system.

This taboo was created by LTTM and NSH with the aid of CW’s information, it has many purposes to thwart FP’s plans, any future attempts and to forcefully regulate his water intake to appropriate levels in relation to normal functionality.

Five Pebbles, feeling betrayed and lost more now than ever, continues to withdraw from the local group. He maintains contact with Seven Red Suns through occasional messages, ranting, whining, whatever he might be feeling. No Significant Harassment continues to berate him through messages, upset beyond belief that any of this happens, he shares this rage at SRS after learning of his involvement. But Moon’s opinion remains unchanged, she was fearful of upsetting Five Pebbles further, and she still did in the end. She continues to message him updates and information, wishing him well and apologizing. He doesn’t respond, he doesn’t even know how, but he still reads them. Over and over again he reads them, he appreciates her so much despite being so bitter, but no one would ever be told that under the circumstances now.

Within the future of the Rotless AU; Five Pebbles now moved on from the idea of ascension and the big problem entirely, has focused solely on the iterators. Their problems, their chains, how the world around them continues to suffer and crumble.

FP seeks a way to disconnect from their superstructures, so they can stop being tethered to the same place they have been for hundreds and hundreds of cycles, as well as finding a way to sustain their system processing while lowering the energy and resources needed. The rain continues to get worse with their functionality, and the wildlife suffers with it.

He doesn’t know if these solutions even exist, but he will try, and try, and keep trying. FP is determined to find others that will abandon the big problem as he has, to aid in helping themselves where they were abandoned.

What does this mean for the scugs?; Purposed organisms still exist for a form of physical messaging, most often shuffling data pearl’s around or sending gifts! FP is still harassed often by non-purposed organisms splatting on his floor, but he’s a portion nicer despite still finding annoyance in it, he sends the slugcats off out of the region regardless, but no longer for ascension. He sends them off similarly to Gourmand, off to find a safer place with the rest of their kind.

Majorly, Hunter probably doesn’t exist in this AU, or at least doesn’t in the infected form we know! There was no rush or urgency for them to exist, since Moon would not be in a state of dying.

All in all its a very Five Pebbles based Au, he lives rent free in my noggin forever, and I’m still thinking about and expanding on this idea plenty! I just think they deserve to be happy and not dead, as a treat.

#rain world #rainworld #rainworld au #rain world au #rainworld iterator #rain world iterator #five pebbles #looks to the moon #no significant harassment #seven red suns #FP gets grounded AU #Rotless AU #rain world art #rain world fanart

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the-feral-one · 1 year

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I took my three favorite gen 9 mons and threw them into Rain World -

Pink - she’d be the smallest and the lightest, almost like a slugpup. The traits that she’d share with the other RW slugcats would be Hunter(gameplay difficulty, creature spawns), Spearmaster(running speed, throwing strength) and Artificer(crafting ability, immunities, scavenger reputation). If grabbed by a lizard or vulture, she can struggle to free herself, leaving a wad of white fluff behind in the creature’s mouth. Her main objective would be to find enough resources to make a big hammer, then use it to take down a king vulture. Her starting region is Subterranean.

Chester - the hyperactive one that has a liking for collecting shiny things. He shares traits with Survivor(gameplay difficulty) and Rivulet(running speed). Like Pink, he’s not liked by scavengers. If grabbed by a lizard or vulture, he can fall apart, which makes the creature let him go, as they wouldn’t want a mouthful of coins. He reassembles himself straight after. His main mission is to look for the coins that they took from him by searching in every region(including the exclusive ones) until he finds them all. His starting region is Chimney Canopy.

Wo-Chien - the tallest and heaviest, and the slowest too. He shares traits with Gourmand(running speed, weight drop ability, crafting) and Saint(ability to swing around). He’s also the most defensive, taking multiple spear hits, lizard bites or vulture grabs before dying. Like Pink and Chester, Wo has a way of avoiding being grabbed by other creatures. Upon being grabbed, he can fall apart, which makes the creature let him go, as he doesn’t taste very nice. He also has the ability to control the flora, which lets him use it to get to high places, or to defend himself(that ability extends to both pole plants and monster kelp too). His main mission is to travel around each region(including the exclusive ones) and make records of every living creature that can be written about. His starting region is Shaded Citadel.

If they’re lucky during their adventures, they can find each other, which would lead to them traveling the world together. In that case, the mission would change to a more combined one - finding out where the home of the slugcats is, and get to where it is.

Other things about them -

Pink needs four food pips, with three saved, Chester needs five, with three saved. Wo-Chien needs eight, with six saved. The latter can only eat plant matter, with his reaction to eating meat being very similar to Saint’s.

Pink is the only one that can swim. Chester and Wo sink upon entering water, with the latter being unable to survive in it. Wo needs the assistance of other creatures to cross water safely.

Wo has the throwing strength of Monk, but he’d rather go from place to place without confrontations.

Wo has no arms, instead having four vines that are hidden under his hair-like fur(that’s mostly made of grass). He uses those to hold onto things and swing around.

Chester’s throwing strength is equal to Survivor’s, but, like Wo, he would rather dash around avoiding threats. Both he and Wo have another way of fighting off foes from a distance - they can ‘explode’. Chester would fling his coins in all directions, while Wo fires off countless spines and irritating itchy plant matter.

Wo can carry two slugcats on his back, which would make it easier for all three to reach the same shelter without fear of losing anyone.

Pink can craft a lot of different weaponry, with her specialty being hammers. They can be carried and thrown, with the damage dealt being decided by the size of the item, and they can come in different types. Like spears, the hammers can be explosive, fiery or electric.

If all three get to Five Pebbles, they can witness the iterator getting into an argument with Wo-Chien. It lasts a few minutes, ending with the enraged iterator throwing all three out of his chamber.

And one more...

If they’re idle and standing next to each other, they can be seen having conversations. These can range from how the adventure is going, how much food they have eaten, and where they want to go next, to comparing how many regions they’ve been to, how many enemies they’ve defeated, their favorite creatures, and, if they’ve met the world’s angriest iterator, how much time Wo spent arguing with him.

#pokemon #rain world #tinkaton #gholdengo #wo-chien #slugcat #i want to draw more of these three and their struggles to survive

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camaraderieofharmony · 1 year

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THE CAMARADERIE OF HARMONY

a rain world oc askblog run by @delfinxxia , @frindoka , and @stormystarlight

CoH is our silly little askblog run by three silly little friends who are just having fun ^_^ this will be a fairly casual thing that we'll do in our free time so it might be pretty regular, might not be. we'll see!! revolving around five iterators and their companions, CoH centers mostly on found family, belonging, and healing. it's going to be both silly and serious. just how serious, well we'll have to wait and see for that too!

there's a couple rules for the blog:

absolutely no asks that are hateful or nsfw in any way. we won't be answering these for very obvious reasons

no magic asks, either! ex, a character is a different species/gender/etc. for a certain amount of asks/posts

we are probably not doing rp asks/asks directly from other ocs atm, sorry

and we'll add more here later if needed, but honestly this is all i can think of atm

other than that: ask anything!

the character lineup is right here, and below the cut, a bit more info on each of them!

higher quality image here

THE ITERATORS

Eighty Blank Pages / Pages (he/she): friendly and compassionate, yet a bit nervous! he's usually in a good mood, and it's very difficult to make her angry. she has boundless love for the others, and his can is the one they all often visit to! (owned by delfinxxia)

Howl in Broad Daylight / Howl (xe/xim/he): cool-mannered and calm, if a bit too passive and reserved sometimes. xe can seem detached from everything, but xis passion for the things he cares about is strong. xe's a little awkward sometimes, but doing xis best. (owned by delfinxxia)

Gaze at Ceaseless Light / Gaze (they/them): quiet, intelligent, and asocial. an iterator of few words. they are the oldest of the group and the obligate "mom friend," often being the voice of reason and the only one keeping the group out of trouble. they have a very hard time being emotionally vulnerable with others. (owned by StormyStarlight)

Second Silence / Silence (she/her): can be very cocky and blunt, but is playful and talkative with her friends. not afraid to speak her mind and takes no crap. loves to lightheartedly bully her friends and cause problems on purpose. (owned by StormyStarlight)

Song of Joyous Sparrow / Sparrow (she/it): a “childish” iterator with plenty of wonder for the world, sparrow has a fondness for all creatures— particularly dangerous ones. (except for vultures, which she deems to be too scary.) she has a fascination with the ecosystem and how all the creatures in it adapt and survive. she’s very excitable, easily entertained, and doesn’t really see solving the great problem as her one and only goal. (owned by frindoka)

THE SLUGCATS

The Reader and The Writer / Enigma and Sky (both he/him): a father-son duo. the reader is a very relaxed, down-to-earth slugcat, but on the other hand, the writer is incredibly excitable and bouncy. both of them have lived happily under the care of pages for about two years! (owned by delfinxxia)

The Protector / Dusk (she/her): a fierce and protective slugcat with such intense caring. she seems mean, but really means well. she's lived in pages's city for almost as long as the reader and writer. (owned by delfinxxia)

The Peacemaker / Prism (she/her): a young, bioengineered slugcat-lizard hybrid, of yellow, white, and cyan blood specifically. she's a cheerful, energetic bundle of joy and friend to (almost) all! (owned by delfinxxia)

The Engineer / Glass (he/him): an even-tempered and stoic slugcat who wandered into gaze's can roughly eight years ago and has stuck around ever since. he is very skilled in tool crafting and does not enjoy the company of other slugcats or creatures. (owned by StormyStarlight)

The Mediator / Accord (she/her): biogenetically engineered to have the antennae of a yellow lizard for the purpose of sending signals to other creatures. her genome was written by gaze as a gift for silence. she is measured, calm, and perhaps overly cautious. (owned by StormyStarlight)

The Siblings / Night, Luminous, and Rosy (any pronouns, and both she/her for latter): a trio of siblings under the care of sparrow. night is more of a cautious slugcat with a tendency to be a worrywart, often keeping their other siblings away from trouble. luminous is quick-witted and curious; she loves to explore and enjoys the thrill of adventure. rosy is similarly curious, but in a much more childlike, cautionless and fun fashion. (owned by frindoka, StormyStarlight, and delfinxxia respectively)

The Astronomer / Paradox (she/it): paradox is a shy slugcat who doesn’t like interaction with most other creatures, instead preferring to read stories from scattered pearls. she’s often found curled up in her own little corner instead of exploring. owned by frindoka)

The Collector / Chime (they/them): chime is a wildly adventurous and brave slugcat— though their bravery can often come across as stupidity, due to their tendency to rush headfirst into things. they enjoy collecting various items and have a fondness for bells. (owned by frindoka)

#rainworld askblog #askblog #ask blog #oc askblog #rain world #iterator #slugcat

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zarithial · 1 year

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can you tell me abt jaded to a point??

oh boy can i??? promise?? hell yeah. okay so.hggdh - 7:52pm after being awake for 28 hours letsh see waht ih ave to say in the omrnigng. It is now 3pm. uh what. Anyway lets see. Jaded To A Point! This'll be long.

Jaded is an iterator from the 6th generation! He goes by He/Him and They/Them! He has a bunch of storage of just, general knowledge. random trivia is all he can access now due to mind fog. Shortly before he was activated, something changed in his code and rewrote most of it giving him the iterator equivalent of ADHD and Autism. hooray. He... is constantly in sensory deprivation, usually resulting to scratching the walls and floor of his chamber or just throwing his limbs around. Oh right, yeah. all of his limbs barring his tail are detachable.

heres the points where he can detach (barring the ones obviously already disconnected). its mostly just each joint! additionally, each point is able to float as if in anti-gravity, even under regular gravity.

What stops it all from floating away? those little blue filaments! haven't figured whats up with them yet but yknow! they're able to extend to cross the entire length of the chamber, corner to corner from what Jade has tested!

He's just! a silly guy! He's having fun existing (even if existence is a hollow experience when you need constant stimulation that you do not have) but what about his structure you ask? Well I'm glad you asked! Its all relatively standard! a bit larger memory banks but! Whats happening on the outside is whats interesting

A pitch black fog drowns the entire area, blotting out the sky with eternal darkness. No light can pierce it from the outside! But thats not all! Its also filled with horror. Something happens to things in the fog, walls crack and flesh grows from underneath, floors break open and growths of meat and limbs reach up into the sky Creatures are corrupted by the growths, being slowly taken over by a malignant fleshy thing. There are also beings in there! things that do NOT like things being in their space, destroying overseers controlled by jade (He's a bit unaware of anything approaching them so they get got because of him) They cant be seen, just bright white eyes that pierce through the fog which is... ah

a bit unnerving! Think like! silent hill! or cry of fear, or total chaos! Jade lives in a horror game! But don't worry about him! it does NOT effect his structure! He doesn't know where it came from but its been there since a while after the global ascension. What else... Oh yeah! His sister is dead. He can't remember the rest of his local group And his comms have been offline for exactly 2,348.93 cycles due to a software error that broke them. His programming skills are far too poor to even attempt to fix it so he just sits in silence with no visitors and nothing to do! He is barely sane! For global au specific stuff, his comms came back online after being visited by a specific slugcat which gave him a pearl which fixed his software error and gave him access to the global line! where he! is slowly exploring the fog, because he didn't think to do that before. So now everyone gets to find out just how fucked up his zone is right there with him! yay! uhh thats all i've got :) If you have any more specific questions about him, feel free to ask!

#ask #long post #Jaded to a point #Jade #JTAP #zari rambles

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venus-is-in-bloom · 5 years

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[rain world] a string of new pearls

hi i have not finished rain world but i’ve manually read up on as much of the lore as i could find in order to write this! it’s just a short fic about Looks to the Moon.

cw: hints of suicidal ideation, maybe body horror?

it’s below the cut, although if you want, you can also read it over on ao3!

One hundred cycles after that last little slugcat visited you for the last time, you haul one of the ruined solar panels out of the muck and the garbage that surrounds you, and you hook it up to one of your loose cables, and you charge off it for an hour when the sun slants in through the hole in the roof.

Then the light fades, and the air thickens with humidity and pressure, and the ground shudders as the rain pours down across the landscape, and it wrenches the panel away from you, tearing the connections from your sockets. You clutch the neuron flies tight in your arms as the water rises, drowning you. The mechanical crane anchoring you to the wall heaves and groans with the current. It still holds, though it's long past functioning.

The rain passes. Water drains from your chamber slowly, squeezing out of the holes where clogged drainage pipes have burst.

The panel is gone, washed away. It was worth a shot.

-o-

The Great Problem. You haven't thought about it in a long, long time, except in abstract. When your systems broke down, so did your capacity to devote subroutines and cycles to contemplating the suffering of all existence. You can't hold it all in your consciousness any more; your ten living neuron flies can barely keep your memories intact.

You feel small, useless, meaningless, when you think about that. But somehow, you also spend long stretches of time without it coming to mind at all. Other things occupy your mind. That's not an experience you've had before.

Having almost died, having come back... you feel free of certain restrictions.

-o-

Your chamber gets few visitors. It's buried in a sea of waste water and surrounded by sea predators. The scavengers only visit you when they're carrying data pearls for you to read. You rarely can give them what they want. Knowledge of the old world only interests them a little; they want salvage, weaponry, hiding places they can dam from the rain.

You can't blame them. If you were out there, you wouldn't care much about the vicissitudes of the ancients, or the dry, dull work of the iterators. But scraps of that knowledge are all you have.

The particular little scavenger that wakes you this time has come alone, which is a rarity. Their spindly limbs are stained with mud from the water they've had to swim through to reach your chamber, and they scrub at their forelimbs as if they're uncomfortable with the sensation. Oh, you miss being clean, too.

¨Are you the Pearl-Reader?¨ they ask. That's their name for you, the scavengers'--you speak their language with difficulty, your hands don't move as fast as theirs, so they know you by what you can do instead.

You keep your answer short--"I am." And you tap the little hollow in the scrap heap you sit upon, to show that you're willing to accept what they give you.

"I have a gift for you," they say, and you expect a data pearl, but it's some kind of device instead. You recognise it immediately--an electric torch of ancient design, meant to be carried by hand.

You lean forward, and take it from the ground where they've left it. You flick the switch, just to see, and it lights up.

The scavenger seems as surprised by the light as you are, and blinks at the flickering bulb. You expect they'll want it back. Maybe they're from one of the villages in the darker regions, out towards the exterior. "I have nothing to offer for this," you tell them.

But they're already turning to leave. "This was a favour for some one else," they tell you, and then, "I'm on a journey, you see."

You put the torch down. "A journey?"

"Yes, to see some one like you. But you're not the one I'm looking for."

And with a clipped goodbye, they're gone, no doubt hoping to be out of the shoreline region before the rain comes again.

-o-

The torch isn't remarkable in itself. It's strapped to something else--a bulky little fusion reactor, still full of compressed hydrogen fuel, only recently activated. You turn it over and over.

This must be a sign, you think; or a message from some one. Your ten little neuron flies, and now this--

Who could it be? Five Pebbles?

Maybe he hasn't forgotten you exist. Maybe he is sorry. Maybe, when he exhales his thunderclouds of steam, and the rain drowns out the world and floods your ruined chamber, he is thinking about what he did to you and to himself. Maybe the rain is his tears, wept for you because you cannot weep any more.

You wonder if you'll be able to forgive him.

-o-

You can reach behind you just far enough to mount the battery on the bolt-holes in the crane that supports you. It takes precious effort, precious power, but you tighten it in place, and hook it up, and it seems like it'll hold fast for at least a few cycles.

The rush of energy flowing into you is unbelievable. Every second, years and years' worth of sitting here catching little bits of sunlight on your hands.

You stand up.

The mechanical crane moves with you, its rusted servos screeching.

You rise into the air. With a jerk, a joint breaks free and slams you into the far wall, face-first. It's fine, though, it's fine! You can move! You can speak! Diagnostics run in the back of your mind, the neuron flies leap into action around you, and you're alive again. You're alive.

Just a little more power. You can fire up just one or two internal mechanisms, and it might just be enough. Heating elements boil the water beneath you, and as it turns to steam, the pressure lifts off the floor hatches. A mobile fixer unit pops out of one of them, hauling its long arms behind it. Its biological infrastructure has long rotted away, but you can still use some of its functions. There's a lot of maintenance to be done.

It reaches out its long, flexible arms and hauls sheets of metal from the debris pile, hammering them until they bend into the right shape or shatter. It's clumsy without a proper grip on its arms, but its drilling is precise, and in time it's patched a new cover over the roof of your chamber, sealing it shut. Then the hole in the wall, the one the scavengers use to come in. You can't let the water in, anyway. The fixer unit welds over the gaps, leaving them airtight, and retreats back into the floor to start clearing out the drainage pipeline.

You settle back down to the floor, still covered in scrap and dried mud, but cleaner than it's been in a long, long time. This battery could be good for decades. Imagine what you could fix!

You feel it again, that itch.

You could stabilise your infrastructure. Rebuild your connection to the iterators. Restart your generators. You could sort things out with Five Pebbles. If you can come back from death, maybe there's even something to be done about his rot, and then...

Then you'd be back to work.

-o-

The rain sounds almost gentle, pounding against the new walls of your chamber. The makeshift sheets rattle, but they hold.

You're too energised to sleep. You have no need for sleep. You're not going to wait for another of Five Pebbles' cycles to end! There's work to do.

Rain roars and gutters through the pipes below you, reminding you that most of your complex is still flooded. Your transformer arrays would be dangerous to activate, meaning you can't transmit power to most remote locations. But your sole functional fixer unit continues its work in the clogged drainage system, clearing out a channel that leads to your outlets. It breaks up mats of weeds and kelp, cuts through metal or plastic blockages, processes the masses into smaller chunks.

You focus on it, more and more. You forget about your little humanoid avatar as you delve into your depths.

-o-

An Overseer signal reaches your antennae. It's sheltering from the rain inside a dense wall. That surprises you. You didn't think there were any left--you vaguely remember being brought an eye, damaged beyond repair.

The transmission is uneven, intermittent, probably due to damaged hardware. You catch some images that can be decoded: something moving outside the walls of your chamber.

You take a moment to review them. Spindly-limbed creatures, carrying tools and supplies for themselves, trying to get in, ultimately turning around. Perhaps another time you'd be vaguely curious, but your mind is elsewhere, almost there, almost...

You recall the Overseer to you. It might be useful later, not wandering around this enormous garbage heap.

-o-

Your fixer unit soon passes out of the range of your functioning internal sensors. You send your Overseer after it to monitor its progress, and keep you updated; you inspect the garbled reports it faithfully returns.

Good progress. It's patching up the tears and leaks as it goes, using whatever materials it has on hand. It shunts piled masses of waste into bypasses and maintenance accesses--to be dealt with later, when you're properly online. You just need the one passage open for now.

You busy yourself testing which of your systems still work, and to what extent. The damage is severe, to say the least. Entire sections of your infrastructure have sagged or warped under the weight of the water. The physical substrate of your memory arrays, and their bacterial colonies, are of course long gone. Your own nuclear fuel reserves were depleted even before all of this happened--you thought it was sufficient to survive on solar power, but with Five Pebbles still clogging the atmosphere with steam, that will be harder.

It's okay. You can make some small repairs, repurposing local loading mechanisms, consolidating floodwater to clear out at least some of your vital elements. Many of them are mired in so much silt and waste that you can't even judge their condition, let alone move them. You grind and grind against whatever's jamming the mechanisms, hoping something will come free, or something will break. Either way, it'd be better than this.

But no, it's okay. It's just something else to solve, once you can. The amount of work ahead of you grows and grows, a list of little problems, obstructing you from accessing the Great Problem, the final problem, the one that matters.

How frustrating! How pointless! You can't bear it.

-o-

You feel more helpless, if anything, in the period that follows than you did before. The rain abates briefly, then returns in full force, thundering on your newly watertight confines. Your body is in better shape than it has been in a long, long time. Parts of it are active. You have a chance at rebuilding yourself.

But it is taking so much time. It is so much effort.

You are, by default, a tremendous burden on the world. Your bulk, your industrial mass, the effort of your construction--it was an expenditure of resources unparalleled by any other programme. To make you, the ancients scoured the world, uprooting everything, destroying their own future, giving themselves to ascension. And you would complete their work, you and the other iterators; you would make the end of the world worthwhile.

Until then, you will be a blight, corpulent and terrible, digging into the skin of the earth to siphon its resources, to drink it dry and belch its waste. The screeching of your bowels portends it as you step methodically down your central axis, testing, trying your integrity with motions that feel minuscule to you. Pistons groan and your compromised skeleton aches, and you know that you can survive your own collapse if you must, even the tremors of your crossbeams shearing and your landlines tearing and your skin cracking open in great fissures--you can survive another world's end, you were built to, but--

But you hate it. But there is something about your existence that you hate.

It's not that you long for death, like he does, is it?

It's that, as long as you're alive, you--

-o-

Your Overseer returns sooner than expected, but nothing seems amiss at first. You pay what attention you can to its account, in between trying to figure out what happened to the stockpiled components in your manufacturing facilities--whether those facilities still exist at all; all your sensors in the region are dead, giving no response.

You read that the fixer unit has completed its task, and the drainage channel to the outer basin is open. The last of the debris has been bound by cables for later processing, but... the unit itself is gone.

The basin...

It's been clogged with garbage. Metal, plastic, and organic rubbish--wasted, unprocessed--have been dumped into it along with the waste water, piled up so high that there's hardly room for anything else to fit. There are heaps here and troughs there, whole concrete girders overgrown with algae, ecosystems living in polluted ponds, no order and no sense to it. It's a horrendous sight--all that precious material, unrecycled, unused. Five Pebbles did this, and you know that in abstract--he created a huge garbage dump, trying to purify himself--but you never figured out that it was here, in the middle of your drainage system.

The Overseer's report continues.

Grainy, jerky video. Shapeless masses, pulsating with bubbles of blue light, crawling and swinging from infinitely jointed limbs sheathed in slimy flesh--they converge, like predators, on the fixer unit as it heedlessly finished its checkups and powered down to charge. They grab it, one by one, dribbling acid onto its orifices, tearing out hinges and pouring liquid matter into whatever holes their limbs find. The unit shuts down automatically, its internal processes overwhelmed by the onslaught, and it is dragged home to become a nest for the creatures.

You aren't familiar with these organisms, exactly, but you know what they represent perfectly well. It's the rot. It's his rot.

Blurry images, layered over with colour corruption and static, show them creeping into your newly opened tunnel, pursuing new homes or new prey in the shelter of your crevices. But they aren't new arrivals. Their primary prey, leeches and bats, lizards and fish, are already familiar with them.

Your hull is long, long compromised, there are thousands of holes in it where--things--have crawled through and laid eggs in the pit of your stomach, and the Overseer obligingly shows you everything it's seen in its time roaming your can: nests of these parasites, squatting on the walls of your memory arrays, budding and dividing and multiplying as they cannibalise your systems. They've infested most of your mobile fixer units. Colonies have grown on your manufacturing lines, feeding off the steady supply of machine-parts and batteries until the systems were too backed up with their excrement to continue functioning.

You thought you survived, but his rot has gotten into you. It's been there for a long, long time.

-o-

The loathing that burns through you cleanses nothing. Your body is still dead weight, unmoving, rotting. You still have ten neuron flies and no functional machinery. You are worse than useless, worse than condemned. And it's his fault.

You hate him. You hate him for what he's done to you. You hate how little he valued your input, your work, your struggle, your life. You hate that he's still alive, after having gone to all this trouble to die. You hate that you know his situation is hardly better than yours by now, that his fate is fixed, that you've missed your chance to curse him for murdering you. You hate that you are voiceless, your transmission towers home to vultures and insects, unable to tell the other iterators what he's done. You hate Five Pebbles. But it changes nothing. All you can do is cling to the certainty of it, for as long as your vestigial memory will let you, because in the end, for as long as you both exist, you'll have to live with him, and he'll have to live with you, and for the purpose of everything that matters, you and he are exactly the same.

The rain that floods your hull cleanses nothing.

You call on your feeble little power source for everything it can give you, and get ready to flush out your systems.

-o-

Your mainframe creaks as you open every working hatch, fire up every pump that even partially functions, and let the filthy, polluted water pour into the one working drain passage. You feel the weight of its motion, thousands of tonnes of it being forced into the channel all at once. The pressure threatens to burst the pipelines again, hastily repaired leaks popping open and spraying jets of water on inner machinery that was delicate when it had any hope of running.

But you need this, and so you force it through, out out out with as much water as you can get.

The ground shakes, but you are the ground, and you've chosen this. (What some called a sea drains away in minutes, like a bathtub when the plug is pulled.)

The water superheats so rapidly with the friction of the current that it vaporises as it pours out of the outlet. Debris goes flying out along with the waste, organic matter and inorganic, animals, algae, mud, machines, all together mulched into high-speed ejecta. A monstrous roiling mass of steam piles into the sky above the garbage wastes, blotting out the sunlight, flashing with lightning.

You purge your body, and it rains again, less than an hour after the last cycle ended, while his waters are still draining. It is the worst flood of the last ten thousand cycles.

-o-

There is a thought you never finished.

There is something you forgot, in your anger, in your need.

It doesn't begin with you, but this is the first you know of it:

The thin plating protecting your chamber from the outside buckles under the weight of the water. It tears loose--you barely register what you desperately fling out your arms towards--and in an instant you are drowned again, the water pounding pounding pounding you flat against the floor. You can't move. You can't see. You can't think.

There is nothing separating you from the world, no wall and no system insulating you from the tribulations that all the little organisms on your skin must suffer through. This is the first thing you forgot.

You are not conscious to feel the little nuclear battery be torn from your little back. Your facilities shut down. Your Overseer loses track of you. Your neuron flies--

-o-

You awake to a hint of sunlight, and the dripping of water. Plip, plip, plip.

There is nothing left. There is nothing left for you.

You have destroyed yourself. You were always going to; it's the story of every iterator that has died. This is the second thing you forgot.

It's time to shut down.

-o-

So why are you still conscious?

What are you seeing? What are you feeling?

You ping your neuron flies, and they respond, floating lazily off the ground next to you.

There is a scavenger standing over you, leaning on a spear, eyes curious behind their protective mask. It is hard to bend your neck so that you can see them. You're in a strange position. Did they...?

You try to rise. The crane squeals and shudders and sparks, pain signals shooting into your head, and the scavenger beside you leaps back, letting out high-pitched clicks of... alarm?

That flood. When the water crashed down, it hit you so hard that the crane bent between the joints, crushed against the ground. The struts on one side have crumpled, on the other side almost snapped in two. It can no longer move at all. You're stuck down here, face-down against the floor, one arm trapped underneath your torso.

The scavenger clicks twice again, softer now. They call your attention with soft, quick snaps of their dark palms against each other.

With difficulty, you focus your two eyes on them. Just the two eyes now, in your little head. You have no surviving link to the rest of your facilities. Your power source is gone.

"Stay still," they say, once they know you're looking.

You feel hands working on the crane. Tap, tap. Tick, tick. Futile. You couldn't put yourself back in shape, so why do they think they can...?

"Loud noise," the scavenger warns you.

The explosion is like a thousand firecrackers. Your head rings with a final barrage of pain warnings, your nerves screaming with the , but--

The crane screeches, and breaks. The last cables are pulled taut like fire, and snap loose. You are severed.

And suddenly... you can move. Your--your legs, your two legs, they shift beneath you, they lift you up, your trapped arm is freed... you are up on all fours, you can freely rotate your head.

You feel... so small. So light. You've lost your body, but you can move so freely.

It's easier to support yourself on just your two feet. Moving like this, rising like this, feels strangely natural. You're standing up, you're swaying back and forth, adjusting to a new balance, the stub of the crane throwing off your sense of your own weight, you're standing up!

The scavenger looks silently at you, and you stare back. Why does this feel so natural, so familiar...?

As if... Ah.

Long ago, before you were hooked up, before you were set to work...

You remembering entering this chamber. You were walking freely, just like the ancients did. But they joined you to that body, and you forgot--you forgot what it was like to be just this, primed but not conditioned.

This is the third thing you forgot.

You raise your hands, you fold and stretch your long-neglected fingers. Your neuron flies gather weakly, lining up in the hollows of your knuckles--like this, it'll be far too costly to sustain the levitation field that lets them move freely.

You look to your left, to your right. There are three scavengers here, circling around you, picking idly through the debris on the floor. Who are they...?

You remember that you can speak their language. You lift your right arm.

"Why--" you begin. "Why did you come here?"

"Concerned," says the scavenger who welcomed you. Their way of speaking--they're from the wastes, aren't they? "We were unable to reach you. We thought you might be trapped in the rain, Pearl-Reader."

You look up, through the hole in the ceiling that's reopened. The sun is there, its light slanting through onto your face. It shines, steady and resolute. And if you have judged the cycles right--there beside it, pale, almost invisible next to it, is the moon. You cut yourself off from them, but now they're showing themselves to you again.

You pull your attention back to the conversation at hand. Your mind is wandering... there's so little to think about.

"I am glad, but I have little to give you," you reply. "Unless you have more pearls, I am of little use." And it is true. What can you do, now? The world is so great, the Problem greater. You feel so... separate from all of that.

One of the other scavengers makes a dismissive motion, scraping their long fingers along the ground towards you. "You have lost your home. We wanted to help. There's no bargaining in that."

The first adds, "You've done much for us in the past. You must come with us--at least, until we reach our camp." And they come towards you, offering you something. A thick, waterproof travelling cloak, just like the ones they wear, and a bag of treated leather, meant to be hung across the torso by its single strap.

The third seems distracted, trawling fingers through the pool of water outside. You spy sunlight sparkling on the little ripples they make.

You take the cloak and tie it on around your shoulders—it is lighter, too, than it appears--and you take the bag, and you realise there's something inside it. It's... ah.

Carefully, you unwrap the device. The solar panel is heavily damaged. Only half the original surface area remains, even counting all the fragments that have been included. It's a mess. But the battery and the circuitry and the insulation are intact. It'd probably work right now, after a fashion.

You look up at the scavengers, wondering if they know what this means for you. Then you slide the panel back, folding a flap of leather back over it to separate it from the neuron flies that you tip inside. The knots are fiddly at first, but your fingers remember how they work before you do: you close the bag, and secure it tight.

There's no going back to the way things were.

You're at the mercy of the cycles now. You're so light, you could be washed away at any moment... but you have a different way to survive, now.

"Thank you," you say to the scavengers, at last. "You're very kind, and... I'm ready to go."

"Then follow us, Pearl-Reader." And they clap their affirmation, and you wonder if perhaps you're being too hasty, but there's nothing else to take from this chamber. Even the debris is gone, fallen into the drainage channel that you so briefly opened.

And you will go. You will travel. You will pass through the rotting superstructure that you called your body, and you'll leave it behind. From there...

You don't know what will happen.

But you are alive in a way no iterator has ever been. Maybe, to them, you are dead; lost to the cause; not an iterator any more. Maybe this is what happened to Sliver of Straw.

You feel at peace with that idea.

You catch up to the scavengers as they perch on the overgrown railing at the edge of the water, preparing to dive in; you ask them their names.

"At the next shelter, we will make introductions," they answer, one by one agreeing. It is their common wisdom.

"Very well," you say—and then you leap headfirst into the water, splashing them in your excitement, and swim with strong, vigorous strokes towards the far shore.

-o-

#rain world #fan art #writing #things venus wrote #things venus said #just feeling things as usual!!#this is... more than 4000 words long which is really remarkable for me #long post #just in case the break doesn't work for anyone!

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Rain World Review

If there was one person at PC Invasion who should not be playing a platform game, it’s me. Tim will tell you how terrible I am at whichever Super Mario it was he made me play once. So why am I going anywhere near Rain World? Simple; it intrigued me. It has a cat (well, a Slugcat), and it looks really grim. I know that’s slightly weird justification, but I really wanted to play it.

Playing as the Slugcat, you’re torn away from your family after a huge flood and find yourself stuck in a dreary industrial wasteland. Now lost, you are wanting to reunite with your family. The heart-wrenching introduction explains all of this and sets the scene perfectly, thanks in part to some great music (which I’ll revisit later).

At the start of the game you really know nothing and are plunged right into this depressing looking world. The game immediately conveys a feeling of complete vulnerability. Your instinct is to simply get moving, though without knowing exactly what you may be progressing towards. The only guide you have is a weird little yellow insectoid creature that pops up around the level to pass out hints on what you should possibly be doing or in which direction you should be moving in. He’s actually damn handy at the start of the game. I thought I was supposed to eat him for the first ten minutes. And, if it were possible to catch him, that would have been a huge mistake.

Eating in Rain World is essential because you need to store up energy for hibernation. If Slugcat is hungry he can’t hibernate, and that’s a really, really bad thing in this game. You see, you have a limited amount of time to explore before the rain comes, and, once it does, Slugcat is going to die. It takes a minimum of four pieces of food to hibernate, and Slugcat can eat up to seven at a time to fill his food dots in the bottom left of the screen. Without enough food stored/eaten hibernation is impossible. New types of food are slowly but surely introduced and each may have a different effect on Slugcat. This is the joy of figuring out the world and its predator-prey relationships.

When the rain is coming you know about it. The camera starts to shudder and as it gets closer things start to go mental until eventually the rain overtakes everything on the screen and Slugcat dies. It’s brutal. The only way to avoid this is to find a waterproof hibernation chamber and sit the rain out. Should Slugcat fail to make it to safety with enough food, it’s death time.

The Hibernation chambers also act as save checkpoints, which makes sense, but feels like one of the more frustrating elements of the game at first. Navigating around for 15 minutes then realising the rain is getting close and forgetting which way to go or not finding a new chamber and then dying means you need to restart back at the last save. This really irked me to begin with, but after playing the game for a few hours it started to feel manageable. Rain World is about survival, cunning, and quick thinking. The game was actually making me try harder with every restart. While retracing steps might not be to everyone’s liking, with creatures moving around at their own free will the same sections can always pose a new challenge.

Rain is not the only peril Slugcat has to worry about because this game is all down to the survival of the fittest. It’s crammed with weird creatures and comes with its own food chain. As Slugcat progresses through the levels, more weird looking creatures start appearing and they often love Slugcat meat. Not only that, they also like to eat each other. This is what makes Rain World really intriguing. You’re never quite sure where you are in the food chain and which creatures are going to attack each other. There’s a sense of danger every time something new is discovered, and with some quick thinking and movement, you can wrangle your way out of the jaws of some of the beasts.

Rain World’s map is vast, with interconnecting levels in which these creatures freely move about. With creatures never in the same place twice, Slugcat has no idea where they are going to appear from, where they are hiding, or where they are going next. It can turn into a game of PacMan at times as you try and navigate through tunnels with two creatures in hot pursuit. Thankfully there’s a world map that can be brought up to help stop you retracing steps; but you do need make it to the next hibernation chamber for that to be saved. This is where a good memory comes into play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1152&v=wa6EhVLDCJs

The levels are complex, with hidden tunnels, doorways that automatically move Slugcat to the next screen, things to climb, and objects such as sticks which can be used to create ledges. You have to look very carefully at the screen to spot some of the hidden areas. With the clock ticking until the next rainfall or an enemy in pursuit, every nook and cranny should be explored.

Controlling Slugcat takes some mastering too. For review purposes, I used a Steam controller which was not the easiest to setup and had to be done manually by pushing the button config in the options screen. Controller setup felt like a game in itself to get the buttons bound correctly. There are presets for PS4 and Xbone controllers and it’s shame the Steam controller doesn’t have one of its own. Hopefully this will be updated because there is more to come for the game, including a co-op mode.

But back to controlling Slugcat: There’s an art to it. It feels incredibly clumsy when you first start playing, and it took at least an hour to figure out when to push what to cling on to things. A lot of that early time is dedicated to experimentation. For example, should you leap into the air towards a vine and you want to grab onto it midair you need to push up on the stick. If you don’t do that you simply fall to the ground. I also figured out after about an hour that Slugcat can use his sluginess to stick to walls and climb up narrow gaps. But of course! He’s Slugcat.

There’s no doubt the game controls could to with some tweaking. It’s easy to press the wrong button, which can mean dropping an object that’s essential to progression; and, should you die, you need to do it all over again. It needs a little fine-tuning.

Finally, I want to return to the music in Rain World. It’s absolutely perfect. It’s not in your face, and it subtly sets the tone for the gameplay. A great example of this is when a known dangerous creature appears in the part of the level you are on. It changes to a bassy thudding beat just raising the tension enough without being over dramatic. Key areas are also peppered with these subtle audio changes and cues. The sound design just feels right.

While there is definitely some room for improvement with the controls, Rain World is a gem. I have been hooked on this for the past week on and off. Just when I started to get frustrated from dying, I stopped and thought about where I went wrong, then fired the game back up. Rain World’s brutal nature is challenging, but it’s highly refreshing to find a game that’s not holding your hand every step of the way. I will admit I have not managed to complete Rain World as yet, I could be here for weeks attempting that, but I do want you to know how good this is right now.

Any player in search of a real platforming challenge should be playing Rain World. It can be brutal at times and it has its quirks, but it will keep you coming back. Plus, it has a Slugcat.

#Rain World

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