[s-b] [auto] Wonko submits p168

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Wonko has submitted a new proposal, p168.

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Proposal 168/0: Seizing Souls in a Strangely Shaped Space
A Proposal by Wonko
Last modified on nweek 94, nday 3

[[
"Weird place." I coughed slightly at the dust. "How long do you think it's been since the last time anyone came in here?"

"Fifty years, maybe?" said The Voice. "Maybe longer. I dunno."

I gazed around at the scenery. It was a pretty typical abandoned house - dust and cobwebs, no power, here and there some debris blocking doorways.

"I heard this place is haunted. Somebody died here, I think."

The Voice snorted. "There are what, six billion people in the world? Thousands of people die every minute. I doubt there's an inch of solid ground where somebody hasn't died."

"True."

A pulse of lightning illuminated the room much better than our flashlights did, briefly.

"Man, there are a lot of doors here." I kicked at one; it didn't move.

"Yeah, I tried a few. They're all locked."

"Huh. Who locks every single door in their house?"

"Whoever abandoned it probably closed up before leaving." came a voice.

We spun to face the door.

"Peter! You scared the hell out of us! What're you doing here?!"

"Same thing you are, keeping out of that storm."

"Anyone there?" called out someone outside. Sonnet stumbled in, dripping wet.

"I found Wonko and Voice. I don't know where the others are."

I turned my flashlight towards em. "There are other players here already?"

"I think pretty much everyone's here somewhere. Eugene mumbled something about looking for Souls. Said he thought they all went here."

"What do you mean, they went here? They don't have locations. You can get 'em from anywhere."

I reached out with my mind to claim SkArcher's Soul, just to demonstrate.

It's an interesting feeling, when you're so used to something's presence that you don't notice it anymore, and then when it's not there you don't even notice until you reach for it. It's like someone removed the handle to your front door, and replaced it with a painted tissue mock-up. You reach for it without ever entertaining the slightest notion that you should even begin to consider the merest possibility that it isn't there, and then when it completely fails to be where you expect you just wave your hand there with a stupid look on your face while your brain tries to explain what happened without acknowledging that the handle isn't there.

That's about how I felt for a few seconds while I did the mental equivalent of waving my arms wildly through the air and dislocating my shoulder. Not only were the Souls not there, but ''there'' wasn't even there. I couldn't feel even a trace of someplace Souls might've been, much less an actual Soul.

"See, it no longer works. Somehow the Lost Souls all moved into this House; I think we need to find them before we can do anything with them."
]]
At the end of the second paragraph of r7-1, add the sentence "Players may only take possession of Lost Souls that are in the same Room as they are."
[[

"Wait, shh!" The Voice motioned us silent. Somewhere in the distance there was a faint crackling noise, the sound of a Lost Soul being claimed.

"I think it's coming from over here..." 

I snapped out of my mental arm-waving session and looked at the door Voice's flashlight was on. Unlike the others, it was slightly open, and a faint blue glow came from the other side of it. We went through it, into a long stone passageway. The blue glow got brighter as we neared the end of the hall. Finally, we came out into the room at the end.

And stopped, staring.

We'd found the other players. They didn't notice us; they were too busy watching the fireworks.

We'd also found the Lost Souls. They didn't notice us either; they were too busy being the fireworks.

They filled the room, clouds of ghostly blue smoke whirling and dancing about the ceiling. From time to time, one tuft of the scintillating mass would harden into the shape of a player long gone, only to dissolve back into the froth. All throughout the cloud little spherical nuclei of energy glowed bright blue, casting strange shadows on the walls and throughout the smoke of spirits. Occasional crackles of energy arced from sphere to sphere, further complicating the mass of shadows. It was an incredible sight to behold.

Of course, we'd all seen Lost Souls before, so it wasn't that spectacular. I turned my attention to the rest of the room, or at least what I could see of it. The room wasn't very wide: eight feet at the most, I guessed. It was about two stories tall, with most of the Souls floating in the upper story. And it was really, really long. I couldn't see the other end. 

The walls were covered with paintings. I recognized some of them from where I was: Dan, Bean, SkArcher, Wild Card. Others were too far to see. The paintings stretched on as far as I could see; a thin fog clouded vision like a drunken stupor on a equatorial midsummer's day, so I couldn't see how far back the hallway went.

Curious, I set out down the hall.

I passed painting after painting of former players. Uin, Aquarion, Anything McGee... A looming monster scared me briefly I realized that it was in fact a painting of Orc in a Spacesuit, and not an actual Orc in a Spacesuit. Meanwhile, the fog was getting thick enough that I couldn't see more than a foot or two ahead of me, and the souls flickering above me were all but invisible.

The paintings began trailing off. In their place, I found merely empty frames. Some of them had scraps of cloth hanging from the inside rim, as though they'd once held canvases but had been ripped clear. Others looked completely unused. I could only assume that these would one day be filled with we current players, as we eventually left the game for higher things.

By this point the fog was very thick; I couldn't see more than a few inches ahead of me, and I couldn't make out the far wall at all.

I contemplated turning back, when I suddenly came upon a frame that still had a painting in it.

It was Orc in a Spacesuit. 

Again. 

I frowned. Why would e be in here twice? I continued further. It seemed that everyone was duplicated at this end. There was Uin again, and Lord Gregarian, and M'cachessilnath... The fog was thinning again, and I saw other lights up ahead. I walked forward, and stopped in bemusement.

There ahead of me were the other players.

"Anything back there?" asked The Voice.

"How did you get here ahead of me?" I demanded. They gave me quizzical looks.

"Get where?"

"To the other end of this room!"

"What do you mean? We never moved."

I stared at them. "I just went into the fog back there, right?"

"Yes. And then you came back out."

"So I'm back where I started?"

"Well, yes. That's what happens when you turn around."

"I didn't turn around."

They looked at me quizzically. "How'd you get back here then?"

"I have no idea. It got really foggy, I couldn't see much, but I kept going straight. When it thinned again, I came out back here."

They looked at each other, now. Each of them thought it through, and as far as I could tell they each concluded at exactly the same time that I was lying through my teeth, because as one they all moved off into the fog. I waited expectantly.

I confess that I looked a little bit smug when they came back out, staring astonishedly at the paintings they'd passed moments earlier. Only a tiny bit, I'm sure.

A few hours later, we still hadn't figured out why that happened, but it certainly happened reliably. We tried putting all sorts of things back there. lasers dissipated into the fog, bowling balls came rolling back, and a rather stupid idea with a bow and arrow left a hole in Triller's hat; we also managed to tie a rope to it's other end, and we found that we actually couldn't pull it back out without untying it. 

Somehow I found myself not really caring. It had been a bit disconcerting the first time through, but I've found that since the week I spent floating without definable attributes following the DimShip crisis, strange happenings don't really faze me anymore. No matter what happens, I always find myself thinking that no matter what happens, at least I know my own amplitude.

Of course, from what I've seen that's practically a guarantee that I'll cease to know it one of these days, but I guess I'll deal with that when it happens. In the meantime, I'm going to go back to playing with the warp in space.
]]

[[
Author's note: This proposal probably has the greatest "story content to real content" ratio of any prop I've ever written. 
]]

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