blastiafreak | [Video] The Rhyme is a lie

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[Video] The Rhyme is a lie

[The communicator flickers on to focus on Rita, who looks tired and a bit spaced-out. All the excitement of coming to the City catching up with her, perhaps?]

Hey, did someone start growing a flower garden in here or something? All I can smell are roses, and they're giving me a headache.

[She sleepily rubs at her eyes then pauses, mildly confused. She inspects her hand, and one might see rose-red rings on her fingers.]

Huh? Is there something...I never had allergies to anything before--wait, is something burning?

[Of course, the device can't exactly transmit the smell, but smoke is starting to waft around the room. Rita frantically starts rummaging around and looking for the source.]

Where is this coming from? A-ow, that kind of...

[Suddenly, her hands burst into flames. She's momentarily stunned at her spontaneous combustion but recovers enough to do something about it, grabbing a blanket and smothering out the flames. She's pretty alert now, at least.]

What the hell just happened?! Is this one of those...w-wait!

[Another tendril of smoke starts to creep up. Rita wastes no time now, a blue magic circle appearing at her feet as she casts a spell.]

O caprice of innocent waters...Champagne!

[The spring of water forms beneath her feet, bubbling forth a small stream that halts the smoke. Rita sighs shakily, about to turn back to her device, when the smoke returns once again.]

C-come on! Stop it, already!

[OOC: Will be backtagging when I get in from work AGAIN sob. Anyway, her nursery rhyme is Ring Around the Rosy, which this handy site going around suggests refers to the bubonic plague. Too bad the City doesn't feel like waiting to cremate you...]

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It does seem to be one of the most likely reasons, but I wish we had more concrete information. I've heard mostly speculation from other people.

Feed the clock, huh...? You can only hear the ticking when you're alone even though it's underground, which I don't get. Do you know anything about it--or have any guesses?

Unfortunately, very little that is concrete exists.

I would not expect to get the clock, if I were you. The popular theory is that it is fueled by high emotions produced by curses, and that it counts down to the end of all worlds. However, it is a hypothesis that has never been tested.

... How's the water?

Really...? Well, it's kind of hard to test a theory like that. It'd be nicer if the deities were more upfront about it, but if they were that generous, we wouldn't even be in this mess in the first place.

...It's fine. Keeping the fire out.

To say the least.

Very well. I suppose you could use the device to find digital books, or videos online, if it becomes boring.

It can do stuff like that too? Hm...so it's not just a communicator, but more like a device that enables us to connect to a network of other devices, including information databases. Does that sound about right?

[Oh, she's going to have fun with this.]

Correct. There ought to be a help file of some kind explaining its network capabilities.

[Would explain further, but he suspects she can figure it out.]

[He'd be right, too!]

I think I found it. Wow, this is pretty advanced stuff...nothing compared to blastia, though, and those didn't exactly come with instructions. Still, it's pretty amazing that it lets you connect to such a large network--I can't believe how much information is here!

Keep in mind that it isn't all true.

... Blastia?

What? If it isn't, why would it be in a database?

Oh, right. It's an ancient technology from my world. The ancients developed it, but their civilization was lost. We'd been digging up blastia and using them, but it took a lot of experimentation since we knew nothing about them. We never did solve all their mysteries...and we probably never will, since we had to give up that technology. It was...well, to put it simply, it was destroying the world.

The internet is comprised of more than scholarly sources. Any person can put whatever he or she wants on it; fiction or fact, or one posing as the other.

It sounds a little more serious than high Carbon Dioxide emissions. What precisely is a blastia, then?

Huh. So it's not just a high-tech scholarly journal, then. Sifting through the junk must be a pain unless you know where to look.

Oh, is that an issue in your world? The basic principle is the same, that too much of something can be really harmful. I guess I should start with aer, which is fuel for blastia. Aer is a fundamental component of our world present in everything, just like the elements that form matter. Aer usually can't be seen though, and if it is visible it's not a good thing, since dense aer has detrimental effects on all living creatures. It can make people sick, drive monsters into a frenzy, and cause plants to grow wild.

Anyway, aer comes from...fountains of a sort, I guess, called aer krenes. But with blastia using aer as their power source, the aer krenes had to keep outputting more to the put that even they grew so unstable that they were dangerous. They could be brought under control by very powerful creatures, the Entelexeia, but since they didn't exactly feel like sharing their problems, humans fought with them and there weren't many left. They weren't enough to keep it under control...especially with us humans continually excavating more blastia. Basically, this led to the birth of the Adephagos, which--well...I guess you could imagine it as a giant monster, say, the size of the moon that was trying to eat the planet.

[She'll give him a moment to absorb all that.]

Far from it. The best approach is to not take anything at face value.

[He needs less than the moment, able to grasp it well enough. Accepting the unlikely was a part of life in the City, except-]

The size of the moon?

... Trying to eat the planet.

... Suffice to say, I am quite sure that global warming will not result in that.

Saying it was a bad situation would be putting it mildly. We've given up the blastia, so that's solved the major problems, but it also means that we have to change the very way we live. Blastia were used for everything...providing water in fountains, manufacturing tools, and, most importantly, they powered barriers to keep cities safe from monsters. It's been difficult, but...it definitely beats being swallowed up by that thing.

Understandably. How, then, are cities kept safe? Greater walls?

...We're kind of still working on that. Some cities already had walls to protect them while others had nothing but the barriers. The knights of the empire and the warrior guilds have managed to band together to protect the cities as best they can but that's also harder than it used to be, since we even used blastia for fighting. Bodhi blastia allowed people to use magic and other special abilities, so it's hard when it all just suddenly disappears.

...I guess we took it for granted that we'd always have the blastia.

So it would seem. So now you've no magic; what about drawing water? There are, of course, other methods to obtain and filter it.

Exactly. The world didn't come to a complete stop--the aque blastia, for example, were already connected to underground water sources; it was just a matter of making them more accessible, things like that. The only thing we really lost was the convenience.

It's not like we're starting completely over though, either. One of the ways the aer was brought under control was by converting it to mana, a more stable state that's also closer to matter. Just before I came here, I had successfully built a mechanism to run on mana and was working on improving and testing it. That's how I was still able to cast that spell earlier.

I'd say our biggest loss, actually, might be Aspio. It was a city where nearly all the world's current knowledge was held and studies conducted, and where the empire's scholars lived. It was destroyed in the whole mess, so all that information and people are gone. There are only a few dozen mages at most left right now.

It sounds like quite a world. Judging by your ability with that mechanism, I take it you once lived in Aspio?

[Young for a scholar, but she fits the bill.]

I did. It was my home and I worked there studying blastia. ...It's...you know, if I hadn't been running all over the world at that time with everyone, I probably would've been there too when it happened.

[It isn't as though he cares. He barely knows this girl. Doesn't at all. Why should he?]

Given what you've already accomplished since stopping use of blastia, it sounds as though the world ought to be grateful you weren't lost.

O-oh, well, yeah...I-I guess so. [She does know it herself, but hearing people say it is always a different matter. So strange.]

It still has a long ways to go, though. There are some problems to work out and I want to be absolutely sure that putting it into large-scale use won't cause harm to the planet like before.

Of course. I expect you intend to work on at least the theory here, though you may forget any progress made upon returning?

[Video] The Rhyme is a lie

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You mean everything ISN'T true on the net? :O

O-of course it is! Ishida is a LIAR.

There goes my LOLcat spelling lessons. ):

W-will you survive?! - 1/2

2/3 woops!

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I'll just go to the other source of infinite knowledge--television!

what, not tabloids!?

they r 2 smrt four me

o i no rite...

y they so intelegunt?

cos dey have amazing sources!1!1

omg u so rite!one

/adjusts glasses 8) - 1/2

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you left a smudge!

o shi --! /makes it worse

fingerprints oh noes

the worst! /wrists

/knees oh wait that do more than smudge D:

ksdfns t-to say the least!

/scrubs with steel wool