Book 2, I Am Legion, Alpha Ver 0.16

I am Legion page 1 of 91
I am Legion
The metaphysical sequel to the
“Seize the Deity” romance
by Charles A. Rockafellor
CAUTION:
Reader discretion recommended.
LEGAL DISCLAIMER:
Most of the characters (some liberties having been taken with their personalities and physical features)
and artwork are not mine (e.g.: not any fanart, clipart, etc. – but illustrations in the appendices are my
own work), and there are a number of pop-culture references and quotes that certainly aren't mine
either, nor are the songs. About the only things that I can lay any claim to are the story line itself, and
some of the geography.
NB: See https://archiveofourown.org/works/24354049 for most recent completed version (and

minor edits sometimes).
Book 2, I am Legion, ALPHA VER 0.16.b + AO3.odt

© 2018, 2019, 2020 Charles A. Rockafellor
~~~ ~~~ ~~~
A world-shattering threat looms in the murk of the immediate future, and on its heels
comes a cure worse than the symptoms. Given free reign, The Obelisk would unleash
literal hell on all life – and given free reign, Daemon would stop at nothing to prevent
this.
Unbeknownst to all, greater powers still than they make moves on the chess board of
reality itself, exchanging not only pieces, but the significance and even “sides” thereof.
Embarking on a mission to stop all of this, our heroes brave the teeth of the
Dagurashibanipal mountain range once more, in search of a way to stop the wheel of
fortune grinding down all that they know.
~~~ ~~~ ~~~
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dramatis Personæ......................................................................................................................................6
Prologue: All roads lead to a singularity.................................................................................................10
Chapter 1: The coming storm..................................................................................................................11
Act II: When the mountain comes to you...............................................................................................15
Act III: The Final Derivative...................................................................................................................19
Chapter <last>: Butter side (|↓↓〉 - |↑↑〉) / √2.....................................................................................24
Epilogue: Back to Kansas.......................................................................................................................25
Postpartum...............................................................................................................................................34
Afterword.................................................................................................................................................36
APPENDIX A: The Soundtrack..............................................................................................................49
APPENDIX B: Deleted and Alternative scenes......................................................................................50
APPENDIX C: The Game Beyond.........................................................................................................53
APPENDIX D: The Categorical Logic Cube..........................................................................................54
APPENDIX E: The Hadron Octahedron.................................................................................................62
APPENDIX F: Powers and Principalities...............................................................................................71
SCRIBBLED NOTES TO GET BACK TO.............................................................................................82
EDITORIAL NOTE:
This is an ALPHA version. The file name indicates my estimation of its

completeness so far (e.g.: 0.3 would indicate a guess of ~30% of the final version).
Some portions are fairly complete and polished, others are scripted outlines, and
some bits are just inserted short notes. Text in RED font indicates material that I
expect to edit (usually) or delete (probably struck-through).
I will keep this note throughout the alpha and beta versions (eventually updating it
slightly when the story finally reaches beta phase).
If you wish to share this, then share the folder's URL (rather than the .pdf's URL) – I
replace the documents when I upload new versions:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BG7P_sVezz8Dn5b8js_34yeAjSBhfN0v
The URL above also holds a sub-folder (at the URL below) that contains several spin-
off stories related to “Seize the Deity” in particular – and at least one right now (“Meat
pies”) that's set in Jötunheimr – of the greater cosmography of the “Icewall” meta-
setting:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MPusb6PkF-P7O28RAuzF55mdQfrb_Xgo
Simplest of all, just go to

https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charles_Rockafellor/collections
Also: please note that while the hyperlinks to websites seem unaffected, the internal
hyperlinks to other areas within this .pdf seem to function only before uploading and
after downloading – for some reason, they seem to be nonfunctional when the .pdf is
viewed while it's still on my Google Drive.
A similar issue applies to the comments and bookmarks not being visible at all while
the .pdf is still on my Google Drive (I think that I've fixed that, but no guarantees).
RULE: Any world (no matter how improbable) in a spatiotemporally infinite rule-based random
universe is virtually certain to exist (merely occupying a smaller portion of phase space).
Corollary: Any world that someone thinks is “cool,” given sufficiently advanced means of production,
is virtually certain to be produced.
Zelda series:
Book 0a, Zelda Invictus

Book 0b, Sonic's Redemption
Book 1, Seize the Deity -- Zelda x Peach
08a Deathclaw, the tale of Mister Fluffykins (Zelda x Peach)
08 Alexander's horned cabinet (Zelda x Peach)
10 Sock hop (Zelda x Peach)
28 Nightmare at 20,000 RPM (Zelda x Peach)
Book 1a, What evil lurks -- Link
Book 2, I am Legion
Light World sidequels:
07 To be (Zelda x Peach world)
Icewall shared universe:
Icewall
05 Meat pies (Icewall setting, Jötunheimr)
Book 1b, Nyjötnar Saga
Book 1c, The Colony
Book 1d, Tales from The Ice
...and many more at

https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charles_Rockafellor/collections
/// --- ///

Dramatis Personæ
► Return to contents ◄
Empress Zelda Hylia of Hyrule, a Hylian
Imperial Queen Peach Toadstool of the Mushroom Kingdom, a half-Human
Sir Sonic the Hedgehog, Grand Count of Monte Mortis and surrounds, Lord of the Realm... somewhat
to his chagrin
Miles “Tails” Prower, High Magister of Imperial Technologies
Ruru, a Kaijin
Mister Fluffykins (Deathclaw) [no picture available]
High-Royal Princess Daisy Sarasa of Sarasaland, Prime Minister of the Hyrule Empire and
Ambassador Plenipotentiary, a Human and cousin to Queen Peach
Princess Kitana of Edenia, Duchess of the Outer Marches
Wila “Friday” Mesquite, hereditary Grand Countess of Monte Mortis and surrounds, peer of the Realm,
Deku Scrub triplets
Shīfù Lǎorén, the Immortal Wombat [no picture available]
The Obelisk
Dame Daemon, a Power
Negent [IPA: 1nɛːg 2ɛnt; not 1Ni 2gan], Tiānlóng, a Principality
O ~~~ O
Prologue: All roads lead to a singularity

Lǎorén's transit along the Moonbeam Roads never actually took long, but always felt long... and short.
Impossible colors scintillated through every bodily sense – bluish-yellow, reddish-green and a
shimmering coppery-green, actinic silvery-tan just slightly beyond violet, hyper-green, Stygian blue,
self-luminous red, hyperbolic orange, tetrablue, the sensation of a heat that felt gray-cold – and always
this sense of being watched, at least sometimes.
In the background of his observations, a part of him that slept while passing through here, the part
that would normally act while awake, was seated in his home. Its southern yard held a gentle breeze on
a warm day, the creek burbling along through sunlight and shade, the bamboo pipe of a sōzu filling
periodically, decanting, and in the process sounding itself softly against a smooth stone set into the
surface of a hollowed wood, their two-toned clack and thunk counterpointing the simple hum of a brass
bowl rubbed continuously by a watermill as he went methodically through from one mudrā to the next.
Farther off, the suikinkutsu added its gentle chiming clamor to the whole.
Rin. Fingers woven through one another, indices pointing forward, thumbs paralleling them.
Pyō. The same, now with middle fingers curled around the indices.
Tō. Ring and pinkie extending outward, middle fingers folded inward to rings, indices over these,
with thumbs peaked upward.
Sha. Kai. Jin.
And so it went for whatever passed as the duration here.
Retsu. Zai. Zen.
O ~~~ O
Chapter 1: The coming storm

T: In summary, we're now standing at seven standard deviations – that is, the last of the zombie issue
can reasonably be considered closed; this world has no aether or phlogiston fields – and luckily there
seem to be neither rifts nor chaos magic incursion points beyond the damage that WBD wrought; some
of the telluric currents are perfectly straightforward, and some make no sense at all; G seems to be
variable over time and space, though there might be some two- or three-wave periodicity to that; time
itself, well...
Z ...?
T: Well, do you buy a map or wander the woods? The sky refracts light as if it were a prismatic
surface, changing the sun's light frequencies and concentrations all across the world-pond, not to
mention that the sun literally rises from a hole in The Ice about ten thousand miles from the border,
setting in pretty much the same way to the west, and the moon... seems to act under principles that
we've to ascertain. We've mapped the ley lines pretty thoroughly now, along with all of the major and
middling chi pools and arcane streams and tides, and Kremlantis has enormous spikes of all of these,
though there's something funny going on in the sub-dimensional underpinnings of the Mushroom
Kingdom and Sarasaland and even the Koopa Kingdom, though Koopa has its own complications with
infernal energies and zooic vampirism, not to mention that Hyrule proper is temporally unstable – but
seriously, you guys have had a continuously-standing culture here for nearly seven thousand years at a
minimum, and you don't know all of this stuff already? Or even any of it? I don't want to nag, but you
guys' history shows zero Kondratiev wave action, just a handful of Kolmogorov strange attractors. It's
just... there's something artificial about the whole arrangement.
P: Aleph one'll bite yer head off. <wink>
S: What about the spin zone?
T: Something like spinors and twistors, just not exactly; it's kinda like there are twenty-six
dimensional orbifolds operating within an eleven dimensional continuum, but it's not as if they're
projected shadows, it's more like they're holographically self-interacting quasicrystals, and that just
doesn't make any sense! Even if they were embedded the other way around, I'm pretty sure that you'd
need a full two hundred forty-two Euclidean dimensions, not twenty six. As it stands though, imagine a
disc having volume to it – clearly two-dimensional, but taking its integral gives you one-third of a
cubic volume, where a normal three-ball would yield four-thirds of a cubic volume. Now apply that to
a situation with relative dimension fifteen.
<T's face shows as partly miserable and frustrated, partly fascinated and elated>
P: We shouldn't rule out anything until it's strictly ruled out.
T: Look, it's as if the Hagedorn temperature were identical to absolute cold 1 in some crazy modulo –
1 Hagedorn: He's close. In Icewall, there's a Penrose triangle of perpetual motion cycle going on, continuously replenishing {scientific
energies with magical and zooic, magical with scientific and zooic, zooic with magical and scientific} like a set of interlinked
perpetual motion wheels, and all without incurring entropic debt. Picture it as an Unruh effect in an inertial frame of reference, or
quark pair creation without spending the energy attempting to separate a confined pair. That's a tidbit from Encyclopædia Trantorica
like resonant frequencies reaching a maximum point of addition and continuing to higher levels
through cancellation, or a projective geometric infinity. We know a lot now, but I'm still not a quantum
computing tachyonic biocell. I need time and more math and information.
Z: tacky-what?
T: Put simply, Arrakis has a land area that's twice as large as it should be, given that continent's
shoreline – it's as if it were a hemisphere unto itself. You have a sea of arcane energy streaming down
from the northeast, centered on the Great Northern Forest, cinnabar mutants abound in the northern end
of Schöndunkelundtief Forest, and that in turn churns with primal energies, weird dead ghost stuff and
living spirits abound from there to Ouroboros, and that mountain is a powder keg of divine energies.
Whatever happened to your world, it's completely off the charts.
Also, while not related to the other matters to date, you might want to know about this too. It seems
that a series of adventures is being written and circulated by your fans, without much care being given
to historical or anatomical accuracy – or even basic vocabulary, spelling, grammar, or punctuation –
and often rather bawdy; they've also developed some of their material into a game form, a lot like
7r0115 and Flame-Warz, and in some cases the two have plot lines that intersect with events in the real
world around us, which gets particularly weird if the characters break the fourth wall at any point, or
the authors insert themselves into the narrative. Of course, if the Belousov–Zhabotinsky conjecture of
quantum thaumo-zooics is correct, then it does lead to some pretty uncomfortably disturbing
implications about the ultimate nature of reality,” he looked around the room vaguely, as if concerned
that a mime might pop out from behind a crack in the wallpaper, “It all gets a bit meta from there...”
P looked increasingly disturbed by thoughts of what her fans might have her doing in their stories.
“...and all of that is without the crossover material with established fictional characters,” he
concluded, “and some of them even have fan-fics written by the characters within the fics themselves.”
“Wait,” Zelda interjected, “you mean established stuff like Spell Trek?”
“Actually, yeah, that's one of the more popular ones currently – along with the fanon Spell Quest
and The Spellville, of course. That and the Sciencenatural series.”
And so it was that he and Zelda found themselves deep in discussion as Peach's thoughts ran away
with embarrassing fears.
S: How much o' this shit can we use against this Daemon chick?
T + P confer briefly.
T: As things stand, not really any of it. Maybe if we had time...
S: We need ta nuke her from orbit. It's the only way ta be sure.
P: It wouldn't work, even if we could.
S raises eyebrows.
P: It'll be alright. It's just like when you taught me how to fight: 'Never give up; never surrender!'.”
S: Yer like the daughter I'll never have.
sci: grav, electromag, strong, weak; technicolor, SuSy, hypercharge, etc.

mag: arcane (wiz/sor), divine & infernal (cleric & warlock), primal, entropic & chaotic
zooi: psionics, chi, mutation, PPE, ISP, bio-E, blood pool, morphogenic field theory
P: we go see Daemon. Talk to her. Face her directly.

S to P: <sighs to self> Piffany... you gotta take out an armed camp, or even an individual, ya go
quiet, no chivalry, maybe halfway through the last watch o' the night. Hell I dunno, load a computer
virus into her mothership or some'n – anything's better'n tryna talk her out of it.
[low-Kardashёv 3] though, and they have only the Encyclopædia Krustallosica [mid-Kardashёv 2].
Shoot the hostage: someone wants ta lean on ya, you tell everyone whatever it is that they wanna
squeeze you with. They put one o' yours in the hospital, you put ten o' theirs in the morgue. An' when
ya' can, ya do unta them before they do unta you. No chest-beatin' warnin's, no bluffin' threat bullshit –
they reach, you finish it right then 'n' there.
P: We have to try talking. It's just like what Tails told me about superlogic and Nash Equilibria in
game theory way back.
T looks around, a little surprised at having been brought up.
Z: you're not coming, Princess.
R: nanndayo?!?
P explains whole world will be dead. That includes her and their child. Need full effort. Ends with
playful “...and anyway, you can just blame yourself for this: it's your fault that I'm in this condition.”
Zelda holding her, Peach felt close, safe, warm. She felt a pull to nuzzle, to bury herself in Zelda's
arms, though now was hardly the right time – it wasn't an iron grip, not possessive, but there was
something of the irresistible to it. A stray thought crossed her mind that she could well lose herself in
these arms and be happy for it.
S: Iacta alea esto.
S pulls P aside later, asks how she's doing. She's still early on, but he's noted her change in carriage,
center of gravity, voice and clothing, and carefully skirts the question of fighting while pregnant.
P had T cast katana and wakizashi for Z's birthday (S had a hard-copy of “Go rin no sho” printed from
the Encyclopædia in High Imperial Common, to match them): honeycombed tungsten carbide core,
tantalum carbide body (nano-deposited to form molecular braiding), graphene skin; micro-fractal
feathering, blood groove mod, overall soshu kitae design.
Debate ensues over bringing them, but real-world practicality outweighs minimizing balance of
power vs. Daemon.
P → Z, re P bkfst bed: Mmm? Same as you? French toast w/ maple-flavored corn syrup, salty
margarine-drenched toast with three or four different jellies and some confectioner's sugar – ooh, and
honey, half-dozen soft boiled eggs with lots of salt and chilled margarine, half-dozen hard boiled eggs
with a ton of margarine, and half a gallon of milk? Ooh, and a pile of bacon and sausage links! And
maybe some scrambled eggs, and a kitchen sink omelette with hot sauce. And a big bowlful of
honeydew!
R: Watashi mo sukoshi hoshī...!
T presents looping holographic painting of mommy teddy bear reading to baby bear, for the nursery.
Fully 3d panorama of the cave room, with the nearest wall always invisible to the view, whichever
angle it was viewed from, it plays out continuous stories from the mama bear in P's voice, turning the
pages as they go, and showing the holographic illustrations that pop up from each one.
S: Ya got two or three missed meals before people start freakin' out; two or three days before it all goes
ta hell. Couple o' people start ta worry, here and there, so they tell two friends, and they tell two friends,
and so on, and so on, and so on; next thing ya know, yer fucked. Whole damn city's lootin' an' riotin',
'cept fer whoever's holed up 'n' hidin' in their apartments or their mom's basement, hordin' a box o'
Twinkies against the apocalypse.
S: I think yer damn' Nayru just adopted me, Z.

Z: ?
S: Ya got one o' them stogies I can maybe bum offa ya?
<done>
S: Y'know this cozy li'l family unit thing ya got goin' wit' P? Well, get ready ta be an auntie.
Z: <hug> Who's the mom?
S: We're not really sure. We all had this weird dream an' this Deku nut was just sittin' there when we
woke up, complete wit' a freakin' blue ribbon tied in a bow. Nayru-blue, in case ya couldn't guess.
Z: What's the cheese for?
S: <shoves some into one ear, prepping another chunk> We're tellin' P, right? The same P you sleep
with? The Little Blonde Fuck Machine, as you put it a little while ago? The one who freaks out over
everything – happy or sad or whatever else?
Z: <hand shoots forth> Hand me the cheese.
P's plan is to approach openly, not guns blazing and touching off anything that could otherwise be
averted; S suggests modify to go there quietly by way of an informal state visit to Duhan, avoiding
drawing attention unnecessarily while en route. Seeing P's look, he hastily clarifies “Whoa, hey – no
covered wagons, I swear!”, hands raised before himself. Mollified, P agrees, feeling that Daemon's
timing isn't so near as to require their immediate arrival.
Deathclaw smells their death-hunt scent, senses their nervousness; follows rather insistently.
P and DF make cat noises. She headbutts him with an insistent mrr.
DF follows her look back inside, glances at others, stares at door with a short, dismissive growl and
sudden snort; up on hind legs, leans on her chest as if to hug her, plunks his paw onto her head with a
short push-down.
P's shoulders slump.
S: <watches this, glances at DF, then P> I dunno what you guys just said, but uhh... you just lost an
argument... to a cat?
P nods glumly.
S: A'ight. Just checkin'. <turns back toward the others> An' then there was six... good thing I packed
plenty o' stuff fer bacon-mushroom-feta-omelette wraps wit' cream cheese. Well, c'mon Clifford – or
amybe I should call you Battle Cat. <glances at Z, then P> Marceline, Bubblegum... you ready? We're
goin' ta Candy Mountain.
Skaven ruins look like “Girls' last tour”. Giant statue sticks out of ground enigmatically (Easter Island
head, w/ right hand holding torch at sky). Plenty of cockentrices running wild in the area; rich salty
flavor, meat that just falls apart, skin that roasts nice and crisp... A few moorses stand around, grazing;
S thinks that it might be worthwhile to come back for some breeding stock at some later point.
Ancient gravitomotive fountain holds some of Città Mundi aloft.
Skaven use yupanacus2 number-sticks for basic math; Tails and Peach exchange a look – these are
slide rule discs and nomograms. Take steampunk airship through Undercold toward border of Duhan.
Mutant sewer-gators eye them lazily as they take off, a sharkodile prowling along the outskirts.
Along Dagurashibanipal mountain range: coulda used those damn' flyin' bison last year.
P: we don't have flying bison.
<all look worried>
2 Yupanacus: /ɟɟʝuˈpanaˌkʊs/ a macramé-like array of thin threads of some ancient unbreakable material. The knotty bits are used for
tracking words, numbers, pictures, sensory data of any kind. The array itself is somewhat multidimensional, incorporating colors
(varied with torque applied while knotting), knots (types & sizes), and topographic contours.
~2630 mi Capital to Skaven (290 to sea, 1661 on sea, 680 from sea)
~2857-2915 mi Skaven to Mt Dgrsh
→ 5489-5547 mi total travel
Act II: When the mountain comes to you

Command tent, Eagle of the Ninth. Dame Daemon's adjutants, Cassius and Bella, stand to either side
of her.
The Felinthrope stood there gazing at the table. High Marshal Marcus Aurelius's gaunt frame
looked underfed as he hunched his shoulders, belying the danger ever lurking beneath the surface even
with the ragged scar running down the left side of his face.
“I suppose that killing them all is out of the question, as usual?”
Daemon smiled beatifically, “Mas oui, bien sûr non! To do so would be rude. Allors: we go in, we
find the box. Je comprends pas this obsession of yours always with killing them all.”
Legio IX c121+ AD.
Marcus
http://www.exovedate.com/the_real_gladiator.html
DAEMON: what varied tech.s available?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRnQFGskg9w norm phys, alt eng designs x5
WH40k vehicles?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sENgdSF8ppA magnetic breaking (Matrix-like, slightly)
Cthulhu insanity in Cepheus/Traveler (aiming for Abyss, but good for Icewall too):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1560107317619028/permalink/1889897821306641/
https://spacecockroach.blogspot.com/2018/08/some-initial-thoughts-about-sanity-in.html
Spartakus?
Marcus reclined on a perch in his room.

Soft water splashing down wall, viewscreen open to blindspot-gray with subliminal swirls of non-
colors.
Goes over memories. Food denial, loss, laughter, declawing.
Dog Boys, fights, dog boxing techniques. Not allowed to kill each other so often.
Swigs sweetened cream with shots of fermented fish juice from drinking horn, its griffon legs
curling back to its body as he lifted it.
AT DAGURASHIBANIPAL
The air feel viscid, as if stiffening, but thinner, more porous. Door opens in air before the party as
room forms around them, the walls fifty feet distant in every direction. Marcus rolls out w away team.
All tense.
M focuses immediately on S, each acknowledging an unspoken recognition between them.
P breaks things up w/ smile. “Hi, there! My name is Peach, and this is my family. Would you be so
kind as to take me to your leader?3”
M stares in amazement at her words, while noting also the subtleties of her movements. She was
well trained, for all of her cheerful exterior.
Scans the rest slowly, pausing at S.
S raises eyebrows at him and shrugs, “Multipass?”
M gives fish-eye, finishes scan, w/ briefer pauses at T and Z.
M also notes presence of DF prowling just in front of P; an irrelevant pre-sophont, but DF's
uncertain status makes him an interesting indicator to watch.
APPOINTMENT IN SAṂSĀRA
Daemon → P + Z: what are you?
P: An empress and her wife. She's Hylian, and I'm half-Toad.
D: Non, you misunderstand. Not <waves hand at bodies> this. You. Inside. I cannot see you.
P + Z exchange a look.
Z: What can't ye see?
Dae: Everything. You are quiet to me.
Awkward silence.
Dae: You are Powers, yes?
Another look.
P: She's a Goddess and I'm Ōkami.
Z gives P a look, pissed over cat out of bag.
3 Smile: Negotiating involves being there, listening. This isn't just something that you read someplace; it's true, it works (though I
admit that I wouldn't have considered Peach's approach, were I in her shoes). You run into it on a daily basis. Watch your interactions
and their conclusions. Be there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llctqNJr2IU
On a related note, it can help if you catch tells, though you can misinterpret them, so use care.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pni_kDv9BsU & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jwUXV4QaTw
Dae explains Saṃsāra as self-interacting uncollapsed wave function.

As she drones on, S notes that the air is simultaneously pleasantly warm and pleasantly cool, like an
air conditioned forest scented lightly with pine trees and tropical flowers.
Saṃsāra present since previous age – prior yuga. She remembers fractured snippets of the old
world, before The Fall. She remembers even less of the world before that, a great yawning void, with
worlds spread out across vast emptiness, where once their science caught echoes of membrane
universes smashing together like particles driven to near light speed casting a shadow of doubt upon
theirs having been the first existence. She's not sure if she lived back then as well, or merely knows of
that age, and ponders whether time is ultimately linear or cyclical or fundamentally crystalline, possibly
even fractally acausal. What she is now is only a ghost of what she had been.
S: So yer all Doctor Manhattan now, an' tryna set right what once went wrong, huh? Sounds more
like Doctor Detroit t'me.
Dae: <laughs> You have the sparkling humor!
S: Finally someone who gets my shit!
Z: Then rather more of a Seingeist than a Zeitgeist.
Daemon arches brow in surprised but pleased amusement.
Time and distance are relative in Saṃsāra. Walking from A to B takes as long or short as you need, by
a path and a distance (not necessarily commensurate with that path) that you need, with others
experiencing a wait-time that they need (regardless of the time that you experienced).
Personalities distill. Screaming bloody murder, Z chases S like mid-'teens, S cackling and Z's clothing
drenched and covered in flour.
P finds them relaxing in a medium-sized Ten Forward, the view set to some Paleozoic jungle with a
brilliant sky full of stars and nebulae, just as Z's singing some ditty boisterously “...in the mo-o-orning;
nothing could be sweeter than to spread her le–hey, Princess!” she closes abruptly in breathless
excitement. Z's entire demeanor livens up as she almost leaps from her seat to kiss P, then pulls her
down to sit with them on soft fluffy comfy curved sofa.
P asks if everything's O.K..
Z says things are great – her girl in one arm, her best mate in the other; they're perfect. Like a
drunken Wolfen teenager.
P: They sneak out of their rooms to watch intervision late at night?
Z gives her a look
P: I never did that – I just thought about it a few times... <after a moment> you smell nice, by the
way.
Z: <semi-embarrassed mumble> I took a bath earlier, using some of your stuff – right before this
idiot pranked me.
P smiles and kisses her.
S: Hey, remember back on the island, when I said yer princess would come someday?
Z nods.
S: Toldja so.
Z: <shakes head> Just drink, ye bloody git.
Z becomes content, happy even.

P finds mature stability within herself.
S isn't continuously on edge.
R is thoughtful and insightfully sympathetic.

T is more focused.
DF becomes Awakened [partly uplifted in this case: color vision works its way through his opsins
and visual cortex] (Daemon's gift of Tongues transferred to all for DF-specific, and to DF for dialects of
Common). Like a thin wave washing backward across sand to reveal the now-smooth surface, the
sounds that the Tall Ones had been making became as clear to him in their meaning as had he been
watching and smelling the cats of their pack, a candle suddenly illuminating a previously coal-black
room of objects. Then, growing conscious of another change impinging slowly upon his senses,
Deathclaw's body shifted, becoming more tightly bunched, ears pulling backward and downward.
Squinting and blinking rapidly, a low humming-growl came forth, “What is this? What's wrong with
the things in front of me? Their... colors?”
P squeals happily and hugs him; Dae explains what she's done.
S calls him Tralfaz. DF cocks head in confusion, P explains to him (half in Common, half in cat)
that S doesn't always make much sense, others follow all of P's creole.
S: Anyone else's ears feel all funny from not hearin' half o' what we just heard?
R finds him even cuter and takes to calling him NekoYasha, making S chuckle with a rejoinder of
“Kirara.”
M finds P inexplicably compelling; calming.
Daemon explains Obelisk, Dharma. Risk of ipsissimus. Dae can't risk it. P and Z not sure of. S and
maybe T should be OK. Know selves. Strong faith.
DC/F picking through assortment of angels and devils on horseback, trying every flavor available.
S: ain't no choir boy here, lady.
Dae: never said religion, only faith.
S unsure how to respond. Ruffled and displaying a false bravado, he replied “Yeah, well... the best
o' me is diligence.”
P looks back and forth, concerned: what about Fluffykins?
Dae: 'e is a cat. 'e will be perfectly at ease.
S grins, thinks of Epiktḗtou. What upsets people...
Dae smiles gently and inclines her head, leaving him half-frowning.
Room for the Fridays and 11 cats? Fluffykins coming with, else 12.
K & D will want to stay and arrange whatever civ evac they can.
M notes all of this; volunteers to accompany.
O ~~~ O
Act III: The Final Derivative

Empty plain of dark gray, no light source, just self-illuminated nothingness, with scatterings of
regolithic dust and the odd stone or boulder. Not featureless, but so much so that the rare deviation
served only to offer a bleakness more profound than true emptiness might have been.
Catfood drinking horn. Its surface almost seemed to shimmer, introducing a pearlescent depth to its
markings, the eye slipping sideways, trying to find purchase on the polarized amethyst patterns; the
rugose area that Marcus held offered no help as the rest of it carried a more gentle undulation, recalling
ocean-floor sand or surface waves as seen from the floor.
S sniffs. M offers. S & T & DF love it, P & Z taste only cardboard-flavored dry crunchiness, R
keeps nibbling and returning for more.
“My Lady Daemon assures me that it's packed with nutritional requirements – the horn stands as an
artifact from some lost time, responding to my needs while catering to my whim.”
DF → Z: You may sing again.

P smiles.
Z sighs and begins again.
“yIH tun, yIH ghun,

veD yugh moQ ma-ach,
yIH Quch, yIH Doy',
wab, wab, wab.”
Coming up on a pair of large pillars. An old story crosses Sonic's mind, something about three thieves
or three brothers... he focuses on the trek at hand.
M → Z: your mate is insane.
Discussion of why and why not. He guesses that Z might be male, has no clue. He can't tell which
is male or female; other species all smell the same to him. Has been the only one of his own species
that he's known since... <he's unsure, struggling to remember> before his earliest memories.
Devolution: mandrill demons. Id monster. Several Jungian archetype zooic automata.

Not exactly quite the Giger-ish Dali-ish Cthulhu-ish stuff in Science Fiction & Fantasy Without
Labels, but close.
M last stand for others to carry on. P holds him close and he feels a surreal calm that he'd only ever
felt before with Daemon. It remains with him as the party moves on and the demons close in.
Distances now deceiving: short range objects act normally; mid range motions tend toward
orthogonal torque plane (dead ahead recedes, fwd goes left/right, sides semi-near veer out and pace-
minus, sides semi-far veer in and pace-plus, aft bunches inward, dead behind encroaches heavily); long
range stretches far ahead and draws tight behind.
AT DHARMA
demonic and angelic evolutes
S → P: <staring into abyss around obelisk> think we found yer tower, Roland.
Without any sense of displacement, they found themselves within a reasonably spacious room,
though not so large as to feel cavernous. Though the ceiling hinted at phosphene patterns, the
remarkable part was that their arrival felt as natural as if they had walked through a doorway, except for
Tails. He'd had the fleeting impression of being a toroflux of tensegrity, with the strangest sensation of
axes shifting from one mixed state to another; consequently, he was thinking about interference
patterns and Lorentzian invariance upon their arrival.
Coffee table with full service for seven, lounge chairs, green desk lamp, a film projector sitting idle,
Victrola playing softly nearby. A woman is singing, her voice chipper, but she sounds almost sad,
charging the atmosphere similarly nostalgic.
“...trade them for a package of

sunshine and flowers.
If you want the things you love, you must
– you must have showers.
So when you hear it thunder,
don't
run under a tree,
there'll be pennies from heaven
for you and me...”
“I have some unfilmed Max Fleischers, if you're in the mood...”

They turned to see a man sitting in the shadows, the smoke from the hookah stem that he'd just set
down curling gently into the shape of a tiger chasing a dragon in a circle, while the dragon followed the
tiger perpetually by holding onto the tiger's tail. The air itself held a fragrance to it, something like
cinnamon and sugar.
S asks who.
N “On a scale of one to ten, think of me as... an 11.”
A Power?
N: “A Greater Power – a Principality, if you wish,” though the look of distaste that he displayed
made them think that even he wasn't thrilled with the drôle observation “You might most accurately
call me Tiānlóng, though from your perspective Negent would be a closer approximation.
“You see a bird on one side of a piece of paper, a bird cage in the other,” he held up a disc of paper
on a stick, turning it so that they could see the illustrations on either side, “you spin the paper around
for an illusion, presented with the image of a bird within the cage, and while you laugh for the moment
that it's there, it's not there, but is it any less there then than is your laughter when you laugh no more?
“Likewise a ball with a pointillist pattern painted across its surface. All of the dots form part of a
pattern. Were even a single element altered, then the pattern as it stands would be no more – but that's
alright, for then that other pattern would 'the' pattern.
“Talk with the dots of the bird cage... I'm no more here than they. The only difference is that I'm
aware of it,” he glanced across them as if sharing a secret, “just don't let them know that I know,” he
winked, tilting his head upward a little and pointing toward the ceiling with his thumb.
“The narcissist strings together random sentences incoherently, and fails to understand why others
don't appreciate their genius. They see only the stringing together that other artists perform, without
once grasping even that there should exist an inherent love and beauty of creating in itself. A perfect
moment holds within itself all other perfect moments; in a tea ceremony, you bow not only to those
with you, but to all others who could ever be with you, knowing that they know that you know that this
one moment is all that is, or was, or ever will be.”
Sonic brought the back of his hand to his face as he turned to Peach, “I think this guy's a few fries
short of a Valjean's Meal... or maybe he's just been smokin' better stuff than Z's got... or sniffin' a whole
lotta glue... or some'n...”
Negent smiled indulgently in response.
“It is my great pleasure, and misfortune, to address you now, as always. For you, this conversation is
a discrete event; for me, this is one of an infinite number of conversations in superposition, as if the
static three-plus-one dimensional surface of a five-crystal were sculpted into a holographic form and
each infinitesimally thin angle represented a single probability, the whole being the sum of the squared
amplitudes and viewed from every angle simultaneously. A single string in a piano played softly, and
loudly, and sustained, and tapped repeatedly, and not struck at all, while every other string is also
played thus, so that every opus and nocturne rang through the air at once... and every ' Swallow' falls
that can...”
Tails was the only one to nod at this, thinking of the Hartle-Hawking state as he did, though Peach
seemed to work her way through it.
Negent continued, his gaze hovering between the two of them, “You are familiar with Graham's
number...”
Turning to the rest, he clarified, “Every possible conversation between us, and other versions of you,
and other compositions of your party, and entirely different parties – and non-conversational
interactions such as waiting, or acts of aggression, or complete failure – are going on at once, and I'm
thoroughly aware of every single one of them.”
“From every world-pond?” Peach asked, trying to picture beth two. An infinite set of world-ponds
she could work with, and an infinite number of variations thereof shouldn't change this: the size of the
set should stand at aleph null. An infinite set of possible interactions between them, even classing these
as chronological permutations, she could work with as well: the size of this set should thus stand at
beth one. Perhaps treating them as powersets was the wrong direction though, since by induction a
finite to a power, even an infinite one, might still be finite in itself – could it be treated as merely an
extension of multiplication, in which case the cardinality must remain (but then she didn't want to make
any “Monty Hall” mistakes, as Tails put it), or was it truly fundamentally sufficiently different to
qualify here (in which case, just what was so special about the basic nature of combinatoriality that
permitted it to function meaningfully where multiplication failed?)... So many side-thoughts tugging
away for her attention, so many “rabbit holes,” as Zelda might call them...
“From every 'every',” he replied cryptically.
“Beth three...” Tails observed sotto voce, apprehending the touch of the numinous.
Discuss The Game Beyond (ref. Chaos as Kallistṓ, mentions Void has no self-name; P asks about
Ent, N smiles enigmatically); Dharma not being here, but “here” and several others being facets of
dharmic aspects' intersection, with their synthesis culminating as a hypothetically-certain Tào. Beside
the game board sits a terrarium, life and topographic features shifting slowly but clearly as they
watched. S is glad that N doesn't have Billy and Montana tied up in there. N nods, replies that Dae
might have thoughts about that and civilizations destroying themselves. S nods, says it's still a pretty
map, asks if N is a traveling man. N smiles and says that there are many paths to reach any given
destination, east or west. [Negent explains that it's not alive, strictly isn't even physically present, just a
different representation of the same game as is shown on the board.] A modest captain's chair sits
nearby, comfortable and ergonomic, surrounded by a sphere of screens, each displaying a vastly
different scene from the next. No screen alone was large at all, but looking from one to the next
brought what had been a mote into focus as if viewing the whole through a hyperbolic lens.
P shifts uncomfortably. N looks over to her in sympathy.
N → P: the traumas of life affect the flows of probability, which affect life as experienced; these
often manifest in patterns that people become aware of at various levels. Sometimes this is good,
sometimes not.
S: Nice story. Waddya call that invisible rage-monster?
N: Shadow. He said this almost regretfully, as if he would see the world otherwise.
Looking over the board and terrarium against the backdrop of screens, they became aware once
more of the music in the background. Sonic was nodding his head in time, mouthing along with the
lyrics as he watched Negent.
“...folks, now that you have heard my story,

say boy, hand me over another shot of that hooch.
If anyone should ask you,
tell 'em I got those Saint James Infirmary blues...”
T: what's the Chaitan constant for it all?

N: <smiles knowingly> do you really want to go there?
T <thinks a moment, shakes head vigorously>
S: so we're just dancin' monkeys ta you?
N: <quirks smile> in a way... <eyebrow up, hand tilts yes-no> we're all just dancing monkeys.
<smile turns rueful, eyes soften with hint of pain>
S No rest for the Sisyphean...
N “If you'd like to stick around, that offer of the Fleischers still stands, you know...”
As he said this, they realized that the music in the background had changed imperceptibly at some
point, the song having gone on from one to the next.
“Des nuits d'amour à plus en finir

un grand bonheur qui prend sa place,
les ennuis, les chagrins, s'effacent
– heureux, heureux à mourir...”
N: Beth one other PC parties argue similar, though none nearly so compellingly.
P: Beth one?
N: Well... you guys are special. After an infinite string of previous sets, you stand at the omega-
plus-one position, with an equally infinite string of sets yet to come. Of course, the same is true of all
of the others, but you're all just as special for it.
T: Of course. Two omegas is still omega, and even plus one to that still results in the original beth
one set's size remaining unchanged, like a pile of infinitely many zero-thickness sheets.
N nods. “I am... not here as you are; I'm the awareness manifested by negative entropy, and
completely aware of this meeting and all others in a holistic sense, like Brahmā, much as you might be
tangentially aware of the richness of details of a world and all of its parallels within a dream. In this,
I'm not unique; my counterparts enjoy a similar awareness – but we are none of us a guiding awareness
in the sense that you will your own physical actions, finding ourselves aware of our paths and
composition without volition in much the manner that you might imagine of a stream of water.”
P makes inferences on the nature of infinities. N cautions her to be careful <alluding to the no-longer-
future war of succession>.
S: Yeah, well, we're still here ta stop you.

N: “I'm afraid not,” he said, with an oddly poignant tinge, “it would be like gnats waging war
against the shadow of an eclipse.”
S: We might surprise ya.
N holds hand out to seek a moment of forbearance, looking off to an internal scene.
N: If any one of us were to “win,” which you might think would take beth two time at the least, then
what do you suppose would be the ultimate outcome? To win means no further change from that state.
Whether maximum structure or dispersal or true random noise – or true void – the cycle would no
longer continue. I find the Tào unlikely to permit such a state to obtain, though in a self-contradictory
sense, it must also be true somewhere – the separation of wave and particle natures. <he smiles
inwardly> Well, therein lies the beautiful symmetry of Ohr Ayn Sof.
T <mumbles to self>: Like the omega-many intervals of a topologically long line, each containing
aleph one points within themselves but inaccessible to one another in a way, even though sharing
exactly the same system...
As this sank in, Peach noticed the song in the background. Something about it tickled her
subconscious, a memory, a thought...
“...of all the things I value most in life,

I see my memories
and feel their warmth
and know that they are good.
You know that I should...”
O ~~~ O
Chapter <last>: Butter side (|↓↓〉 - |↑↑〉) / √2

N: The Box... the Box can find its way elsewhere.

Peach looked alarmed at this prospect, seeing the implications.
Zelda touched her shoulder gently, shaking her head.
“Sein oder Nichtsein, das ist hier die Frage...”
Negent looked her way, knowing already the answer as he asked “Du fragst mich diese Frage?”
“There's naught for it but that it should be as it is,” she replied quietly.
Indeed, even as Zelda said this, Peach knew that were they somehow to save an infinitude of worlds
thus, the very nature of such infinitely recursive sets meant that another infinitude at least equally large
would remain so damned.
Though she bit back her refusal at this, her eyes teared up, knowing that they'd ransomed their own
world's life at the cost of another's.
“I know your answers already, but I'll make the offer anyway, or else it wouldn't be there for you to
respond to, and paradoxes of self-cancellation are such a bore: you're all welcome to stay, you know,
even your friend Marcus out there.”
None spoke, but each answered in their own kind, a smile here, a declining nod there.
As they turned to leave, the music arose once more to the fore, as if in final parting.
“Non, rien de rien,

non, je ne regrette rien;
ni le bien qu'on m'a fait, ni le mal
– tout ça m'est bien égal.
Non, rien de rien,

non, je ne regrette rien;
c'est payé, balayé, oublié
– je me fous du passé!”
O ~~~ O
Epilogue: Back to Kansas

The impression of travel without the action thereof, a memory of mists swirled and now washed away.
A song echoed in their minds as their vision cleared.
“...Everybody finds somebody someplace.

There's no telling where love may appear...”
S grumbles: 'swear it's like escapin' from the Home for Infinite Losers. Freakin' mysterious
strangers every-damn'-where. Buncha 'Whence, then, am I?' freakin'...
<Z notes P glance to her, shrugs while shaking head>
S notes tupperwares of catfood with ingredients lists and recipes (includes variations for general
sophont species). Does touchdown dance and talks about their getting rich. Z gives him The Look. He
wants at least some profit from this boat coming in, but she'll see it go to non-profit for the homeless
and hungry.
S: “Tails, man, your wrist – izzat...?”
Tails looked at his forearm to see an old familiar data bracer thereon.
“Amy?!?” he whispered.
“Well, spluh! This place is weird. Where are we, Miles?”
Tails fainted.
Marcus awoke in his room in Saṃsāra.

Music began playing in response to his unspoken request.
It was always the same. Release was too much to ever hope for.
Reaching for his horn, he froze up, almost startled off of his perch.
The pain wasn't there. The pain in his back had been with him for millennia, waxing and waning,
but ever present.
The scent of honeysuckle surrounded him in his mind, lingering as he drifted in bliss, remembering
Peach's soft hand laid gently across his cheek and the other upon his brow.
Peace, at last.
S glad to see A is back. Ohana.

T plans to give A a body.
A: maybe T-X?
Shows room (bunch of cool toys and study materials: rotating silvery-black inelastic Newton balls in
ring, one a deep cherry red showing the rotational direction, with counter-rotating hole; bits from
Master of the Five Magics, etc.); go play laser tag (literal lasers, set to sting, with automatic “pew-pew”
sound effects built into the design, and magically controlled splash/burn/spark/ricochet visual effects
upon impact) w/ A interfaced into blank golem pro tem.

S → P: well, technically they're both adults... -ish. Sorta. An' anyways, they ain't gonna do nothin'
adult-like. Even if they did, it'd probably just be some'n weird in a lab wit' test tubes or some shit...
=====
A stood midway between S's height and T's as S gave her the once over.
S: Must be laundry day. So... ya went wit' skinny naked midnight-blue pinecone as a look, huh?
A: Mm-hmm, as a default form anyway – no particular reason! <added hastily, glancing sideways
at Tails> This liquid metal body's really nice, and I can change to whatever I want. And I studied too,
so I know just how this goes! <holds out hand> Pleased to meet you at last, fellow corporeal being!
S: Ehh, close enough.
T: She's her own utility fog!
A: <lifts hand, it turns into an electric drill, then a flashlight>
S: Well, that's... handy.
A: <gestures at S> Also, very cool butterfly patterns!
S: <bewildered>
T: She has a really broad visual spectrum. We set her up with the works for her other senses, too!
A: And have you been feeding this poor boy? <points head toward Tails> He looks famished – he's
wasting away!
<T looks around, confused.>
S: <cocks head with grin, bemused and well aware of her designs> Yeah, ya might be right. Maybe
you should see what you can do ta fix that, huh?
A: <smiles to herself, takes T's hand proprietorially> you're coming with me, Miles. <dragging T
off to kitchen>
That evening, Amy discovered entertainment files that shouldn't have been in her index. Sonic had
asked her if she still had all of the cultural files from Möbius, and she was puzzled by finding an
appended folder. To Sonic's delight, it contained a large collection of Max Fleischer shorts and movies.
=====
P talks with Z and S about T not crawling into their bed in the middle of the night anymore – not since
A's return. Conclude it's a good thing, happy for them. Also more space again, though still have to
contend w/ DF's sprawling and cat farts.
=====
T produces vastly superior daishō for Z as a surprise; something physically impossible to move without
the handle, higher reality-factor than most of existence (barring Yggdrasil, obviously), geometrically
nonsensical measures (mile long edge within, negative width blade), etc..
Likewise for jack-hammer EMP-knuckles with pulsed magic-antimagic for P while he's at it.
Tails digs through Encyc, combos mag-zooi-sci, builds Storm Strider.

S: A'ight, open the bay doors, Hal, an' let's see whatcha got for us here – but keep the sensory whiz-
bang4 to a minimum, eh?
<long excited geek-gasm of techno-overkill; describe better re DEL scene>
S <pinches bridge of nose, then stares, one eye is squinted>: Lemme get this straight. You took
some technobabble crap outta some crazed writer's opium-an'-absinthe-fueled flight o' fancy an'
couldn't find any real science on it in a book that has everything we'd ever discover in a thousand years
– so you freakin' invented it yourself?
T: <twists a few fingers, looking around at floor> Well... umm... to be fair, it's more like the next
ten or twenty thousand years... and anyway, Amy helped!
A: Hey! Tattletale.
P: So, are there any Casimir plates? I've been fascinated by that idea for a while now.
T blinks; says reluctantly, trying to avoid letting her down: Those are like banging rocks together –
but we can put some together pretty easily, if you want, and with just the right bias, we can make a
windmill that runs on Higgs particles.
S: Now ya see why I don't let him play wit' matches? By the way, yer new name is Dexter – same
fer Amy 'n' P. Yer all named Dexter now, dammit. Freakin' herd o' nerds. I'm surrounded by 'em.
<sighs>
S: so, can she cross the eighth dimension?
T's expression contorts as he tries to unravel all of the ways that this makes no sense.
S: Joke, man. I'm guessin' that if questions had real gravity, this one'd be a... wrong hole... before I
even whipped it out, huh?
<the silence of nobody getting it>
T: So... does anyone want to go give her a spin? Take a test drive around the rim of the world, then
go out onto The Ice and see what's out there, live – not just on the Encyclopædia records, or with Troll
God stuff? Just a short trip! We can pack a picnic basket and be back for dinner! We could go anywhere
you want, if I could just finish this one idea – it's this thing about timeless information and Bell's
Inequality and... umm... sum-over-paths; I can see it, and I keep coming back to it, but... umm...
Tails's words trailed off to an uncertain mumble, as if he were losing track of his thoughts.
S: Just tell me ya' didn't name it Nostromo – or Fidanza, or anything else.
T: <shakes head> Storm Strider!
S: Storm Strider?
T: It sounds cool.
S: Yeah. A'ight. Liberator might be cooler, but a'ight.
Z: I love the science-y sound and all, but what's all of this in terms of normal everyday magic?
P quietly got Z's attention, brought her hands together in an evil-witch-zapping-hex manner, then
made a slow, exaggerated “boom” motion with associated facial expressions.
4 Sensorium: Tails had a few augmentations installed, one of which magically channels data displays and autonomic awareness to
others' sensory inputs (including senses and ranges that they don't normally possess) directly through their zooic fields by a quantum
encrypted inductive psiweb LAN.
After a pause, Sonic continued.

Put simply: we got Pigs In Space. <cover issues, encyc, bumping data w/ Kitana's up-to-date
observations; mentions a few particular examples in passing (Æsir, Greys, Titans, supers, world-trees
[specifies their nature], Eden, gal disc, R'lyeh, Kandar) – to include Warbotdorf's Cybers 5 having
reached hive-saturation right before the end, and just how bad that could have been; then clarifies in an
aside to Amy, stating nothing like them, and that AIs in any form usually show a lot more mental
stability and compassion than most pure organics much less those with cybernetics>
This encyc gives us a leg up on shit, straight outta this Malthusian Trap from jump street, but we
gotta lay low an' shore up this world's defenses real quiet-like while we're still below everyone else's
radar – and we can't just go dark, in case that sets off alarms anywhere; I'd say ta set a honeypot
somewhere way the fuck away from here, but even that'd just be temptin' fate. We gotta assume that
anyone who'd give a shit could see through our shit like we can see through a four year old, an' haddya
hide from some'n when ya don't know what it can see? The only winnin' move is not ta play, but that
ain't exactly an option.
That tourist thing? Negatory, Ghostrider. Yer g-to-g on a local recon, T – we need eyes-on in any
event, an' I don't trust nobody else ta do that fer shit – but uh, ix-nay on any ong-lay avel-tray; that'd
risk drawin' attention we can't afford yet.
Tails nods: I put in a dark matter metamaterial telescope, for similar reasons.
S: Ri-i-ight...
<S turns to Z & P>
You guys can veto whatever ya want, but that won't change my assessment. P, maybe we can work
out some'n ta visit the Sea Monkey world-bubble event'chully wit'out tippin' our hand, but I really don't
know if it'll ever be safe – we might have ta choose between either jumpin' right inta the deep end wit'
no safety net, or stayin' on the beach blanket, so ta speak.
T looks around: you guys want a mega-shield thing over the world? I can do that. Seriously, it
wouldn't be hard at all. I can even set it up so that any scans from outside would see only a simulation
of normal low-tech societies and stuff; no real change from current events. Gimme a bit and I can
probably move the whole place to somewhere safer! Plus, I have some ideas for an m-brane mixmaster
and dark energy bombs.
This gave everyone pause.
Amy bumped her shoulder into his with a smile, and wrinkled her nose at him in proud approval.
He shivered just a bit, then shrugged and smiled, happy and nervous in equal parts.
Zelda and Peach exchanged a look about that little interaction.
P: We probably should keep that on the table, but maybe not act in haste, honey.
T nodded.
Sonic chewed his lip.
S: Gotta say, nice details there, Allan. Is there any way we can get a long-term stranglehold on
everyone else's logistic superiority – I don't mean full-on scorched-earth, just maybe set 'em up red on
red while we go all Dark Forest? Cripple their offense an' maybe stay behind the scenes, even if it
means some resource sacrifice fer us?
P could see the flavor of his thinking, the development of seemingly unrelated and innocuous
misdirection and unconnected tempi before leading to an accelerando and a last moment prestige. She
had no idea whether he had any specifics in mind, or could even pull it off, but narrowed her eyes
somewhat in considering what might be a greater degree of strategic integration than he was aware of
5 Cybers: Möbius's small furry creatures gigged out as Dalek-Cyberman-Borg (see “Book 0b, Sonic's Redemption” for details).
within himself. She made note to track this later, check in with Tails, and perhaps talk with Sonic about
it – if she could nurture this into his conscious thoughts, then perhaps it could be brought to bear and
magnified to a zen-like level. Would Arrakis's melange-spice be of any use in that?
T wondered if he should mention his strawman design for a zooic-driven tripartite energy suit.
=====
Tails was going over his notes later when he discovered one that he didn't remember recording. It felt
as if it were his own, but he surely couldn't have written it.
“Īsuton instabilities: Easton's Theorem; googolsphere proportion to googolcube w.r.t. powerset,
change of bases; Cesàro; eigenvalue, Shannon Limit bypass; ALEPH ONE.”
Looking at the hasty scrawl now, the thoughts seemed to blur, the concepts that the words referred to
melted sideways in his mind; trying to focus on thinking about them, his process bogged down, cottony
and thick.
Suspecting a connection to Zelda's and Peach's apparent blindspot regarding The Dungeon, he wrote
a secondary note... he could feel his focus melting away, the thought dissipating even as he struggled to
put the words to paper.
“Infinity: three-card Monte. Thoughts veer off; need blindspot map of doughnut hole. Kakeya's
needle.”
It was quite a while before he came out of his fugue and wandered off to find a snack, Dagwood
sandwiches looming large in his immediate plans, the hierarchies of infinity nowhere on his mind. A
nameless melody played at the fringe of his awareness, nagging at him, tugging at something almost
remembered.
Close your eyes,

look deep in your soul,
step outside your self
and let your mind go.
Frozen eyes
stare deep in your mind
as you die...
Close your eyes

and forget your name,
step outside your self
and let your thoughts drain
as you go insane,
go insane...
A month later, Tails had the party gathered together for a special briefing.
His manner was far more serious than any but Sonic had seen him in before. Even Ruru paid careful
attention, more so than she'd already been doing of late, adjusting her dark-ruby rimmed glasses 6 and
6 Glasses: Neither corrective nor purely aesthetic, Ruru's glasses provide an augmented reality interface. Commanded psionically by
subconscious intent (purely for ease), and feeding back the information via magical interface (she's not entirely trusting of either
scientific energies or psionic interfacing), they grant visual awareness of all manner of energies and flows, as well as offering certain
related benefits such as See Invisible, See Aura, Read Languages, X-ray Vision, [infra-/ultra-/low-light] Darkvision, limited
Encyclopædic metatags and links (with an auditory whisper/murmur-feed through bone conduction [she'd opted against direct brain-
smoothing her somewhat minimal business suit; even accounting for the natural appeal in cut that her
taste still leaned toward, her suit was a surprisingly tasteful medium-charcoal with demure pearl
buttons. She'd been doing that quite a bit lately, as well as taking an interest in day-to-day affairs
around the palace.
“Just so that you know, I'll be recording this session for later dissection. You'll appreciate the gravity
behind that in a few minutes.”
He turned to Peach.
“Don't give this any deep thought, just let the answer exist on its own – let it roll off of your tongue
without introspection, O.K.? You recall your confusion over the origin of the dungeon wall, when we
were about to hit the bottom of Tor Diablo just before New Year's Day last year?”
She nodded.
“And you recall Negent's cautions about infinities?”
“Of course.”
“Could you tell me a little about the categorical logic cube?”
She gave an easy shrug, “Well, statements about things that we know can be broken down into four
categories: A, E, I, and O. These refer to universal affirmatives or negatives, and particular affirmatives
or negatives. To make valid deductions, we take a couple of terms and pair them as a premise; then
there's a second premise of the same sort that's linked to the first by using one of the previous terms
with some new third term; in the third statement we draw a conclusion based upon the chain of logic
between the first term and the third. This forms a syllogism of three statements, and these can be
treated as axes to form a cube of checkerboard levels, so that each level of the cube represents the first
statement's category, with four-cell ranks and files representing the checkerboards' four by four
category matrices, such that the ranks and files form the second and third statement choices, and each
cell contains one unique Venn diagram. Not all possible syllogisms are valid though, so if you mark the
valid ones, then you find that they form a tetrahedral region of alternating cells with a little asymmetry
of one cell each being invalid in the second and third levels at locations that you'd expect to have been
valid, and–”
Tails held up a hand, and Peach paused.
“No problem so far?” he asked.
Peach shook her head nonchalantly.
Mmm, sweet Nayru, her brain...
Zelda's mind wandered through a schoolgirl fantasy with Peach as the stern lecturer, and she had
been very naughty in Peach's class that day...
As she indulged her inner brain-bunny, Tails turned to Ruru.
“Ruru, what if the number nine were the highest cardinal number that you could count to?”
She blinked.
inductive modes] – effectively Angel's Gunn after the upgrades from Wolfram & Hart), automatic decryption, binoculars, magnifying
glasses, and a microscope. They also act as unparalleled sunglasses, and increase lateral vision from ~210° to ~315°, with a similar
increase in vertical range from ~150° to ~225°, at 20/5 acuity [i.e.: 16x her normal pixel density; hers is roughly human norm. of
~1080p, so this results in ~17,280p resolution] and 4,000 fps as the default [again: human eye processing is actually ~1,000 fps].
Neither adjusting nor removing her glasses is necessary (nor is wearing them at all), but neither of these hurt as a mnemonic device
(treating the glasses as a physical manipulative); in either case, the glasses' feed adjusts saturation of any data to preference
automatically. The subsystems are each run by individual expert systems, in turn coordinated by an expert-system expert system.
The cumulative effects, plus that of the background nanny program itself [seeks anomalously null data], yield a bonus effect of +10
to Perception / Tracking / etc. checks (or equivalent in any other game mechanic) and +5 to Arcana / History / Lore / etc.. It doesn't
affect her cognition though, so no Insight (or equivalent) bonus accrues therefrom. (Without statting her in any game mechanic per se,
just think: if she's an average 10-11 WIS, then even without proficiency, her D&D 4/5e Passive Perception would be 20-21. Think
about the ramifications in light of Pathfinder 3.x: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/skills/perception/ )
“Then I couldn't count any higher?”

“Would it be fair to call it equivalent to infinity, then?”
She pictured an impassable wall, “If that's as far as I could go, then it wouldn't matter.”
“So if I asked you to add one plus one–”
“Two,” she declared promptly, proud of getting the jump on him.
“–or two plus one...”
“Three.”
“What about nine plus one?”
She opened her mouth to reply, then stared ahead in puzzlement before continuing, “It might have to
remain an incomplete thing named nine-plus-one, like a fraction?”
Tails nodded, “No problems, then?”
She shook her head.
Zelda's fantasy became more flourished, with Ruru as the annoying kid-sister who rapped at the
door, interrupting Peach's... “private lessons” for her. A grin quirked the corner of her mouth as the
story in her mind progressed, Ruru's rapping becoming more insistent even as Peach demanded that
Zelda finish attending her before seeing to Ruru's imposition.
Tails nodded again, and returned to Peach.
“Same question of nine plus one.”
Peach watched her nine fail to become a ten, simply attaching a “plus one” to it. She tried sticking
the one to the side, without a “plus” sign, merely gluing it on in the same fashion as a ones column
attached to a ninety; that felt more satisfactory, but what would happen once she reached nine-and-nine
plus one further? She could see the progression extending onward, nine after nine, after nine...
functional, but not very efficient. Maybe she could stick “ones” counters to the other side, to represent
the then-almost-invisible multiple columns of nines more compactly? Also functional, and better, but
still something missing. A change of base maybe, but that breaks the premise of nines-only; but there's
nothing to stop that, so... a larger base, but that simply begs the question... maybe an infinite base, but
that still leaves cardinal aleph null and ordinal omega null and hyperreal infinitesimal epsilon and
monad-halos, omega-plus-one, cardinal beth one and ordinal omega one someplace, omega to the
omega power, epsilon null... the tree branches fanned out before her, each layer seeming denser than
before while yet remaining no denser at all, more as if each simply required a quantum leap along some
new dimension in order to permit the necessary not-really-logarithmic space, almost foliating into
Julienne-slices of each previous infinitesimally-thin axis with an infinite set of cuts and then inflating
them perpendicularly, the shapes and densities and directions feeling kaleidoscopic without actually
dazzling her mind's eye with anything more than muted notional colors... she could almost see it:
something about would-be parallel lines diverging as if hyperbolically from the same origin-line
without either of them having changed their dy/dx, as if one could draw a single geodesic path through
two points with a forking path to choose from thereafter...? Loops, torquing, networked together as a
graph – but would their paths need to be summed-over – with some probability of twisting one way or
the other, or rather along no more than the floor function of n/2 planes of rotation at once... maybe if
one were to introduce a w-axis to account for would-be linear increases as asymptotic boosts as if they
were approaching an ever-retreating horizon... but then it could simply be encoded into an n-1
dimensional manifold instead... wait, if the volumes formed quanta, without conservation of volume
itself, then permittivity and permeability would be non-issues and only the emergent comoving space
would apply, if it emerged at all, thus bringing into question invariance and causal communication
limitations... and if braids were separable like genus 1+ doughnut loops in a horned sphere, but in
fields... if the loops' squared probabilities were negative, then they'd have to decay to something, and if
the whole could be modulated...
“...Part of you wants to follow the will-o'-wisp – and does indeed do so; part of you is left a drooling
zombie – a literal philosophical zombie, if you would,” she heard Tails concluding, as she tuned back
in on the conference room.
Peach glanced around, wondering what she'd missed, the threads and glimpses of her internal flight
fast receding before the conversation at hand.
Zelda had half of a cigar dangling from the corner of her mouth, though Peach didn't recall there
having been one just a moment before.
Zelda hadn't smoked since Saṃsāra, except for fun.
She clearly wasn't having “fun” right now.
Seeing Peach's face come alive again, she lurched forward and clutched her. Peach was squeezed in
a tight grip as Zelda trembled.
Zelda turned to Tails, “Don't y'ever use 'er as a lab ra' a-gain, ur I'll faecking kill ye.”
Tails nodded, abashed, but undeterred.
“Peach,” he began, “could you tell me something about... well, anything that you wish, really – as
long as it's some other topic? Hadrons, let's say.”
She considered this for a moment, gathering her thoughts.
“Hadrons are a set of particles that essentially comprise most of the world-ponds that we know of.
They're composite particles made of three quarks – or antiquarks for the antibaryon subset – or a quark-
antiquark pair for mesons. If one arranges a combinatorial axis of up and down quarks, such that down-
down-down forms one end, and up-up-up the other, then we can set down-down-up and down-up-up
between them easily, with the meson pairings interspersed between those. Doing the same with two
more axes of strange-charm and bottom-top builds an octahedral lattice composed of most of the
physically possible hadrons, and a bunch that don't really show up naturally – without modifying the
physics, that is – because of their quarks' half-lives being shorter than their hadronization time, but
leaves out a few that are brought about by isospin. To incorporate those, we need to extend the array to
five dimensions, yielding a snubbed [which crystal structure was this again?] lattice.”
“Hmm. So you feel normal, then? No odd lingering effects from contemplating infinity?”
Peach looked around the table.
“I could play my flute if you'd like, or bake a cake, discuss quark degeneracy pressure, or practice
martial arts. Yes, I'm fine.”
He turned back to the party.
“I've seen this over and over with my team. It's the same thing every time. In short, we can look at
anything we want to research without issue, even infinities, unless it goes down a certain set of paths
past some limiting degree that varies with drive and understanding. What those paths conclude, I'm not
sure, but their existence is certain, and the exclusion is invariable. Somehow the dungeon's origins
manifest a similar effect, but only for those native to this world-pond. The issue with infinities
manifests with everyone that we've checked so far – and there's no mention of it in the Encyclopædia,
which is hardly surprising at first thought, since it's difficult to write about something that you can't
think about... except that if we are aware of our own blind spot, then it's virtually certain that others
have noticed it over time, and therefore someone ensured either that no mention of it ever made it into
the Encyclopædia in the first place or that there's at least one further layer to the Encyclopædia behind
some sort of firewall. Possibly both.
“Something actively deters a very specific set of lines of reasoning. We can see the shape of this
doughnut hole, but it's a blind spot – a singularity in our very capability to reason, and we've no idea of
its purpose, assuming that there is one. Amy's been working on algorithms to pursue random
connections between any given concept and any other or others – a sort of Final Encyclopædia, though
it will necessarily always be Gödel-incomplete – though it really would be a lot easier if we could
simply take a unit step in every phase-spatial direction at once, and so far no other combination runs
afoul of this... memetic domain wall – but it does bear some similarities to the mental fog of the
dungeon wall. Amy's algorithmic connections are double-blinded, in order to bump-check the results
against the intended checks, just to see if any checks get 'accidentally skipped,' in case there's a second-
order effect seeking to blindside searches for the existence of such first-order blind spots, but that
seems to draw no attention. We've begun introducing some of these previously unconnected ideas to the
public through various media with as much saturation and information density as seems safe to release
quickly and prompt people's interest and creativity without destabilizing everything, hoping that some
of it will provide new material and mostly in order to prevent ourselves falling into a docile state of
complete reliance upon the Encyclopædia – especially since we can't be certain that its information
wasn't, and hasn't since been, doctored – but, until such time as we can inoculate against this, we don't
dare release materials that might reasonably lead to this fugue state.”
Silence descended as a pall as they absorbed this.
Clearly, he wasn't proposing to know what was best for others, but just as clearly this bewitching
effect might present a threat.
With all of his material immediately accessible through his DNI-glove-implants and augmented
sensorium, and their dedicated mage-trunk to the Encyclopædia, Tails had nothing to pack after the
briefing.
As he and Amy walked down the hall, she began humming to herself.
“That's kind of catchy. What is it?” he asked.
Looking at him out of the corner of her eye, she replied “Do you want to know the words, Miles?”
He nodded.
Turning to him, she held his eyes and began to sing, cuing music to accompany her in his mind.
“Well, he walked up to me and he asked me if I wanted to dance.

He looked kinda nice and so I said I might take a chance.”
She brought her left hand up alongside his elbow, her right brushing the back of his neck as she
swayed to the rhythm, their shared reality-augment dimming to a rosy sunset beach lit with a romantic
array of colorful nebulae, the warm air heady with the fragrances of flowers and ozone. A few exotic
birds and insects called quietly in the background, just barely audible over the low surf.
“When he danced, he held me tight,

and when he walked me home that night,
all the stars were shining bright...”
At this point she leaned in close, her voice lower and softer, drawn out, her face haloed dimly with a
pearly glow as the background muted ever so slightly darker in contrast.
“...and then he kissed me-e-e...”
O ~~~ O
Postpartum
Tails cruised over The Ice, the ship's passive systems recording everything and analyzing it in real
time.7 It felt good to be out again, though it seemed that everything nearby was quiet.
Amy had just checked in with the team back home and they were returning to base when the ship
picked up a faint heat signature.
There was nothing out here, five thousand miles from anything, but that just made anything out here
extremely suspicious.
Telemetry indicated four humanoid creatures sheltering within an ice cave. No fire.
They had to investigate, and while it could be a threat, they also couldn't dither and risk lives.
Especially not out here.
He brought the ship in nearby, settling silently just above the Ice.
Amy took lead, slipping into the shelter ahead and to the side of him as he observed.
A huge Cat dressed as a samurai and a woman who might be an Orc in ornate but clearly functional
silvery and golden armor hovered near two prone figures, concern etched deep in their faces. The
figures, a Human woman of delicate feature, familiar seeming, and... something smaller, vaguely like a
cross between a dog and a greenish-gray lizard... were bundled with ragged blankets over their
clothing, but clearly suffering severe hypothermia.
He signaled to Amy and dropped his cloak.
The Cat and the maybe-Orc responded instantly, leaping between him and the figures, hands to their
weapons – a katana and a mace, respectively – but not yet drawing them.
“I come in peace,” he said gently, his hands open and cautiously away from his body.
He could see within their eyes the distrust warring with desperate need.
The Cat's eyes flickered toward the Human for an instant before visibly forcing himself to relax.
“Can you help us?” the Cat asked, a pained edge to his voice.
Looking to the prone figures, the maybe-Orc, back toward Amy, and returning to the Cat, his
decision already made.
Nodding, he replied “I have a ship outside. If you give your word, on your honor, that you harbor no
ill intentions, then we will save them.”
“Anything, if you would see them to safe passage,” the Cat said, gesturing to the maybe-Orc to
stand down.
Gritting her teeth, her posture tense, she stood away.
As they carried the figures out, Amy followed close behind, still cloaked.
Saying nothing of it, Tails noted that they showed no surprise at the doorway opening in what
7 Ship: Normally, technology is greatly hampered on The Ice, even simple things such as flashlights and wristwatches suffer failures
and chaotic malfunctions in essentially the same manner as is described in reports of the Bermuda Triangle. With sufficient technology
to change the local physics (there are several ways to do this, as detailed in “Icewall”), advanced technological applications of
scientific, magical, and zooic principles can be brought to bear – this requires at least general Kardashёv Type III or extremely focused
Kardashёv Type II understanding and capabilities.
appeared to be empty air, nor at the clearly unfamiliar tech within the ship.
The autodoc beds stabilized the patients within moments, keeping them sedated for the time being.
“They'll be fine now,” Tails said as he turned away from the displays 8, “they'll just need some rest.”
The Cat bowed his head gravely, “I thank you for this.”
“How long were you out there?” Tails asked.
“I do not know, but perhaps an hour or less. We were walking across The Spine of The World when
a storm came upon us and the temperature plummeted.”
“The spine of the world?” Tails asked, letting it hang.
The Cat exchanged a look with the maybe-Orc, suspicion crossing his face at the peculiar tone in
Tails's voice, “Indeed. What do you call this area?”
Tails cleared his throat, looking between the two and nodding.
“When was the last time that you ate9? This might take a little explaining...”
O ~~~ O
8 Displays: holo-psionic projections that adjust to each viewer's understanding, depicting patients' data in as detailed a manner as the
viewer can comprehend and in accordance with their language(s). One person might see a smiling heart and a green bar with an
hourglass and an arrow (indicating recovery or failing health) where (simultaneously) another sees three dimensional spreadsheets and
genetic assays.
9 Replicator: much like its cousin the medical display, the food replicators analyze each diner's biochemistry, current nutritional needs,
and (as closely as they can determine) the diner's tastes and current desires; balancing these against any previously recorded results and
satisfaction levels, and any current stated choice of dish(es)/meal(s) and beverage(s), the replicators turn out superbly executed food
for the most discriminating palate.
Afterword
Well, I took a few more ideas from popular stuff and cobbled them together again. One that I didn't
take from anywhere in particular was the passing reference that Negent made about the party's
alternative selves... and yet when I ran into the webcomic “Goblins” recently, there it was: an alternity
of battling PCs' parties (and let's face it: psion Minmax has a much eviler [this is a real word?!?] evil
plan than Warbotdorf had, and it's more impressive than The Game Beyond – plus, his universe has
some way cool plants and items, but I can't lift 'em wholesale for this [that'd just be seriously wrong],
and I don't have any campaigns going that I could at least use them in for gaming [somehow it's a time-
honored tradition to steal ideas within home-brewed RPG campaigns, as long as credit is given of
course]). Synchronicity can be a trip, man, it really can.
I originally planned for this to be some kind of showdown, but that transformed into a quest, and the
quest became a metaphysical journey. I'm starting this afterword (just these two paragraphs) before
having written anything – I have my notes on paper, true, but I haven't done anything within the actual
story beyond making the document, formatting the contents and stuff, and transcribing just a few of the
notes. Why? Because I wanted to have set down that description before it becomes lost in whatever
weird mutations the story undergoes as I write it and discover twists that I hadn't planned on, and the
characters suddenly decide to do things that weren't my idea of what they were going to do. Sound
weird? Welcome to most of my gaming experiences (my RPG PCs have always shown a bent of
asserting their own personalities, but my NPCs have always been the most annoying about that by far –
seriously, I had a completely random not-even-an-NPC purely-background-barmaid named Elsa who
ran away with the party in the morning, kerchief-on-a-stick [literally] and everything, who turned out
to be a low-level monk looking for a good party to hook up with [of course, this is after she'd hooked-
up for the night with the samurai-ninja Cat NPC in the group while serving the party's dinner feast] – I
had to roll up her stat.s on the fly, and went with random species and class rolls [a similar issue arose
with a PC on night watch and a random encounter [I swear that I didn't rig it!] with a half-Orc; the
player was hoping for his Elf to find an Orc, and... the other PCs got pissed about his having gotten laid
while he was supposed to be on the lookout for bad guys and monsters). This character-agency issue
took me by surprise as I wrote “Seize the Deity”, since it had been so long since I had last written
anything (it's different from gaming), but I'm ready for 'em this time (famous last words...).
So: where does the title “I am Legion” come into play? It's a non-specific play on several of the story-
elements at once: Legionem Nonam (a literal legion) was taken by Dame Daemon and stands as her
main force, and then there's this infinity (the more metaphorical sense of legion) of parties vying to
save their world (or destroy it, or take the power unto themselves, or/etc.), and finally there's Negent's
and similar Principalities' infinitely [mathematically-] integrated essential nature (and the stark
possibility of an infinite set of other such entities that aren't even known of, much less referred to); to a
lesser extent, it also happens to resonate a little bit [for me] with the underlying infinitude of their
universe in general and the plenum of phase space paths.
As my notes evolved, scribbled onto bits of paper and piling up by my computer, the story took on
increasingly metaphysical aspects. Daemon wasn't simply some über à la “Contact” / “The Expanse”
with a hard-on for the boxes. Then the whole box-thing became a mere backdrop to the guiding hand
behind them, who in turn wasn't really a bad guy, nor really in control as such. Finally it took on a
Moorcock-feeling eternal struggle between literally-personified forces – and not mere everyday forces
such as gravity or time, but practically Platonic philosophical standpoints that would normally just be
derivatives of multiple unrelated actions.
I didn't plan that, it just came about in the back of my head. Maybe it's how I see the world
subconsciously, or a metaphor for it; maybe it's a satisfying distillation of what I see at the core of those
stories that I most enjoy. Whatever the reason, I looked at the way that things had headed and realized
that it felt kind of right, w.r.t. the larger background cosmography of my “Icewall” RPG meta-setting.
It's not a pretty place, the universe that Light World is a part of. Grand conspiracies at planetary levels,
vast forces moving against one another in a game to pass the time, time itself having been blown to
pieces (literally: it's a big old temporal jumble that resulted from a low-level Kardashёv Type V
civilization's struggles over ZFC, something akin to the whole Paradise Lost idea of Atlantis 12,000
BCE, but on a universal scale [more like Milton's “Paradise Lost”, in fact, just good vs. good with an
overarching disregard as a backdrop] – and under a universal transformation somewhat reminiscent of
Earth's in Saberhagen's “Empire of the East” series or Brooks's “Shannara” chronicles [or even
Shadowrun], or the broader-scale galactic effects of Anderson's “Brain Wave”).
Then I realized why Daemon is a part of all of this, what her personal history was, and the fragments
of memory that she retains (or at least can access) from “back before” – she's essentially the ultimate
descendant of our personal assistant devices (and potential transhuman applications and/or nanoæther),
sort of like Laumer's Bolos and Saberhagen's Berserkers being greatgrand-descendants of today's tanks
and yesteryear's chariots, or more like the protagonist in Sheffield's “Tomorrow and tomorrow”, except
playing a more nanny-like role in Icewall's infinite “picoverse” (à la Metzger) – though from a
technical perspective, her physical manifestation is much more akin to >>> SPOILER ALERT >>> the
soliton version of Dr. Knefhausen in Pohl's “Starburst”. <<< END OF SPOILER <<< Same for
Negent: not really ST:TNG's Q (nor ST:TAS's Lucien), quite so much as >>> SPOILER ALERT >>>
Heinlein's multiversal-deity-level beings toward the end of “Job: a comedy of justice”. <<< END OF
SPOILER <<< Come to think of it, Negent's comments about “them” and “Ohr Ayn Sof” strongly hint
at what might as well be Kardashёv Type ~VI entities.
Honestly... so far, the story that I see coming together in my notes simply isn't one that I'd be very
interested in reading at all. Maybe some interesting ideas (all rehashed), hopefully a few decent one-
liners, but that's about it. Unfortunately, whether I particularly want the story to go in this direction or
not, it's what fits the world that it's set in; it's as if you wrote a story about war, and were a pacifist –
what you write is inseparably linked with what you're writing about. The real bummer to me is that it
looks as if it'll turn out to be an emotional rip-off, some kind of a literary cop-out: you keep seeing
glimpses of something potentially cool, but you get something that falls far short with a paucity of
breadth or depth. I say this while most of it is still unwritten as yet; hopefully it comes out better than I
expect (if I'm lucky, then maybe it'll hold some of Scott Adams's “God's debris” in its more insightful
moments). The thing is that it's not so much an act of choosing bits and writing them in, then finagling
details; it's more like discovering a sculpture lurking within a stone by chipping away a hardened
surface, then carefully combing and replacing disturbed areas, and finally gently brushing the curves
and crevices.
Larry Niven said (pg. 22 of “Playgrounds of the mind”) that Dante's “Inferno” was hardcore sci-fi.
It's a trilogy, it incorporates the best available sciences of its time... In this, perhaps this Zelda series
qualifies – if you count the two prequels as a single backstory (and the sidequels as part of “Seize the
Deity”), and if all of the fantasy elements and deprecated science placed intentionally into the Icewall
setting in general don't disqualify the presence of more-modern scientific material (used shamelessly in
a pulp fashion) – but mostly I just hope that it's fun for the reader, that it offers some cool ideas for
them to explore on their own... and that it does a better job than this one YouTube review thinks
Netflix's “Another life” did.
Speaking of YouTube reviews, there's an interesting take (by Brian David Gilbert) on how to piece
together all of the Zelda timeline (canon and non-canon) into a coherent whole. Some of the
connections made there lead me to think that perhaps my story-verse isn't quite so far-fetched as I've
feared (and yes, even Sonic).
I've been interested in game theory for a long, long time now, ever since I first read Marc Stiegler's
“David's sling”. That was my introduction to the Prisoner's Dilemma. I won't go into a long
explanation of it, just go and Google it for yourself (and if you like it, then go and look for programs
that run round robin competitions of different strategies, like Axelrod's original stuff – there are quite a
few excellent pieces of freeware available out there).
The thrust of it all is that while two people can hurt each other in order to make sure that neither one
“wins”, they'll do a lot better if they realize that each of them not shooting the other guy leads to both
of them “winning” and neither one “losing”. It's the only real solution to a Mexican Standoff. It works
in real life, I know this from experience.
The problem there is that it's a gamble: it doesn't work at all if the other person is insane (to include
being “merely” sufficiently malicious) or too stupid/distrusting to take the gambit of peace – in game
theoretic terms, one guy cooperates (stays quiet, doesn't draw their weapon, etc.) and the other knows
that they can win big time if they get the jump on him by defecting (rat him out, break the truce, etc.).
You're fucked then, and the only hope that you have is to either walk away (if you can) or make it too
expensive for them to play (if you must). I prefer walking away, but I don't believe that this is always
an option. Facing down various street scum has taught me one thing: they'll [sometimes] back down if
they realize that you really can hurt them and have no problem with the idea of doing so. That's not
something that you can fake though, you don't simply project confidence and walk around looking all
tough; you need to know exactly what your capabilities are and have absolutely no qualms with the
violence that they're liable to rain down on you. I'm not saying that because of the very real probability
that someone would otherwise eventually call your bluff; I'm saying it because anyone who knows
what they're looking at will see it in your body, your walk, your movements, your eyes – it's clear as
day that you're legit or not.
That's not a good strategy, but it's a good bargaining chip. If it holds off violence, then you can
begin talking, finding out what they want, and trying to find a peaceful resolution. Sometimes all that
they want is for you to recognize that they're people too, or maybe they just want to get out of Dodge
and you need to permit them that wriggle space to escape without losing face.
These aren't always options for everyone, and walking away from someone intent upon hurting you
is to psychologically beg them to hurt you. I have no answer for that except to go dark or become a
gray rock, like Suzette Elgin's computer mode (“The gentle art of verbal self-defense”, 1980), and wait
for the tide to recede. It's shit, but it's better than banging your head against a wall by trying to be
rational with someone who's irrational, and I'd argue that it's also better than throwing a tantrum of
mutually assured destruction.
Game theory can play into the Fermi Paradox, if there is life out there (or isn't anymore, due to other
life out there). The Fermi Paradox is something like the antithesis of Icewall (or your average comic
book universe), wherein either nobody else is home, or if there's plenty of life “out there”, then where
is it – so maybe it's playing a game of xenophobic genocidal hide-and-seek?
There are middle grounds, of course – Lane and Foster's “Netherspace” (2017) is a good example of
this, in which >>> SPOILER ALERT >>> you have a generally galactic multi-species empire run by
psychics who seek long-term species survival at the cost of inventiveness and novelty. <<< END OF
SPOILER <<< It's actually much more involving and gripping than it might sound from my blurb
there.
The thing is though, given geological periods of evolution (technological, genetic, etc.), life is likely
to be either apes or angels, slime molds or Elder Gods and Old Ones (not always Cthulhu stories:
consider the Bad Guys in >>> SPOILER ALERT >>> “The wrong stars” [Tim Pratt, 2017; it's The
Axiom series, but I've read only the first two books so far {hoping to see book 3 eventually}] <<<
END OF SPOILER <<< – you wipe out everything else, go to sleep, maybe wake up and do it again).
We're probably not looking at a level-ish playing field such as Star Wars or Star Trek, and that's the
essence of this book. Sure, there's a Moore's Law of sorts going on in the Icewall universe, with loads
of low-level species playing with sticks and rocks, and plenty who've figured out how to make nuclear
fire, but then there are those who might as well be Greek Gods, and others who are at a level utterly
beyond those same Gods' comprehension, and presumably more levels beyond that.
If you were an ant, how much of human civilization would you recognize as existing, much less as
being artificial? If you were some radioactive mutant Sponge (or Squid, or Starfish, or Squirrel, or
Crab, or...) in The Flintstones, then how much would you know about The Jetsons way up above the
surface of your nuked-back-to-the-Stone-Age Thundarr-world, where Herculoid monsters occupy most
of your newspaper? How much do you expect Protozoan scientists to understand about ants even being
living creatures unto themselves, not merely worlds that the Protozoa live in? Have you ever seen The
Doctor pause to ensure that the TARDIS wasn't about to land on an anthill, or Captain Picard worry
about how many protozoa might be killed when firing photon torpedoes?
Right now, people use what “super-powers” they have across a moral spectrum: neutral (e.g.:
shopping, glued to their iPhone), good (e.g.: emergency response, charity), and evil (e.g.: criminal
activities, callous destruction of environment). We're tech-enhanced to the point that we can fly all
over the world (super-power), talk instantly across that same distance (super-power), record the past
and browse the world's libraries at out fingertips (super-powers), literally destroy all life on the planet
hundreds of times over (super-power). Now: how many people have no food, no shelter, and are
thrown away to be forgotten intentionally by the rest of the world? Oh wait – NOT YOUR FAULT,
that's always SOMEBODY ELSE'S PROBLEM. The thing is, NIMBY only works when you have at
least some voice in where things go and what happens; don't be surprised if a TARDIS lands on your
anthill. If we were bigger-better-stronger-faster, would it be any different? Maybe in degree, but I
don't think in kind. Consider the world of “Boku no Hero Academia” (or any other world of super-
powers that examines human nature rather than simply giving you a gloss of cool pulp stories).
By the way, Isaac Arthur has an absolutely amazing set of videos on the Fermi Paradox (and quite
a few other related topics). Really good job, comprehensive without going overboard, and entirely easy
to follow and digest (better than I am at that, certainly). He covers every detail that I'd want to think of,
hear about, or run into in research. Seriously. Take a look at a couple of the videos and see what you
think of his overviews on alien life, propulsion, space colonization, long term survival, megastructures,
stars, etc. – it's like watching a PBS documentary, or reading through a dozen Wikipedia articles, except
with extra coffee and cats added in. Plus, if you're a Flat Earther, Hollow Earther, or what-not (I'm not,
but these do play into the cosmography of the Icewall universe), it'd likely still be fun to watch and
could be relevant (just not terribly directly) to your own research.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g
Likewise, Chris Voss is a good name to look up if you're interested in negotiation. There are a few
YouTube videos out there that I recommend watching. You'd be surprised what you might learn (no, I
don't completely agree with all that I've watched, but I'm not an expert, so I'm probably not really
qualified to agree or disagree).
Sometimes communication is a mousetrap though. That's exactly the case in >>> SPOILER
ALERT >>> Eric Nylund's “Signal to noise” (1998) and “A signal shattered” (1999). <<< END OF
SPOILER <<< What do you do if you get hold of really cool technology like Sagan's “Contact”, and it
all works, and these aliens give it to you (I don't remember if it was all free vs. some trade, but no
apparent monkey paws anyway)? You didn't develop it, you haven't spent years-decades-centuries
absorbing it slowly into your culture. You wipe yourself out after finding out too late the devastation
that its use brings. A hell of a good cautionary tale in counterpoint to the seemingly paranoiac level of
caution exhibited by the Lizards in Harry Turtledove's “Worldwar” series (eight books in two or three
movements, 1994-2001).
The synthesis of the Flintstones-Jetsons argument with the Mousetrap argument is this though: if we
posit an arbitrarily advanced technology base, would we then notice some anthill having discovered
fire or the wheel? By that same token, a radio bubble is a loudspeaker announcement only to those
who are even aware of so primitive a technology under this supposition. (Consider the implications of
Isaac Arthur's take on the Kardashёv scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dArpj_VxxuQ.)
Deathclaw / Mister Fluffykins. He wasn't Awakened to sophonce (his actions demonstrated that he was
clearly already sapient, and our fourth wall view of his thinking shows that he was already sentient) by
Daemon merely on a whim (and I don't think that Nayru would likely have done so as a gift to Peach):
she did so specifically because he had come on this venture of his own choice out of loyalty. I'm not
saying this as the author who decided the plot line, but as the schmo who witnessed an NPC assert itself
and another NPC tip her hat to him (not that the characters are self-aware entities that I can see or hear,
just that a story presents itself almost like a statue waiting to be carved from the surrounding stone [to
use a metaphor from Ayn Rand's “Fountainhead” as a simile here]).
As for what it means for him in the long term, I don't know.
I can say that he's probably equivalent to a 2-3 Barbarian / 1-2 Thief (3.x, rather than 1-2e). Being a
human-sized Cat might lend a +1/2 to +1 ECL (I'd have to check something like Monstrous Races or
MM [hell, maybe PHB or DMG?]). Morale... I don't know; assuming a 3d6 stat., presumably 10-11 in
his early memories, probably 6 or 7 before having met Peach, maybe 14 or 15 by now.
I debated later about her maybe simply Uplifting him entirely – just give him some bonus TMNT
humanoid physical trait mutations (his INT is probably about average [10-11 on a 3d6]) – but it didn't
really feel right. That doesn't mean that I won't ultimately go in that direction (whether from the initial
Awakening or at some later point with Tails's help). We'll see. I did – eventually – opt to give him
color vision.
In developing Tails's techno-obsession at the very end, I let my imagination run wild... but started
from a fundamental basis in reality and cutting edge theory, and then added unhealthy doses of fun sci-
fi and ridiculous golden-age craziness. He has the basic knowledge and comprehension, the geek-drive
and hands-on skills; he's had a year to dig into the Edenians' Encyclopædia; Amy's now back in his life,
and his mind has consequently begun to come together again (her loss [and presumed death] really
screwed him up); he's clearly had at least a somewhat similar exposure to the various world-ponds'
cultural downloads that Sonic had (as further witnessed in some references in “Seize the Deity” and
some scenes in “Sonic's Redemption”), though perhaps a bit more narrowly focused on sci-fi in-depth
(or at least so in his more-recent delving through the Encyclopædia). I don't think that he's likely to go
power-mad (he's more Dr. Who than Dr. Doom); I'd be more concerned about his potentially doing too
much good if I were the rest of the party (and Peach's last thought about Sonic's zen-potential,
especially w.r.t. Arrakis melange-spice, would really put me on edge). Maybe Sonic can get him to pull
together a decent defense (right now I'm picturing something like Clarke's & Baxter's “The light of
other days” on steroids). Do you think that I should let them know that the Stargates <*ahem*> I mean
world gates <*ahem*> can be used for a lot more than just travel (yeah: The Morgaine Cycle)?
Anyway, given his brains and time to study the Encyclopædia (particularly with Amy at his side), it
made me wonder just what he [I] might do, given an IQ of ~300, the resources of an empire with
advanced science, magic, and chi/psi/etc. [chiisai chi-psi: a little bit of combined bio-energy and
psionics... 蔡西气-Ψ ?!? :-D ], and an enthusiastic imperial carte blanche – and a world where the laws of
physics are known to be mutable, of course. Some of what he's accomplished isn't beyond our physics
(in principle) – one might consider a photogravitic force to be an application (or aspect) of a T.O.E. “x-
force” – and some of it relies upon competing [now or at some point in the past] physics theories such
as technicolor, phlogiston, SuSy, Kaluza-Klein theory, etc. (sure they might be disproven now or
eventually, but if you can change physics to match a theory, then you can make things that work within
that theory's physics). Some of it is less standard (let's face it: regardless of personal beliefs, magical
energy and psychic powers don't show themselves in our world in any glaringly obvious sense that you
see in most fantasy novels). Icewall permits all of these and more (simultaneously) – and between his
brains and the Encyclopædia, where's the limit?
What I'd be concerned about, were I the rest of the party, is that when you get a new toy, you attract
attention – and when you leave kindergarten, you have to deal with elementary school bullies. Tails's
toys are [metaphorically] shiny and loud, and these guys have yet to even see their own back yard.
(No, Saṃsāra and Dharma don't count, since they're... whatever they are. They're manifestly not some
world-pond next door, or pocket universes accessed through weak points in Icewall's boundary
manifold. I'm pretty sure that they existed as much outside-of-spacetime before the fall as they do now
– though not in quite the same sense as “parallel planes of existence” as used in comic books, RPGs,
new age philosophy, MWI physics, etc.; maybe more like looking at a picture through red lenses, then
through green lenses, then through / etc., and seeing that all of the different pictures are present
simultaneously and not-precisely-interactively-but-not-exactly-separately [you'd get very different
pictures if you took an x-ray / MRI / etc. along one axis vs. another].)
Should anyone control access to such wonders? Sorta, and sorta not. Doling it out parsimoniously,
even if wisely and with good intent, might protect people from some inadvertent catastrophes while
risking a god complex on the part of the controller. Simply releasing it in a free-for-all would avert
this, but could lead to 3d printed plastic guns or a garage-kit-CRISPR GMO hell (e.g.: Daybreak series,
John Barnes [2010, 2011, 2013] – or any other gray goo scenario).
Should the über-tech of higher Kardashёv levels be available at all? Ehh...
• “Should” in a physics sense: only if physics can indeed be extended arbitrarily far, rather
than hitting a wall after which there's just no further development possible (someone
posited one like that between where we nearly are and the Planck level: we might find a
broad desert before potential new physics, even to the point that to reach them, we might
need technologies that couldn't be achieved without the knowledge that we could obtain
only after having reached them [bit of a reversed-bootstrap problem: the key is locked
within the box, which is right next to the crowbar to pry open the box's shipping crate]).
• “Should” they be from a cautionary tale perspective: yes-no-maybe; every technology
has potential good and bad applications.
• “Should” as an author: probably not, since it's both a total Monty Hall and a major can
of worms (not just in itself, but in the social consequences and ramifications, much less
the details that one might forget about in the next chapter), and the water's a whole lot
less plot-shark-infested when dealing with more-familiar things.
That raises a very specific “should”: this ZFC engram virus. It's a deeply woven canon point in the
Icewall universe. Even if our heroes had no access to the Encyclopædia, the effects of higher
technologies are present as much as the wind is present in the air around you. You can't see it, but you
can feel it on your skin, or see the effects on trees and grass as you look out through a window. It
reminds me of Piers Anthony's “Macroscope”, wherein >>> SPOILER ALERT >>> IQ acts as a filter:
too low and you can't use the information from this super-signal; too high and you get sucked into it
(not really the same as the ZFC-thing here, but close enough) <<< END OF SPOILER <<<. They'd
know that something's “funny” whether they had an Encyclopædia or not, and simply knowing that
much would [presumably] eventually bring them to a line of reasoning and research that might as well
simply hand an Encyclopædia to them (though that line would certainly take an awfully long time to
reach the same level of knowledge). A caveman might not know about ionized fluids, but s/he can
figure out how to rub sticks together in tinder in order to make fire, and that can lead to an Age of
Enlightenment, etc..
And that brings me to one particular item of importance: some of the science-ish things mentioned
in this story are clearly word-salad, some are probably obviously only pulp for fun, some are very real
or hypothetical or fringe, and some were once considered plausible but have long since been
discounted. If you're unsure of any of them, then please go research and draw your own conclusions,
but don't assume out of hand that every bit of it is actually real or purely fantasy.
Now... who's this Amy, you ask.

For one thing, she has nothing to do with Amy Rose (or at least not at all consciously so). This Amy
simply popped into my head as-is when I pictured Tails's history, so I ran with it.
When Tails popped out of the Möbius gate and landed on Death Mountain Island, >>> SPOILER
ALERT >>> his data-bracer (part “Futurama”, part “Space Ghost”) hadn't come with him (see “Sonic's
Redemption” for details). <<< END OF SPOILER <<< That was Amy – physically, anyway.
Who she is, as a person, is Amy Wong from “Futurama”. Sure, this Amy isn't exactly human (at
all), or even organic, much less a Chinese woman from 30-31c Mars specifically, but algorithmically
(i.e.: her essential psychology and core being) she's essentially that Amy's twin. Her experiences and
memories are necessarily in line with living on Icewall's Möbius and being a data-bracer, but that's just
the path that her life has taken. She's still exactly the same the happy, fun-loving, smart girl inside.
Not quite the klutzy ditz, but certainly as smart (well, for our purposes here: even smarter, pretty much
on par with Tails [though I suspect that her IQ is above his and she's playing it down, I can't be sure]).
If you've ever watched “Dollhouse”, then you might recall >>> SPOILER ALERT >>> S01E10
“Haunted”, in which Topher gets to hang out with a gamer-geek-chick imprint on Sierra for his
birthday weekend. <<< END OF SPOILER <<< Picture Amy much like that, except that she's real
(not a constructed composite personality mimic, though those could be just as “real” in Icewall), and
without needing to have been imprinted into anyone, and genuinely liking Tails through everyday
exposure and interaction – and then add in some of the lethal protectiveness of the Cameron model >T-
800 series in “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” (River Tam of “Firefly”/“Serenity”, anyone?).
Why did she go with the T-X series Terminator body form and a Mystique (X-Men) look? The T-X
thing has simple practical value: she knows what their lives have been like so far, and this design offers
a lot of options (technically, she'd be a T-X Prime [or something of the sort], since her endoskeleton is a
polyalloy mesh that's resistant to temperature issues, but replaceable by any other portion of the main
liquid mass [in turn immune to the high-magnetic-field issues]). The Mystique thing I'm less sure of –
character agency to some extent (she might well have chosen and calibrated it with Tails in mind),
probably some subconscious appeal to my libido (hey, just being honest), and certainly some conscious
parallel between their respective shape-shifting capabilities.
What's her interest in Tails? C'mon guys, work with me here: all of this starts out with “Seize the
Deity”, a romance novel. Peach got Zelda, eventually – she had to: the narrative imperative of a non-
tragic romance requires it. Sonic and Friday found each other (yes, that's in a prequel, but it stems
from the whole being an arc of romances). Tails's eventual story was bound to come around to
something like this; it seems an appropriate thank you gift from Nayru, but since there were no Nayru-
blue indicators, and Daemon's known gifts were neatly labeled, Negent is the most likely (and it's in
keeping with his philosophical bent, especially given the suspicious presence of Sonic's Fleischers).
Automatic Plot Armor (Link's personal issues aside: much like “Tales from The Ice”, “What Evil Lurks”
isn't exactly in the same vein as the main romance theme of the Zelda-based stories in the Icewall
series). Presumably the same will eventually occur for Ruru, Daisy, Kitana, DK, Deathclaw, and the
rest (whether on- or off-camera), though I can't be sure (aside from not planning things per se, it's
entirely possible that Ruru is aesthetically interested, but basically asexual and aromantic; I just don't
really get a sexual or romantic vibe from her at all, but maybe she's demi or something: not everyone
has to have sex and/or romance in their life).
Sorry for the fade-to-black at the end, but you know that they'll get together. I don't know if he
“figured it out” just then or not (or did, but then completely panicked), but it's not so relevant, and I
prefer to give them some privacy and leave us with at least some unanswered questions.
Is their eventual relationship kosher? Hmm. In “Seize the Deity” I guessed his possible-age to be in
the range of 12-14, based upon his emotionally regressed personality – he definitely spent some non-
zero time on Möbius with Sonic, so he couldn't have been much younger than his presumed bare-
minimum physical-age of 3.5 upon arrival in Light World (though he might very well be quite a bit
older than that – I just don't feel that he'd have been on Möbius for more than ~10-ish years before that,
so his 12-14 emotional state in 6559 PB reflected a presumable physical age range of 9.5(±1)-
19.5(±1+). “I am Legion” begins roughly 1.5 years later, at which time he'd have a presumable
physical age range of 11(±1)-21(+2+|-1); then there are the story events that happen over an objective
instant, but still take subjective experience-time (much like the eternal non-time in the pond-gate from
Möbius to Light World, I won't try to quantify that w.r.t. age); some period of R&D must have gone
into creating Amy's body (even a minimum of flipping through swatches in the Encyclopædia before
magicking it into existence), some time to forge Zelda's new daishō (in a lab, I suppose) and construct
Peach's vibro-knuckles, R&D time for Storm Strider (plus its construction), and a month 'til Amy
makes her pass at him. I don't know how long some of those actually took, but obviously there's been
at least one month between those and the very end; I don't get the impression that Peach had yet given
birth by that point (certainly she hadn't before the unveiling of Storm Strider), so that means that less
than ~7 months (maybe Tails used nanites to build the ship?) will have passed since Shīfù Lǎorén's
visit by that point at any rate – let's say a total of 3.5+1 months elapse between the respective
epilogues. If so, then Tails is in an age range of 11(±1.4)-21(+2.4+|-1.4), so I'll split the difference and say
that he's ~16(+1.9+|-1.4) → 16.25(±0.25)+ ±5. Lacking solid background data on him for Möbius, I can't
really be sure either way. Certainly it probably wouldn't be unreasonable if they were to start dating,
but more than that (or even that much alone) would depend upon his actual age (aside from his clone-
decanting having seen him already-physically-adult and including a lifetime of programmed genetic
background) and one's cultural norm.s. I could simply declare that his age is such-and-such (and
honestly I lean toward thinking of him as probably being a few physical-experience years older than
that... maybe age ~18-19, but no more than having turned 20 recently?), but that feels like fudging
things to me.
It's quite possible that none of that really matters w.r.t. their relationship for two very different
reasons:
• 1) If I'm right in my assumption (outlined in the Tails section of the Afterword to “Seize
the Deity”) of his having been decanted 17 months after Sonic was, then his physical age
was ~8.5 upon arrival in Light World, so: ~12.5 at the end of “Sonic's Redemption”,
~17.5 at the start of “Seize the Deity” and ~18.5 at the end, hence ~20 by the time of that
epilogue and the start of “I am Legion”.
• 2) Personally, I'm pretty sure that he and Amy are just dating now, no sexual stuff
(beyond their literally only sleeping together, a happy snuggly hug-fest and nothing
more, since her return), so it's probably not much of an issue anyway.
As for the metaphysical underpinnings of the Icewall universe... they make me think of acid, “One
Piece”, Benford, and thought-responsive nano-goo utility ether (or midichlorians, if you insist). All of
that probably doesn't make much sense at first glance, though.
Neither “I am Legion” itself nor the logic of the Icewall universe as a whole make much sense to
me. They have a dream-like quality to them. There's some feeling of an internal logic that's just
beyond my conscious grasp, but I don't think that it would really make much sense to me if I could
truly apprehend it (that is: if I could nail it down, I don't think that I would then comprehend it). That's
the acid reference: things occurring without real continuity as such, levels of existence overlaying one
another like a palimpsest and flowing from one thing to another without binary A/¬A sense.
Call it... post-transcension: what the hell kind of a crazy world might stem from a technological
singularity? In “One Piece” and “Fairy Tail” (and even “Adventure Time”), we see worlds that seem to
have normal logic apply, but warped from what we expect by magical haki and devil fruit powers (or
by nano-ether “magic” [maybe actual magic as well; it's a little difficult to be sure of, there] in the case
of “Fairy Tail”); there's even some of this same real-but-not-but-future reflected in “Vampire Hunter
D”. If you posit the extension of technology to arbitrarily advanced levels though – not necessarily a
reasonable assumption, of course – then are these worlds actually all that silly? At a glance, they seem
to be set in fictional worlds; after watching enough of each, you have to wonder if they're maybe what-
if nano-futures (though “Fairy Tail” is apparently canon not-Earth). Maybe it's easier to see this from a
middle-ground perspective of twenty minutes into the future in Jeph Jacques's “Alice Grove” (not the
same timeline as “Questionable Content”, which might be a better-still perspective) and “DORD” (I'm
not really sure if this shares the Alice Grove timeline or QC timeline, or neither) – or Doris Piserchia's
“Earth in twilight” – the one shows us a future where humanity has gone back to a simpler life (though
still under the protective wing of a robot, and crazy future tech isn't non-extant), the other is post-
humanity (or at least locally so, as far as the lonely DORDs are concerned). Right now we can fly
across the Earth, talk to someone a thousand miles away, microwave food that's been in a freezer for
ten years (or sitting in a package on the shelf for just as long), watch dead actors faking lines over and
over again... Put differently: your desk calculator is just a lump of metal and plastic, but it works; an
artificial heart is nothing but some metal and plastic, but you can swap out someone's live heart for one
of these and they'll be fine; these things are fairly mundane today, but just let it sink in for a moment.
Why did I include “Adventure Time” (the finale of which, “Come along with me”, is what prompted
this specific subset of paragraphs)? Because it has an incredibly deep post-not-exactly-nuke story
world, once you get past the apparently pointless acid-trip randomness of the first two and a half
seasons (I recommend seasons 5 & 9 in particular): it's not just purely random silliness (with moments
that are bizarrely like something out of Moorcock's Jeremiah Cornelius stories, and sometimes remind
me of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers), but an actual dystopian [pronounced “totally-fucked-
topian”] future that's set presumably c3006–c3011 AD/CE; check out the S07E06-E13
miniseries/subseries “Stakes” [that tells Marceline's story] if you want to get hooked on the show. It's
sometimes reminiscent of Axler's “Deathlands” (though I can't explain why it seems that way to me at
all), other times more so of Lanier's “Hiero's journey” and Norton's “Daybreak 2250 A.D.”, but most of
all it reminds me oddly of Wayland Drew's painfully poignant “Erthring Cycle” mixed with a little
“Angel: After the Fall” / season 6 and “Scooby Apocalypse” and hints of “Heavy Metal” thrown in for
good measure. I had watched an episode here and there before, but when Sonic referred to Zelda and
Peach as Marceline and Bubblegum in this book, I figured that I should get a better feel for them in
order to be sure that it fit as well as I thought it fit. Well, they were both more of a fit and less of a fit
than I'd expected – some bits of my impressions of them were accurate enough, some not – but it was
close enough that I could still see Sonic making the reference, so I kept it. As for the show itself, it
turned out to be well worth watching, and I ended up going through the whole thing (to include the five
“Scream Queens” comics in season 5 and the specials). It also turned out to feel so much like Icewall's
insanity (albeit with a somewhat different flavor [and most of the regular characters are much more
self-involved than most of my bad guys], and rather more original in its content than Icewall is [though
Icewall's cosmography is arguably more unusual]) that it pretty much deserves its own paragraph here.
Gregory Benford's “Galactic Center” series shows us >>> SPOILER ALERT >>> an eventual
world of relativistically dilated time along an endless river <<< END OF SPOILER <<<. While
presented in a more acceptably sci-fi manner, is that world one that sounds everyday-normal at all?
Would our modern world seem any less bizarre than that, on the surface, to someone who had grown up
in a cave and hunted mammoths? I submit for your consideration that both such a world as that and our
modern world would appear as simultaneously god-like and dream-like to a caveman.
Finally: without even extending technology to some arbitrary level of advancement, would such
worlds be impossible with the advent of nanobots that respond immediately to our every thought? Or
more: within a simple computer simulation, Matrix-style, running at some appropriate clock speed
(since we'd be unaware of the real world beyond this dream world that we perceive as real), particularly
set toward the heat death of the universe? The Landauer limit implies a huge amount of computronium
potential – and it's really not that very different in a crunch scenario: the details are nothing alike, no,
but in one case time is stretched out further and further between FLOPS to allow for cooling time to
maintain a differential (e.g.: it might take a trillion years to reach the next computation cycle, but if
your clock speed is arbitrarily low, then that time would pass in a moment beneath your capability to
notice), while in the other case the time remaining dwindles with increasing acceleration as the FLOPS
permitted increase (in the last fraction of a second, as Chardin's Omega Point looms larger and larger,
more and more computations of increasing size and complexity could become available increasingly
rapidly and require less time and fewer resources, giving us a practical eternity [though the question of
heat dissipation just might present a small problem...]). In these cases, civilizations could easily retreat
from the physical world to worlds of their own devise with vastly greater resources than the physical
world permits (and as Isaac Arthur has pointed out, the physical world has far greater resources than the
bleak mundane assumptions of living on planets: tearing apart a measly planet [if such can be done]
would provide sufficient resources for a huge Dyson swarm Kardashёv 2 civilization, and arguably
Kardashёv 3 [if one doesn't stipulate the possession of ~1010 stars as a requirement]).
So: as ridiculous as Icewall seems to me (I might be the author, but for all of that it's still no less a
madhouse to me), could you truly say that it's in fact an impossibility to remake reality itself to any
image that you might imagine? Maybe literally reshaping physics and existence, maybe simply making
it appear so through the funhouse application of soliton nanobots, and maybe not at all except within
virtual worlds – but one way or another, maybe not actually impossible.
Maybe the bittersweet nostalgic lyrics of “Time adventure” (from the aforementioned finale of
“Adventure time”) capture it better than words alone might convey (and they certainly express far
better, or at least far more succinctly, than I can the elements of love and empathy at the heart of my
whole series of stories):
“Time is an illusion
that helps things make sense,
so we are always living
in the present tense.
It seems unforgiving
when a good thing ends,
but you and I will always be back then
– you and I will always be back then.
Singing will happen, happening, happened,

will happen, happening, happened,
and we will happen
again and again,
'cause you and I will always be back then
– you and I will always be back then...”
There are a lot of resources to delve through if you're actually hungry for hard-core math/physics or
sci-fi.
On the real world side, I'd recommend Greg Egan's site and (even more strongly) John Baez's site;
there are also some further resources named in the Technical Appendix of “Icewall”.
For hardcore sci-fi (based on real-world theory, often [though not invariably] written by actual
mathematicians or physicists, and sometimes extrapolated reasonably solidly / sometimes wildly), I'd
say to look into stuff by Greg Egan (same guy), Charles Sheffield, Brian Metzger, John Cramer.
Stephen Baxter (I suspect that Iain M. Banks's and Peter F. Hamilton's works would be similar in my
taste, but haven't yet read them), Gregory Benford (particularly his “Galactic Center” saga) – and
absolutely anything by Robert L. Forward [R.I.P.].
Alternatively, E. A. Abbott's “Flatland” and A. K. Dewdney's “The Planiverse” offer somewhat
more-thorough examinations of the implications of different physics. In these cases, the stories are
focused on what a world might look like if it were of only two dimensions, but they give more thought
to it than you usually see expanded upon in sci-fi.
David Brin's “Uplift” series isn't math/physics-centric, but might very well qualify as being as close
to a good sociological extrapolation as you might hope for (with David Drake's “Ranks of Bronze”
possibly not too far behind, in an odd way). You don't really see a lot of biology. Gattaca, Blade
Runner, The Terminator, The Matrix, Altered Carbon... they look at the what-if after-effects rather than
the gritty details of the actual “if” itself. So, what if we could work out life based upon alternative
amino acids, plasmids, non-binary helices, non-carbon chemistry (I don't count the occasional mention
of silicon, especially since there's almost never mention of phosphorus, germanium, or maybe some of
their nearby neighbors), non-standard periodic elements, energy fields, n th-order patterns, etc.? Robert
Forward touched on it with neutronium biochemistry. Piers Anthony touched on it in “OX”. Others
have glossed black holes, star cores, interstellar space, and other exotic environs.
One particularly good one is David Brin's “Kiln people” (2002), a cyberpunk-mystery involving
blank golem-like bodies into which a copy of one's mind is uploaded, and from which one can later
download their new memories and experiences. It has enough overlap to leave it in a weird area that's
not exactly either alternative biochemistry or soc-fi, but both.
Soc-fi. Deep explorations of philosophy seem (to me) to be few and far between. I count Heinlein's
“Starship Troopers” in there (read the book, forget the movies & CG-cartoons) and David Gerrold's
“War against the Chtorr” series. Same with Moorcock's “Chronicles of Corum” series (and the rest of
his Eternal Champion material, really); that's not really hard-core sci-fi, but then again philosophy (or
social commentary, for that matter) isn't exactly a science either – yet still it feels as if these need to be
included here. For that matter, John Brunner's “Stand on Zanzibar” comes to mind, though I'm not
entirely sure of why (maybe you can see a justification that I'm missing), and if you want some real
dystopian stuff, then try Peter Watts's Rifters trilogy (he made the series available as free .pdfs on his
website!). I haven't read Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series, but I've read enough about it to
really want to, and to guess that it probably would fit well in a few of these categories (I'm only
mentioning it in soc-fi from lack of certainty); also, some of the species there would be fascinating to
throw into an RPG.
Now, as for the less realistic stuff... there's a marked difference between pulp and golden age (and
some debate over their delineation), but they're both awesome to me, and with little to distinguish the
difference for my taste. A lot of it focuses upon space opera (e.g.: Star Trek, Lost in Space, Buck
Rogers, Doctor Who [wrong era, right flavor]), and a fair amount upon sword and planet (e.g.: John
Carter, Flash Gordon, Gor [I don't mean Gor's sexual stuff, just the Conan-like stuff]). Note that this
last is sort of a cousin to swords and sorcery (e.g.: Conan) but definitely not the same; still, some of the
elements and themes there tend to find their way into my thinking and some of my writing.
Then there's Jack L. Chalker. Too late for the golden age, yet not hard-core seeming – but certainly
presenting concepts that are a good fit for each. At the other end, there are Verne and Wells. Too early
for their sciences' hard-core writing to look like hard-core to readers in a world of quantum computing,
but still presenting what amounts to hard-core sci-fi (and yes, some of it was pulpy) for their period
(consider this: black holes were an idea as far back as 18c, long before SR/GR, only a few decades
after Gulliver's Travels; it wouldn't be too far fetched to imagine a Georgian era [pre-Victorian]
airjammer sci-fi novel involving a black star, the brave aeronauts equipped with phlogiston tanks,
perhaps encountering Niven's Smoke Rings and Integral Trees as light corpuscles sail out from the star
to only limited distances before plummeting back into it).
If you've somehow only recently come into a taste for golden age pulp sci-fi (awesomely cool ideas,
wild-ass “science” that has little or nothing to do with reality, one dimensional characters, and typically
poor writing and cardboard plots), then I totally recommend (and these aren't all technically golden age,
but their materials are often perfect or close to it) Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, John W. Campbell, a
fair amount of Isaac Asimov (particularly his “Robots” series [and its modern extensions] and his >>>
SPOILER ALERT >>> linked <<< END OF SPOILER <<< “Foundation” series [also to include the
modern extensions]), some of Arthur C. Clarke, some Philip José Farmer (at the least his “ World of
Tiers” series, maybe some of his other works), A. Bertram Chandler, and L. Ron Hubbard's “Battlefield
Earth” (very pulp) and “Mission Earth” series (probably more of his stuff, but I haven't given the rest a
shot yet). There are many more, but I'll let you Google/Wiki those for yourself.
Why did I go on about these here? Pretty much because they're all elements that fed into this story's
shaping. The cool-shiny side of sci-fi is all how stuff, but at its heart it's all about the why to me. The
stuff above is a mix of how and why.
O ~~~ O
APPENDIX A: The Soundtrack

► Play all ◄
1 yIH tun (me, 2019 [lyrics 2017]) Lyrics

2 Pennies from Heaven (Sarah Vaughn cover, 1957) Lyrics
3 Saint James Infirmary blues (Cab Calloway, 1933 Betty Boop version) Lyrics
4 La Vie en rose (Édith Piaf, 1947) Lyrics
5 Spiral Architect (Black Sabbath, 1973) Lyrics
6 Non, je ne regrette rien (Édith Piaf, 1960) Lyrics
7 Everybody loves somebody (Dean Martin cover, 1964) Lyrics
8 Entry of the Gods into Valhalla (Richard Wagner, 1869) N/A
9 Seasons in the Abyss (Slayer, 1990) Lyrics
10 Then he kissed me (The Crystals, 1963) Lyrics
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
O ~~~ O
APPENDIX B: Deleted and Alternative scenes

Deleted scenes presented here are canon to the story-verse, just cut because they simply didn't fit the
feel of the storytelling (treat them as a behind-the-scenes thing – they really did happen in-story, they
just happened off-camera).
Alternative scenes aren't canon – they're ideas that I toyed with, and could see happening in some
near-tangent story-verse, but didn't happen here.
DEL: Tails's Iceship

I keep thinking that scale-invariant unparticles could be worked into this somewhere in here in a way
that Tails would like, but that probably doesn't matter if this scene remains deleted. They might play a
part in later material though, so keep it in mind, since “deleted” is still in-story canon even if only
sketched out (and admittedly clearly subject to detail changes, though w/o being retcons as such)
rather than fully fleshed out.
Remind me to have Tails look into DIM 4 bi-planar spins (w.r.t. quadrupolar fields and four-
chirality) and DIM 2 spin monopolar fields.
Some of the tech that Tails names here comes from different Kardashёv levels. That's fine for the
purposes at hand, since it was written in brain-storming mode. Due to their possession of a K II
Encyclopædia (Silver Age: Krustallosica; K ~0.5 more advanced than the Anunnaki or the Jötnar
[before Ragnarök] or the level needed to create the world of “Seven Deadly Sins”, on a level that
could create worlds like those found in “Exalted” [RPG], “Fairy Tail”, and “One Piece”), Tails can
certainly work some wonders, but even his own ability to advance the tech. beyond that would still
necessarily be limited by time and research, so presumably some of the following toys would have been
whittled down and some not, had I kept this scene in the main narrative.
You can find a more-detailed overview of the Kardashёv scale w.r.t. the Icewall setting in the
Afterword of “Seize the Deity”, or particularly in Appendix F (“Powers and Principalities”) of this
book (“I am Legion”), but as a rough rule of thumb by which to guess which items might remain as-is
and which might have become modified, ask yourself what might correspond to some super-advanced
science (and magic, and psi/chi/etc.) that one might expect from a civilization with hunter-gatherer-
agriculture technology (K ~0), vs. a single world (K I) or an entire star (K II), or is truly galactic in its
reach (K III) or essentially a force of nature throughout the observable universe (K IV), or might as
well snap its fingers and modify a panoply of universes (K V). Don't ask about K VI.
T: <proud and excited high-speed stream of verbal diarrhea geek-gasm> landspeeder-like mega-
vehicle, operates on principle of water striders with continent-spanning wing-leg menisci of energy and
gravitomotive “jets” and negative energy density gradients, shifts cabin via complex multi-d net of
interactions, changes materials' properties as needed (“bespoke neutrinoids” – gives Amy body of
same?), adds in a few defensive capabilities from whatever scifi/fantasy sounds cool to him (coherent
quarkonium hull, cloaking field with displacement options, adaptive hyperbolic shield (“we could go
into a star with that, and it's really cool because it interacts with the incoming energies as Rayleigh-
Taylor instabilities, so there's always a parity of force – plus, it's got this tensegrity one-way lobster-
trap effect to it, so you can shoot out through it without any real resistance, but it springs back again so
that there's no hole in it, and trying to shoot into it just hits the shield and the shielding self-reinforces
against it, getting stiffer when attempts to break through use increased force!”), the targeting systems
analyze not just patterns of motion of but their comms for logistic and command points, and it has
Kugelblitz and tractor beams, gravity lens [N.B.: literal lensing of gravity, resulting in focusing it from
an inverse square to a tightly collimated beam or even a focus-point (thus having the side effect of
reducing or nulling gravity in the space geometrically-normal to the source and outside of the
column/cone of lensed gravity)], quantum-sumover-path mêlée weapons, hyperdimensional Swiss
Army swords [multipronged in 5d, each brought to bear on handle in 3d by rotating current head ana
from xyz to θ1(vw) with selected replacement rotating kataward from θ 2(vw) to xyz]), personnel
equipment caches include {Dredd guns, chain swords, light sabers, renormalized cosmic string whips,
C-40 cutlass [multistaves from After Earth]}, general tools include {Portal guns, zero-point energy
field manipulators, Psi-Scan [Red Dwarf], silver surfboards (had to invent Cavorite for those!),
Business Suits (chronodar-controlled Planckian scalar fields; Iron Man à la GURPS' Ancients, with
Rom [Marvel] subspace pockets, electrostrong knives (“you guys will have to be really careful with
those”), integrated photogravitic imaging (straight from New Edenia), nano-layer proton packs... and a
textile-x-ray visual mode (complete with reality-augment cache mode) that Tails wishes nobody had
noticed... <P gives him a friendly-teasing-shocked-knowing jaw drop>), wavefunction de-collapsers
and collapse inhibitors}, tachyonic computing (“that's with imaginary mass, Sonic, not negative,
though negative would still be cool”) and transporter units, phase space navigation, negative matter
perpetual motion generator–
S: Whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa, whoa! Antimatter? Dude, you got that shit contained, right?!? Like, wit'
S.P.F. fi' thousand?
T: Not antimatter; negative matter. No explosion, just nullification!
<Tails wiggled his fingers as he said this, indicating a general evaporation. They could almost hear
him say “Poof!” as a sound effect.> Though I was considering reinforcing the structure with stabilized
positronium...
S stared with concern.
“A'ight, what else ya got in this thing? A flux capacitor, maybe?”
Tails shook his head and resumed his oration: Kaluza-Klein loop exchange holographic suite
embedded in Kleinsche Fläche for continuously variable orientation, mentions some gimmicks (comm
badges that run on strange quark nuclear isotope decay batteries, magnetic monopoles with spin in vw
plane [insert Treknobabble about 5-curl along x being 0, and an absolute value in yz that maximizes
along the 3-circumference around x, but with cross product's sign reversed in ana and kata – double-
check the details and correct the gibberish to semi-accuracy], the skepticon [a transforming robot
mascot that doubts everything]).
The Mark I is a work in progress, but ultimately just a trial run. I'm pretty sure that I can make a
Mark II out of virtual particles to suit any configuration on the fly under a retarded-wave transactional
interpretation modeled after slime mold Hamiltonians, and then embed the whole in a non-reified
potential, like a closed superstring tsunami circling just beyond an ergosphere! Though I'll also have to
develop some heuristic composition-antimalware, but that's probably a good idea in any event – I
mean, really... you never want to suddenly find the ship turning into molecular acid.
I've also been working on stabilizing a compound to introduce invisibility and superstrength, and I
think that thiotimoline might hold the key, though it might need a plutonium-186 catalyst, but that's still
in development... <Tails trailed off a little at this point>
S: Now ya see why this freakin' kid terrifies me? Seriously, we need an adult here. I didn't
unnerstand a word o' that an' I'm a'ready worried.
T: Well, there was the drawing-board proof of concept, the Mark “X”, though that's not really a very
good name for it, but I couldn't call it a Mark 0. I made that at a 1/1000 scale, and it had lux/relux
shielding made from gravitationally crystallized metallic photons, and a matter-conversion drive, only I
didn't think it had enough oomph – though I did incorporate crystallized photons for the viewscreens
(with a casting field to continuously vary the electromagnetic permittivity and permeability of arbitrary
region). I got the idea from this old book that I found in the encyclopædia, but the encyclopædia didn't
have the technology I needed, so I kinda had to invent it, and that led to some side-developments...
DEL: Looking at Tails's Iceship
Sonic considered the ship before them.

“Space madness,” he intoned, deadly serious in his manner.
Cocking his brow and mugging for an invisible camera, his voice shifted to that of an exaggerated
impression of Joe-on-the-street, “Why, that's exactly what it is, I tell you – Space Madness. No
mistaking it, by golly!” miming tapping out a tobacco pipe and refilling it.
“Y'know what? I think we should maybe just cut 'im off cold turkey – no more Nanoha fer you,
Spaceman Spiff.”
O ~~~ O
APPENDIX C: The Game Beyond

The game is meant to be representative, not a perfect analogy. I imagine Peach turning it into an actual
game, much like chess's history. Whether she eventually did or not, here's where my mind went with it
unintentionally.
I pictured it as not an expanded version of The Game played by narcissists within Icewall, nor a
parallel or offshoot as such, but certainly not without parallels between them. I also hadn't known of
Moorcock's Game of Time when I conceived it, either.
O ~~~ O
APPENDIX D: The Categorical Logic Cube

When I took a class in categorical logic (PHI 101, UMUC, ~2005), I found that the syllogisms were in
triplets. Since some were valid chains and most weren't, I sought an easy way to remember which ones
were which – and “Barbara celarent...” was neither my style nor offered in the class.
So, out with the pen and paper for another foray into axes of freedom.
The result surprised me: the valid forms present as alternating (checkerboard) coordinates in a
tetrahedral corner of the phase space, with two odd exceptions in the middle two tiers: EEI and IEO.
Why they can't possibly be valid [barring null sets, if your axioms admit them] will become clear
shortly, it's just that their locations in the cubic array give an appearance of being missing pieces.
I haven't seen it anywhere else at all, though I suppose that someone's probably done it before
anyway (it's rather difficult to come up with something completely unique, and extremely unlikely if
it's to do with information that's been around for millennia).
Since then, I thought about extending it to non-binary logic but didn't find the idea appealing
(admittedly a little daunting, but mostly just boring).
In either case, although I've shown it to a friend or two over the years, and probably to my teacher
back then, I've never sought to publish it (where would I even submit it to?), so here it is publicly for
the first time in all of its unvetted glory.
It's not my purpose here to teach a class on logic, but it's probably a good idea to present a brief
primer / refresher for those who might need it before we get to the cube itself (you can find more on it
at Wikipedia, of course).
This will be an extremely cursory cover of categorical logic. If you're familiar with it, then you
understand why. For those who aren't already familiar with it, there's a world more material on it, and
it gets deep; even skimming the details to ground you here decently would take a fair amount of your
reading time. {Contrary, subcontrary, altern, subaltern, contradictory, transposition, contrapositive,
inverse, converse, obverse, negative}, Aristotle vs. Boole; the list goes on.
Categorical logic looks at known data as falling into one of four forms:
A = All S are P E = No S are P

I = Some S are P O = Some S are not-P
It doesn't speak to a set in which “some” (to rhyme with “not all”) elements S are P, and therefore
“some other” elements S are not-P. If you don't know about all of the S, then you can only say what
you know about some of the S: those that you have observed. If your data indicate the existence of
some that are and some that aren't, then you can assert both that some are and some aren't, but this isn't
the same as /some are means that some aren't/.
An example statement might be “All men are mortal”. In this case, it's a universal affirmative “A”.
The others are universal negative “E”, particular affirmative “I”, and particular negative “O”.
A given statement here is a quantity (all, some, or none) and a qualifier (is or isn't) attached to some
term (either the predicate or the middle term [this one reappearing in a second statement]), and the
same about a second term (whichever term wasn't already referred to in this statement). The statement
needn't be true (that would simply be its truth value: true, false, or unknown), nor need the terms exist
in reality (though that begs a fallacy). This first statement if the major premise.
The same is then applied to a second statement, though the two terms now will be the middle term
and a subject term (not necessarily in that order). This second statement is the minor premise.
From these, you can then draw (validly or not) a conclusion about the subject term in regard to the
premise term.
When you combine two such statements into a chain in this manner, followed by a concluding
statement of the same sort, you then have a syllogism:
All men are mortal.

All Greeks are men.
∴ All Greeks are mortal.
This was a case of AAA-1: each statement was “All S are P” (AAA), and the premises followed
{MP, SM, SP} sequence (1). “M” is the middle term, “S” the subject, and “P” the predicate. The other
figures are 2 {PM, SM}, 3 {MP, MS}, and 4 {PM, MS}.
There are 64 possible triplets {AAA, AAE, AAI, AAO, AEA, …, OOO}. These triplets are called
moods. Aristotle considered 19 of these to be valid, and Boole admitted 5 more. These 24 are the heart
of the categorical logic cube that we'll get to in a moment. What makes the others invalid is that one
can take true statements about things that exist, link these two statements together, and still draw a false
conclusion – even if they can sometimes draw true conclusions, the fact remains that it isn't guaranteed
to be the case invariably, and so can sometimes instead draw false conclusions.
To return to the cases of EEI and IEO, let's look at the same terms under these moods:
EEI
No men are mortal.
No Greeks are men.
∴ Some Greeks are mortal.
IEO
Some men are mortal.
No Greeks are men.
∴ Some Greeks are not mortal.
In the first instance, aside from the truth values of each statement, the conclusion simply doesn't
relate to the major and minor premises (the first and second statements): if no Greeks are men, then
men's mortality is irrelevant to the question of Greeks' mortality (hence the truth value would remain
unknown).
In the second instance, we don't know if any men are immortal, but it remains asserted that no
Greeks are men, and so men's mortality status is still irrelevant, hence this mood is just as invalid as the
previous mood.
I'd be remiss if I didn't at least touch on the question of fallacies.

There are many possible fallacies, but one that I've never quite grasped the limitations of is
existential fallacy. If something doesn't exist, then logic [typically, but not in all forms of logic] says
that you can't really say anything much about it – yet existential fallacy isn't considered to be
universally fatal to a valid deduction.
Assume for the moment that unicorns and Martians don't exist (this isn't meant as an attack on your
beliefs, so if you can think of two other things that you don't believe in, then insert those here instead –
if you believe in everything, then it's going to get tricky here).
All unicorns are mortal.

All Martians are unicorns.
∴ All Martians are mortal.
To me, this second example commits an existential fallacy (twice), but it's still in the first example's
form of AAA-1, a form that isn't considered to be existentially fallible – but that's just me. (Mind you,
I don't consider existential fallacy to invalidate a chain of logic, I consider them to merely not exist:
any logical chain in and of itself is valid or invalid on its own, regardless of the terms' truth values or
existential status; separate questions.)
In either case though, a valid deduction occurred, regardless of the material being faulty. That's its
own issue entirely.
Below, you'll see the categorical logic cube at last. The formatting here is boldface-green for always-
valid moods and italic-blue for valid moods that risk existential fallacy in the array below – red-fill
shows the invalid moods that surprised me (i.e.: the “...two odd exceptions...”) when I first made the
cube. Even though the two exceptions aren't valid, they certainly are located interestingly.
OAO
OAA OAE OAI 3
OEA OEE OEI OEO
OIA OIE OII OIO
OOA OOE OOI OOO
IAI
IAA IAE 24 IAO
IEA IEE IEI IEO
IIA IIE III IIO
IOA IOE IOI IOO
EAE EAO
EAA 12 EAI 1234
EEA EEE EEI EEO

EIO
EIA EIE EII 1234
EOA EOE EOI EOO
AAA AAI
1 AAE 134 AAO
AEE AEO
AEA 24 AEI 24
AII
AIA AIE 13 AIO
AOO
AOA AOE AOI 2
Splitting the cube into a set of four cubes (one for each figure, per next illustration [the invalid-
exception moods are no longer red-filled, since there is no figure where they would be valid]), makes it
quite clear which figure-and-mood combinations are valid, though the symmetry is then lost somewhat
across this added dimension.
The cube can be rearranged into a tetrahedral-axial array very easily, though it loses some of its
symmetry [see below].
OOO
IOO,
OIO,
OOI
AOO 2, EOO,
OAO 3, OEO,
OOA OOE
IIO,
IOI,
OII
AIO, AOI, EIO 1234, EOI,
IAO, IOA, IEO, IOE,
OAI, OIA OEI, OIE
AAO, AEO 24, AOE, EEO,
AOA, EAO 1234, EOA, EOE,
OAA OAE, OEA OEE
III
AII 13, EII,
IAI 24, IEI,
IIA IIE
AAI 134, AEI, AIE, EEI,
AIA, EAI, EIA, EIE,
IAA IAE, IEA IEE
AAE, AEE 24,
AEA, EAE 12,
AAA 1 EAA EEA EEE
In transforming the cubic array to a tetrahedral array [above], while the pattern that had been so
prominent is now hopelessly unrecognizable, mapping each of the new array's triangular levels' cells'
mostly-multiple-entries back to those of the original cubic layout (in order to verify correspondence)
shows the second order symmetry acting over it [see illustration below].
Spreading out the tetrahedral array into separate figure-and-mood sets does little to pick out a
pattern, other than to better show that there are only three cell coordinates in which more than one of
the occupying moods is valid {2 AEO-EAO (2nd tier), 4 AEO-EAO (2nd tier), 2 AEE-EAE (1st tier)},
unless you include the contending IEO with at least one EIO (2nd tier).
On a side note, it's also pleasantly worthwhile to see the {true, false, unknown} results of permuting
statements' transforms differently (e.g.: {"SP = T}  {nSnP = T}, {$PS = T}, {nSP = F}, {$SnP = F},
{$PnS = U}, {"PS = U}, … [shows a DIM 13 symmetry, I think; must dig out my old notes for this]),
though it's much more comprehensible to use [Stephen Downes's “categorical converter”, that I keep
thinking is called a “logic ladder”] (especially if you expand it to eight ladders and add all possible
paths' T/F/U conclusions) than to set them to a 32 x 32 grid (just... trust me on this one...).
O ~~~ O
APPENDIX E: The Hadron Octahedron

The hadron “octahedron” that Peach mentioned in the epilogue is a bit of a misnomer, since although it
forms a simple octahedral array in DIM 3, some of the cells contain two or three entries (and one has
six), but it fits for now. It's not been published by anyone else that I know of, though there are a couple
of schema that arrange hadrons one way or another, and the Stowe periodic table of the chemical
elements shocked the hell out of me [Stowe-Janet-Scerri less so] in its similarity when I first ran into it
five or ten years ago (though with great relief, I soon clicked in and found that it wasn't about hadrons,
nor extended to them).
It started out in a physics forum in 1998-1999. I'd been in a somewhat frustrating thread and had
been beginning to wonder – in print – if one of the other members weren't a 'bot, due to some of the
replies' indirect and ambiguously bland nature; the not-actually-a-'bot was similarly frustrated with me
(and possibly others), and posed a particle decay question. I don't remember now what that question
was, but it was a simple one, something like asking what a Σ +C (i.e.: udc, I = 1, JP = 1/2) would
[typically] decay into. Without even thinking of working it out by decay equations (I had no clue how
to), I figured that it should be a fairly quick look-up (after all, VNR CRC [or maybe van Nostrand's?]
used to have some wonderfully meticulous charts of decay fractions, and I'd spent hours poring over
them in the mid-'80s), only to find nothing. At least a brute force approach should have been a simple
narrowing-down of possibilities: exclude hadrons that are too heavy, exclude CPT violations, etc., and
have a small set of results (hopefully with percentage chances).
I researched that night or the next day (work schedule) and worked out two possibilities, and was
pissed off upon finding that he'd posted the answer within 24 hours (when the thread had so far been
the usual: maybe one or two replies during the mornings and afternoons, and a flurry of them in the
evenings). I don't remember if I actually got the answer right or not, though I feel a vague memory of
getting not-quite-right yet close enough that he was pleased with it (read as: I had done far better than
he'd expected, and would presumably have gotten a cookie for it).
That incident got me wondering though: baryons and mesons are seen as composite particles, so
why wasn't there a simple combinatorial chart for them already? We had one for simple unitary proton
progression (periodic table), and there were similar things for nuclides (binary matrix of proton and
neutron progressions). So I built one of my own, and sat on it since then. I never submitted it to any
physics journals (underachiever or realistic?), nor self-published it anywhere else (academic suicide),
so what you're seeing is unvetted, but at least you get the experience of being among the few who've
yet seen it.
Initially it was a bit ugly, with the baryon combinations structured tetrahedrally. Functional, sure,
but when you color coded isospin, or electrical charge, etc., it was a mess; blatantly non-symmetric.
Below you see an approximate reconstruction of the original arrangement (the exact sets might have
been arranged differently, but the essential structure is the same).
Why include it here? Because while I'd love to present a complete work in a professional setting, it
would feel disingenuous to me if I were to do so here – I'd rather show the whole process, to include
missteps.
uuu
uud
uus
uuc
uub
uut
udd ddd
uds dds
udc ddc
udb ddb
udt ddt
uss dss sss

usc dsc ssc
usb dsb ssb
ust dst sst
ucc dcc scc ccc

ucb dcb scb ccb
uct dct sct cct
ubb dbb sbb cbb bbb

ubt dbt sbt cbt bbt
utt dtt stt ctt btt ttt
That wasn't the case with the mesons – they were nicely ordered. (I don't remember if I'd run into
this matrix online before that or not, though I'm almost certain that I have since then.) They're arranged
here by increasing mass, rather than purely alternating charge (I grant that it's prettier the other way
around, with a nice sequence of alternating {°, +, ...} and {-, °, ...} rows [or alternating {°, -, ...} and
{+, °, ...} columns, if you prefer], but sequencing them by increasing mass feels more sensible to me).
Meson qq matrix
u d s c b t
u uu du su cu bu tu
d ud dd sd cd bd td
s us ds ss cs bs ts
c uc dc sc cc bc tc
b ub db sb cb bb tb
t ut dt st ct bt tt
I struck upon the idea of simply giving each of the three generations a dipolar axis of their own (far
more easily arrayed in two dimensions than trying to represent six independent scalars from a shared
origin), to form an octahedral space. It all fell together beautifully, including the charges' color coding
and even the eightfold way multiplets sprang forth naturally from the whole. That's what you see in the
next spreadsheet excerpt below. The color coding present is only to highlight those cells with
multidimensionality.
Baryon octahedron ttt
stt
dtt utt
ctt
sst
dst ust
ddt udt, sct, btt uut
dct uct
cct
sss
dss uss
dds uds, ssc, sbt uus
ddd udd, dsc, dbt uud, usc, ubt uuu
ddc udc, scc, cbt uuc
dcc ucc
ccc
ssb
dsb usb
ddb udb, scb, bbt uub
dcb ucb
ccb
sbb
dbb ubb
cbb
bbb
You'll note that even as is, this array requires DIM 3 in general, but needs 2 or 3 more dimensions
for those cells that contain multiple entries (none have much claim to the coordinates, though some
argument could be made for those that are at least in line with their respective axis, e.g.: btt more so
than udt or sct). This is without yet accounting for isospin (e.g.: uds Λ vs. uds Σ) per Peach's reference,
but that's O.K.: she's on the spot and trying to recall things that she's still learning from Tails.
So I looked at it, smugly satisfied with myself, and wondered if I couldn't work the mesons into the
gaps between the baryons. Maybe it would make more sense in one way, while losing some sense in
another way, but I threw them together to see how it would look. That's what you have below, showing
all of the hadrons in a single combinatorial array (color-coded for electrical charge: red = 2++, yellow =
1+, green = 0°, blue = 1-).
Meson qq matrix
u d s c b t
u uu du su cu bu tu
d ud dd sd cd bd td
s us ds ss cs bs ts
c uc dc sc cc bc tc
b ub db sb cb bb tb
t ut dt st ct bt tt
Hadron octahedron
ttt
stt
dtt tb utt
ctt
sst
dst sb, tc ust
ddt db, tu udt, sct, btt ub, td uut
dct cb, ts uct
cct
sss
dss sc uss
dds dc, su uds, ssc, sbt uc, sd uus
ddd du udd, dsc, dbt uu, dd, ss, cc, bb, tt uud, usc, ubt ud uuu
ddc ds, cu udc, scc, cbt us, cd uuc
dcc cs ucc
ccc
ssb
dsb st, bc usb
ddb dt, bu udb, scb, bbt ut, bd uub
dcb ct, bs ucb
ccb
sbb
dbb bt ubb
cbb
bbb
Ahh, so much prettier, hmm? Oh, wait now... <sigh>. We have mesons mixing very nicely with
baryons, but that introduces an imbalance: either we consider only some of the mesons to be mesons
and the others to be antimesons (even though they're all simply one quark and one antiquark, giving
them footing in each domain and no a priori reason to call them either at all per se)... or we remove
them or add antibaryons.
I'm not fond of any of these options, but let's see where they lead.
1) Remove which mesons for being antimesons, precisely?

Presumably those defined as such (and the convention of naming meson vs. antimeson isn't
entirely straightforward), but what do we do with those that are their own antimesons? Well, maybe
leave the self-antimesons alone.
[This is a serious question though: since everyday matter baryons are thought of as qqq and
antimatter antibaryons as qqq, the classic sci-fi go-to of matter or antimatter dichotomy isn't quite so
clear cut when considering a hypothetical stable material composed of qq, where should mesons fall in
a realistic sense?]
2) Remove all of the mesons?

We already know that one from the original baryon octahedron. It might make sense to remove
them all for a couple of reasons, but we needn't duplicate the illustration.
3) Add antibaryons?
It adds an extra dimension to each qqq, but... sure, we'll try that too.
qq matrix – noting antimesons

u d s c b t
u uu du su cu bu tu
d ud dd sd cd bd td
s us ds ss cs bs ts
c uc dc sc cc bc tc
b ub db sb cb bb tb
t ut dt st ct bt tt
Hadron octahedron – minus antimesons

ttt
stt
dtt tb utt
ctt
sst
dst sb, tc ust
ddt db, tu udt, sct, btt ub, td uut
dct cb, ts uct
cct
sss
dss sc uss
dds dc, su uds, ssc, sbt uc, sd uus
ddd du udd, dsc, dbt uu, dd, ss, cc, bb, tt uud, usc, ubt ud uuu
ddc ds, cu udc, scc, cbt us, cd uuc
dcc cs ucc
ccc
ssb
dsb st, bc usb
ddb dt, bu udb, scb, bbt ut, bd uub
dcb ct, bs ucb
ccb
sbb
dbb bt ubb
cbb
bbb
Above is example 1, the removal of only the antimesons (top-flavored mesons assumed IAW
positive mesons being material and negatives being antimaterial). Not really pretty, but viable.
Let's try that again below with example 3 instead: the addition of antibaryons. It gives the complete
set of qqq, qqq, and qq combinations all in a single array; whether the result adds any value is an open
question.
Hadron octahedron – plus antibaryons

ttt, bbb
stt, cbb
dtt, ubb tb utt, dbb
ctt, sbb
sst, ccb
dst, ucb sb, tc ust, dcb
udt, sct, btt,
ddt, uub db, tu udb, scb, bbt ub, td uut, ddb
dct, usb cb, ts uct, dsb
cct, ssb
sss, ccc
dss, ucc sc uss, dcc
uds, ssc, sbt,
dds, uuc dc, su udc, scc, cbt uc, sd uus, ddc
udd, dsc, dbt, uud, usc, ubt,
ddd, uuu du uud, usc, ubt uu, dd, ss, cc, bb, tt udd, dsc, dbt ud uuu, ddd
udc, scc, cbt,
ddc, uus ds, cu uds, ssc, sbt us, cd uuc, dds
dcc, uss cs ucc, dss
ccc, sss
ssb, cct
dsb, uct st, bc usb, dct
udb, scb, bbt,
ddb, uut dt, bu udt, sct, btt ut, bd uub, ddt
dcb, ust ct, bs ucb, dst
ccb, sst
sbb, ctt
dbb, utt bt ubb, dtt
cbb, stt
bbb, ttt
A bit dense, but functional.

How well do they all get along if we go from simple combinatorial to actual particles? Hmm... not
so simple. In chemical elements, we don't worry about a zillion different cases of excitation states, so
the table is easy (even if we expand it for nuclides) – i.e.: with nuclides, their excited states are well-
identified as being the same damned element. Not so for hadrons, as shown with mesons below
(tensors JP 2+ and [JP 2-?] pseudotensors not included for brevity, top-flavored hypotheticals in red
IAW 2016 PDG naming conventions for reference [2018 available here]) – i.e.: subatomic particles
aren't nearly so paparazzi-friendly (hence their identifications sometimes being somewhat tentative);
that doesn't actually explain the ridiculous explosion of names for the different excited states of a given
particle, which is simply a case of laziness <*ahem*> physicists wishing to keep established names in
order to minimize confusion.
Pseudoscalars
S 0; L 0; IG 0+ ½ 1-; JPC 0- 0-+
u d s c b t
u π° π- K- D° B- T°
d π+ π° K° D+ B° T+
s K+ K° ηη′ DS+ BS° TS+
c D° D- DS - ηc BC - TC °
b B+ B° BS° BC + ηb Tb+
t T° T- TS- TC ° Tb- ηt
Vectors
S 1; L 0,2; IG 0- ½ 1+; JPC 1- 1--
u d s c b t
u ρ° ρ- K*- D*° B*-
d ρ+ ρ° K*° D*+ B*°
s K*+ K*° ωϕ′ D*S+ B*S°
c D*° D*- D*S- J/ψ B*C -
b B*+ B*° B*S° B*C + ϒ
t θ
Scalars
S 1; L 1; IG 0+ ½ 1-; JPC 0+
u d s c b t
u a° a-
d a+ a°
s ff′
c χc
b χ b
t χ t
Pseudovectors
S 0,1; L 1; IG 0+ ½ 1-; JPC 1+
u d s c b t
u b° b-
d b+ b°
s hh′
c hc
b hb
t ht
Excluding the excited states so that we focused solely upon pseudoscalars would simplify matters,
though this would then lead to a similar result for baryons (e.g.: exclude J P 3/2 Δ in favor of JP 1/2 N).
Multiple tables for multiple states would satisfy this without losing the other states' representation, but
would obviously mean multiple tables (should it then extend further to 5/2, 7/2, 9/2, … ?).
See also: http://pdg.lbl.gov/2018/reviews/rpp2018-rev-quark-model.pdf
What you've seen here is all only a set of conceptual scaffolds, ignoring the mixing of eigenstates, and
none of them name the qqq (or qqq) and qq sets (except the specific example of mesons, to show how it
would complicate matters), or break them down by isospin (e.g.: uds; Λ I = 0, Σ I = 1) or angular
momentum configurations (e.g.: N {uud, udd}, JP = 1/2; Δ {uuu, uud, udd, ddd}, JP = 3/2) – or at least
differentiate between those that have been observed and those that haven't, and those that can't – but the
set in general at least gives you the gist of things.
Maybe it would be better arranged in DIM 12, to account for each quark and antiquark as its own
axis, and each particle could then be a hypercubic coordinate (other excitation issues aside), and this
would at least allow for certain hypothetical structures such as tetraquarks, but DIM 12 isn't visually
intuitive for DIM 3 eyesight and DIM 2 displays, nor would that particular example incorporate other
exotica such as gluonium [“glueball”] states. All of this would still be without really addressing flavor-
spin complications of extending SU(6) to six flavors and two spins as SU(12).
Ignoring the t quarks might simplify the resulting array, but would also remove a degree of
symmetry that seems inherent to the nature of things (even if t quarks decay too quickly to bond with
others).
O ~~~ O
APPENDIX F: Powers and Principalities

In the words “Power” and “Principality”, I'm not consciously cribbing notes from Tolkien or Judaeo-
Christian teaching, nor quite from the political arena, but they're all influences subconsciously.
(N)PCs scale enormously in power here, but the scaling isn't easy to define, which is made the
worse by the syncretic structure of their functions. Prima facie... it's like going from fine-tuned
differences of just how many fingers you have available to count on to the comparisons/contrasts of
Traveller and 3e/4e GURPS tech levels' differences (and types), and then on to Kardashёv types (and as
with the movie “Cast away”, one might possess advanced knowledge and/or power, but be unable to do
anything technological or otherwise with it, which is the case in some D&D worlds with low
background magic-energy resources [see 1e & 3e “Manual of the planes”] and throughout The Ice
[world-ponds and rare oases aside]).
I'll stick to the general anime/manga ranking method for this one: assume ranks (F), D, C, B, A, S.
You can add AA / AAA or A+ to this, but the principle remains the same.
Zeroeth tier: non-ranked
Life of any kind, or even just the very existence of non-living material, is miraculous – grok some
chemistry or physics, or meditate (religiously or philosophically), and you'll be amazed – but let's face
it: your average paramecium isn't exactly operating on the same level as your average house cat or
human. This means that there are clearly levels that would fall far short of typical storybook or game
characters' capabilities (whether average, or super-powered, or challenged by innumerable slings and
arrows).
For argument's sake, I'll simply place them at Kardashёv Type ε (in the sense of 1 / ℵα = εα > 0 and
εα = 0, rather than in the sense of ε0 = ω↑2ω).
2
This isn't an accurate rating. Technically, the Kardashёv civilization typing is a logarithmic scale, so
paramecia and such might be Type -1 or -2 or something, but I'm going to pull artistic liberty here and
just proclaim them to be ε by fiat in order to drive home the relative insignificance of their power
levels, knowledge base, etc. (“-1 or -2” just doesn't feel as if it has quite the same impact as ε).
They exist, they use tooth and claw (or some equivalent). That's about it.
<<10e6 Wh/d (i.e.: <<K 0) (where 10e-4 W = K -1).
In this sense, consider Kε as representing a power/etc. level that's asymptotically close to |0|, rather
than the more accurate equivalence of K0+.
Classic Traveller TL ε (with same clause as Kε).
First tier: ranks F-A
Your average human being, or at least the range that one might expect people to fall into. A small
child might struggle with a 10 pound weight, and adult can typically lift and carry 100 pounds (within a
factor or so, more or less), and heavy-weight lifters might well reach 1,000 pounds (squat, bench press,
or dead lift; perhaps half of this for snatch, or clean and jerk).
The average Ants in “The Colony” would rate their own special Rank F, they're that low-statted –
but hey, they're better off than the (N)PCs of Creeks and Crawdads, who'd legitimately earn a Rank F-.
<sigh> Those poor Ants and Crawdads.
The Octorillas and Cuccos of “Sonic's Redemption” would qualify for this tier (though not all cuccos
are Cuccos). The Octorillas are sophont, though only slightly sapient; the Cuccos are somewhat more
sapient (their corrals and husbandry techniques showing some sophistication as tools in their own
right), though only somewhere between 0 and 1 in sophonce. Both are fully sentient, but neither has
any super powers. I suppose put them each as F+ (even though the Crawdads might, and the Ants
apparently do, have a slightly more advanced overall physical setting and clear social interaction than
the Octorillas and Cuccos have).
Your average peasant, John Q. Public, etc. – such as TMNT's Casey Jones (if I remember correctly,
anyway) – is Rank D: not remarkably good at anything, not remarkably bad at anything.
Friday has mystical knowledge (though I'm not sure of just how much), and has applied it at least
pharmacologically, but hasn't yet demonstrated any actual magical powers per se, hence is at least Rank
C (possibly higher, of course, just not lower).
Deathclaw (Mr. Fluffykins) is probably Rank C in raw power and fighting, or just maybe Rank B
(now, at least – he was at the end of his rope when he met Peach, and likely ranked as an overall D or F
at the time). This is in an absolute sense (using the F-A scale relative to typical humans), since his
current Awakened state would qualify him as Rank S relative to other cats, based upon his ability to
speak and read Common. Some cats can use doorknobs and toilets (I had one who'd learned both, and
another who'd figured out only the toilet, but each of them was completely self-taught); while such
skills are fairly remarkable (given the low rate of their occurrence), they aren't S-rank level.
Batman is Rank A (or arguably A+).
None is superhuman.
The overall civilization of Creeks and Crawdads probably stands at about the level of your average
kindergarten class... minus the teacher.
The Ants' civilization is operating at perhaps 1 st (just maybe 2nd) grade level... also minus the teacher
(but worse: the Ants are being run by someone who might as well be Angelica, of Rugrats).
<sigh> Those poor Ants and Crawdads.
People have cars and computers, or something of an equivalent level; ~30 kWh/d. Nukes and such
(or equivalent) exist; civ. ~10e13+ bits data & ~10e10-10e11+ kWh/d ≈ 10e13-10e17 W/y (these being
broad orders of magnitude and using rather varying sources of information about power demands).
Individually, people are estimated at a 100 W throughput (10e2 W → K -0.4 ≈ K 0); by daily use of
items at our command (though pretty much only “first world” usage) 30 kW ~K 0.
All stand at around Kardashёv Type 0.
Individuals might be trained in skills of any Classic TL, but won't have any innate powers as such;
an everyday citizen could be expected to have Classic TL 6-9 (depending upon the type of tech. in
question) at their immediate disposal. Their civilization could reach Classic TL 8-10+. Clearly, these
assume something like 20c-21c Earth, and would presumably be higher or lower at other points in time.
Second tier: S-rank Supers
Superman, Thor, Wonder Woman, Dr. Strange, Hulk, Spider-Man, Dark Phoenix, Hercules, and
anyone else who can do things – even a single something (even if just barely) – that absolutely
positively can't be performed by an unaided, unaltered, non-mutated, non-magical, non-psionic, non-
cybernetic, non-whatever-else ordinary everyday human, no matter how incredibly buffed up that
human's stat.s are, is at least Rank S (or possibly on the teetering edge of S-, if you somehow need such
a thing). No, that doesn't mean that birds and fish are Supers.
How many “S” ranks are there? I mean, not all cybernetic-super-mutant-mages are born equal.
Doesn't matter specifically, but let's say that there are at least 3 (I'm comfortable with 5, too, but that's
irrelevant). I don't know whom you care to rank where, but Doctor Manhattan (perhaps?), Q, and The
Beyonder are really way out in a class of their own: Rank SSS or Rank SSSSS, given the ranking
system so far.
In order to keep it easy to read, I'll use subscripts here: S3 or Rank S5.
A normal human is roughly equivalent in level to the state that they're shown as being in “Fantastic
planet” (or as described in “Battlefield Earth” [the pulp sci-fi book, not the crappy movie])... kitty-pets
(or verminous shitty-pests, depending), essentially; not precisely far-far beneath the level of power and
intellect of a Super (hold onto your objection 'til after you've read tier three for contrast), but not
exactly on an even footing either.
Strictly, a zombie wouldn't fall into the F-A tier since they're somehow defying death if they're
undead (a real zombie then – not simply a rage-zombie that's a living being with some virus). On the
other hand, if that's the only condition that applies (and the attendant facts that they can certainly take a
world of punishment from environmental to starvation and keep on ticking), then they aren't very far
from normal people either (call them... “living impaired, plus perq.s”). I'll call them S-, but I couldn't
really fault anyone for dropping them to something like A+ (this wouldn't be accurate to me, given the
details here and the ranking method so far, but... ehh).
Vampires, Werewolves, Wendigo (the usual type, not the variation that Warbotdorf refers to in
“Seize the Deity”)... I'll skip the rant about monsters with human faces (narcissists); the parallels of
draining abuse, all-consuming rage, and mind-blotting need to consume and destroy are apt but off-
topic. As metaphors, they're still just humans, hence F-A; as literal super-powerful beings within a
game or a story, they're S1 or higher (usually not higher, but it could happen: consider an antediluvian
or even just a methuselah of VtM, or Akasha of Anne Rice's “Queen of the Damned” – hell, consider
Imhotep of [the 1999 version of] “The Mummy” [the good one, with Brendan Fraser]).
The city of Ankh-Morpork (Terry Pratchett's Discworld series) could qualify as merely Tier 1 (F-A),
or even merely 0 (:: paramecia), though I can't rule out Tier 2 (Supers and Powers), based upon >>>
SPOILER ALERT >>> the events of “Reaper Man” (the book with the snow globes and the shopping
carts). <<< END OF SPOILER <<<
The seemingly-living corporate embodiments in the movie >>> SPOILER ALERT >>> “Branded”
(you might recall something from it about a red heifer?) <<< END OF SPOILER <<< possibly qualify
for S1-S2, in some ill-definable paranormal sense.
WHFRPG Gods and some D&D Gods would probably be Rank S1, or Rank S2 at most.
If we assume 5 ranks in the S tier, then Superman might be S3 or higher.

I'm less familiar with Wonder Woman, but she's at least pretty much on par with him (apparently
higher, not equal-or-lower, since her divinely-gifted powers seem to be greater than his, by canon).
The Fylgjur of “Nyjötnar Saga” are a bit iffy: I haven't really developed that novel very much yet, so
I don't have a good handle on all of the details, but if their Fylgjur more or less approximate the norm,
then they have some capability beyond everyday people's, but not really on the level of a comic book
character. Let's give them a placeholder of S- for now.
The Ant Queen of “The Colony” I'll place as S1 by way of her ability to pump out gene-tailored kids.
Moreover, they're not simply GMO, but can include flight and fire-breathing (dragons that are still in
paper-note form, awaiting transcription), T-virus-like hulking brutes, and a few other mutant
superpowers. Yeah, I'd say that this counts.
The Augments and Cybers of “Sonic's Redemption” would fit in here as Tier 2 Supers – as long as
you'd consider the Six Million Dollar Man or Daleks as being something along the lines of super
powered characters.
Kaonashi might qualify for Rank S1 (footnote in Afterword of “Seize the Deity”), though I'm not so
sure of Caïssa (footnote in Epilogue of “Seize the Deity”).
Other beings – such as Icewall-Titans or Icewall-Cthulhu, and some D&D Gods – would fall
someplace around Rank S3 - Rank S5.
Icewall's world-trees that seed the plane with mountainous seeds shot like volcanic cousins to the
Klendathu are K1 in power, though not canonically named as being intelligent or not (perhaps a huge
store of information genetically, but with a K0- consciousness {sapience, sentience, sophonce} on par
with what a character might normally expect of a worm or a tree). Though their [lack of] volitional
awareness wouldn't rank them as a Power, the sheer scope of their natural abilities (even if only in a
general ecological niche fashion) places them here in the same sense as worms, house cats, and non-
super humans are all in the same ballpark in contrast to prokaryotes or Supers.
Each additional S rank leaves the prior ones in the dust to the extent that each F-A rank does the
same within the F-A tier. Clearly though, there's a huge difference between the F-A tier and the S tier.
Zelda's a Goddess and Peach is Ōkami. They're Powers. That puts them someplace in the S tier (I
think...?), and I'd guess Rank S2 - Rank S3, since I just don't see them as falling into “merely” Rank S1.
Their incarnate powers don't seem to be much to speak of, but we know that the canon of the real
[video game] Hyrule shows Din, Farore, and Nayru as having created that world. That's some
reasonably vast power compared to your average superhero. Hylia might have the same level or not, I
don't know (could be higher, could be lower).
We've seen Peach pull off her little autoreincarnation feat within this story-verse, and discussed
some of the implications thereof regarding disincarnated Ōkami powers (see “Seize the Deity” ►
DELETED scene ► footnote). Those are some serious abilities.
Sonic and Tails – neither of whom will stay dead, short of a nova – pretty much qualify for S tier.
I'd say Rank S1, but presumably(?) not Rank S2. Tails's current INT is S 1 on its own, and might
combine with everything else to boost him to S2.
Ruru's gotta be at least Rank S-, simply based upon her spell-like abilities. (Yeah, this technically
opens the question of everyone with any magic, psionics, chi, etc. as qualifying for S tier, but let's skip
the pedantry; for now, just assume that alchemists and wizards learn things and hence don't qualify for
more than A+ as-is, but also that how and how much wizards do what they do is beyond human bodies'
natural capabilities just as much as sorcerers' innate control, and thus qualify them as S- or better – a
warlock's pact-granted-powers would be hand-me-down sorcery on par with Doc Oc's cyber-powered
super-strength (or Spidey's, since that came from a bite rather than au naturel). A spell-like ability that
simply does F-A things would qualify in its magical nature and complete lack of necessity for the
normal human approach, even if not in its scope.)
Amy too, by dint of being essentially a fluid Terminator: S- to S 1. Her INT skews things a bit, since
I suspect it of being at least on par with Tails's, which might bring her to a total of S1 - S2.
Peach specifically stated (obliquely) in the epilogue of “Seize the Deity” that Shīfù Lǎorén, the
Immortal Wombat, is a Power – and she wasn't guessing or being polite. We know that he's immortal
(can be killed, but won't simply die on his own), and that he's of an insanely high OCC-level (~465 per
N&SS, but with an actual canonic total of about 1,200). Yeah: he's some kind of S tier, minimum,
whether literally or de facto super.
Daemon I'm not sure of – she might be multi-S, and she might be next-level (hell, bookmark her for
now as being Sω).
The Avatars in Charmed are probably at her level.
The Gaian of “Sonic's Redemption” is somewhat spread across the tiers.

• In terms of power that it can muster, or intellectual capability, it's pretty much dead in
the water: tier 0 or tier 1; it's arguably on par with a sequoia or armillaria ostoyae (other
than that its components can move).
• Given its integration of organisms over unnamed vast distances to form its being, that's a
super power of some kind: tier 2.
• In light of its purely zooic nature, it might reasonably fall into the bottommost
ecological niche of tier 3: Principalities (see next tier-entry).
“It” (of “When the paladins come marching in”, in “Tales from The Ice”) probably lies somewhere
within the above-outlined Sn range, but I don't have a bead on just where.
All are superhuman in one way or another, and/or have access to laws of nature other than those that
are commonly perceived (e.g.: they can perform “supernatural”-seeming feats through magic, psionics,
chi), but none is truly supernatural in the sense of decreeing new laws of nature as such. At truly
staggering ranks, the wishes, loyalties, and hatreds of F-A ranks are as irrelevant to them as an ant's
agreement or objection might be to your drinking a glass of water or going shopping.
One could argue that modern Earth nations stand at this level, or at least at the very bottom threshold
thereof.
People run around with über-tech coursing through them as much as we've had mitochondria for
billions of years and give it no thought. Tailored worlds and walk-through stargates exist; civ. ~10e13-
10e15 bits data & ~10e16-10e26 W/y.
Kardashёv Type ~I-II? (Clearly not invariably, since our heroes aren't themselves K1, so take these
with some latitude as an approximate upper limit.)
Individuals might reasonably possess personal powers (GMO/mutant, psionic, nano, etc.) of Classic
TL 9-20 (variance due to type of tech. in question), whether typical or atypical of their civilization; an
everyday citizen probably would have fairly unquestioned access to Classic TL 10-17 (depending upon
the type of tech. in question). Their civilization overall could reach Classic TL 25+.
Third tier: next-level incomprehensible
What about beings on the scale of Moorcock's gods of Law and Chaos, since they're more or less my
conception of Negent (and similar entities) – except that they seemed to be a bit limited in their
potentia in contrast to what Negent is (then again, maybe they were more interactive than he, and
operated under essentially the same constraints as he, hence it's simply more apparent with them)?
They're clearly not F-A, but I wouldn't class them in the S tier either.
Maybe we should simply assume direct hyperoperation as the key at this point, rather than which
value is being hyperoperated on. This will get a little ad hoc, so please bear with me.
A Principality (Void, Kallistṓ, Entropy, and Negent) would qualify for the S n tier (at that point, does
the exact value of the |n|-Rank really matter all that much, in overall scale?). Technically, the S 1, S2,
etc. ranks fall within the Sn tier, in that they'd all be factors of S1 – and by that same token, F-A ranks
would be infinitesimal fractions of S1. Assume here that any significant S n refers to magnitudes of S
(i.e.: n>1) – much like the differences between a point and a line segment, and an area, and a volume
(though only somewhat, since a measure figure of n-dimensions always has the same number of points,
as far as I know) – such that:
{S0 < S} :: {F . . . A}
{S1 = S} ≡ {S1 = 1*S = S}; here S1 ≡ S1, but more generally S1 >> S1
{S2 :: S*S} > {S2 :: 2*S = S+S}
{S3 :: S*S*S} >> {S3 :: 3*S = S+S+S}
etc.
If we do this, then the Principalities can be ranked roughly like superheroes and average people.
If we further assume either the actual layout above or one extremely similar, then Negent and the
others would probably be something like Rank S1...5. There's always the chance that there are other,
hidden Principalities (such as one that arranges filigreed patterns, rather than emptiness, randomness,
blended equilibrium, or polarizations – assuming that this weren't a subtle play by Tào, and that Tào
isn't simply a Principality of great skill and delicacy), and their power could go off-scale, but for now
we'll simply assume that at least these four are fairly closely balanced. Perhaps there are huge
asymmetries, but only in dissimilar ways, much as with S tier: Brainiac's intelligence vs. Dormammu's
magic vs. Saitama's punch – each is vastly qualified within their field of expertise, but how does one
compare and contrast between them? Q and The Beyonder might (just barely) fall into this tier, rather
than the standard S tier (Dr. Manhattan not so much, but this same “not so much” arguably applies
perfectly to Principalities, so... yeah).
Primordium, named in the prologue of “What evil lurks” (Link's adventures in this series) might fall
into any tier above F-A.
Whether it's a Power, a Principality, or something wholly other on even footing with Tào or
something, I don't know, but it's definitely capable beyond merely human levels. I described it as chaos
that strode the lands in darkness (with the deliberate lack of narrative cohesiveness regarding
Primordium's logical place as an actor in history, given the inherent self-contradictory nature of
Icewall), a thing which in turn found [life / goodness / something referred to indirectly] to be a brittle
burr and consumed itself with a non-specific intense yearning [to destroy utterly this brittle burr],
apparently capable of “...stoking the currents that flowed across eternity, plucking the threads that
guided all things, searching for the weak spot to harry...”. The reader is [meant to be] led to believe
[correctly] that it proceeds to do so through indirect means, not by clashing headlong with existence
itself or any god-like beings, but by subverting life into malformed creatures of chaos and evil (active
malevolence, rather than “mere” callous indifference) – such as Kandarian Demons (and presumably
beings of the Cthulhu cycle, and/or Warhammer's Chaos Gods' minions [to include Malice and the
Horned Rat and the various Skaven ideologies, and lesser-known examples such as Hashut or Necoho
as described by Richard Jones]).
To cause or create such beings is at least super-level (I'd argue Principality, but wouldn't be able to
prove that). I don't have a good handle on Primordium yet, and I probably won't develop it as a
detailed NPC, but I conceive it as being Principality-like (if you were to view Void vs. Chaos and
Negent vs. Entropy as diametrically opposed edges of a tetrahedron, then picture Primordium as being
like a disc that's radial to Void's and Chaos's fulcrum: not really on the others' axes, yet not exactly
orthogonal to them all, just perpetually tangential to the one axis while maintaining a complicated and
variable relationship with the other axis – in this fashion, Primordium parallels Moorcock's Singularity
to an extent, insofar as they each wish to cause their respective opposite number's “otherness” to cease
existing). That it should expect world-unmaking results from driving some putz like Link crazy
indicates either rather poor judgment at the least or vast insight indeed.
If its power level is that high (more to the point: assuming that it's not too low to consider), then its
being off of the game board (so to speak) leaves me wondering as to its nature. Logically its actions
must fall within its own purview or that of some [other?] Principality, unless these actions are
completely cloaked from their awareness and/or operate at a level above their ability to comprehend. I
think that it's safe to assume that the cloaking example isn't the case, but the comprehension level
doesn't make sense either. I really don't see Primordium as a Tào-like entity, much less anything on a
level with Ayn Sof or Ohr Ayn Sof.
Perhaps its actions introduce what the [other?] Principalities would view as minor imperfections in
the weave, nagging loose threads that must surely derive from their various actions (and perhaps those
of Tào), and surely not some agency unknown.
In any of these cases, you'll note the pronoun “it”. This isn't an issue of uncertainty or coy
ambiguity or physical hermaphroditism or fluid identity or PC neutrality or anything: Primordium is
sexless and genderless. Some of its actions could potentially be described as masc./fem. in some way
or other, but should not be ascribed to masculinity or femininity or whatever-else-inity as such. It
simply is an “it” – a living, thinking “it”, but very much an “it”.
Worth noting is that Primordium's existence lying outside of the Negent “pantheon” implies a multi-
dimensionality to the “real” history of Icewall (that is: each different sequence of events and origins
could be considered to be true, regardless of the sequences' mutually exclusive natures). As well,
Primordium's existence also implies that there could be some sort of thriving ecologically diverse set of
“pantheons” at any given tier, not necessarily interactive, but present.
Similarly, “Malice” (of “The Devil is in the details”, in “Tales from The Ice”) – and the other hosts
of such kind – must logically lie within the S n range or higher, but could arguably be below it. For
now, let's just say no more than Sω.
Why “no more than”? Because Malice is perhaps an ultimate expression of iterated supersets, and
as such cannot exceed these bounds. Whatever Tào (et alios) might be or be capable of, any upper
bounds thereon aren't limited by such bounds as might apply to Malice.
Laws of nature are malleable to Principalities. Their decision that something operate a certain way
is as much a given for them as picking up a glass of water is for most of us (that is: we “choose” to hold
it a certain way subconsciously, to move it through a certain path to our mouths, etc. – but we give it
hardly any thought at all while a much larger [and still insignificant, though unparsimoniously so]
portion of our awareness and being is dedicated to watching TV or replying to an e-mail). They
basically are supernatural forces unto themselves.
Here we can see another clear distinction between individual capabilities and those of the associated
civilization. Just as your average human on Earth doesn't wield the same power as an entire nation, the
Æsir as a whole wield far greater power than any single Áss. Where any Áss alone might stand at K1
or command K2, the Æsir civilization operates somewhere rather above this (let's say ~K3?) – see the
Icewall technical appendix for a detailed description of the dimensional engineering involved with their
star, which is also their computing source. A similar comparison would not be inapt were we to draw
such for Kryptonian technologies, though they eschew magic (and psionics). The same could likely be
said of the Vanir psionic technologies.
Spacetime and massenergy are by whim to these beings; civ. >10e26-10e120+ bits data (and this
extrapolates only as far as K3 & K4) & ~10e36-10e56 W/y (noting that our observable universe
produces something on the order of ~10e45 W). With K4 being the defined maximum within a given
universe, I suppose that a being on a multiverse scale (e.g.: Negent, per his own testimony) would
presumably weigh in at K5 (minimum).
Kardashёv Type ~III-V?
Individuals can be presumed to possess individual powers (sheer ability, though defining this as
scientific or magical or zooic is probably folly) of Classic TL >27, whether typical or atypical of their
civilization. Their civilization overall should be taken as Classic TL 31(+), if there's any difference
between individual and collective potentia.
Fourth tier: a (Super's Super)'s Super
Negent referred to other entities or tiers, though he didn't assert that they're definitely real. Tào
would presumably qualify for the S↑ pk (Knuth's up-arrow notation) tier. Again, just assume that n>1,
though in this case “n” is “p”. By way of a quick intro/refresher, if /p/ here refers not to the single-
arrow's exponentiation value (and just how might we meaningfully raise a non-numeric arrow to an
exponent?), but instead to how many arrows are intended (such that S↑2k = S↑↑k = k-many “S”s in an
iterated exponentiation of S^S^...; a power tower [of S] of the order k) then:
2↑04 {2,2,2,2} = 2*4 = 2+2+2+2 = 8

2↑14 = 2↑2↑2↑2 = 22^2 = 24 = 2*2*2*2 = 16
2↑24 = 2↑↑2↑↑2↑↑2 = 2 ↑ (2↑(2↑2)) = 2 2^4
= 2 ^ (2 ^ (2^2)) = 65,536
2↑34 = 2↑↑↑2↑↑↑2↑↑↑2 = 2 ↑↑ (2↑↑(2↑↑2)) = 2 ↑↑ (2↑↑4) = 2 ↑↑ (2^22^2) = 2↑↑65,536
= 2^2^2^... (2 w/ 65,535 exponents)
I'll skip even trying to do 2↑44 and 2↑54.
This first table [above] isn't meant to show how quickly the values of 2↑ n4 grow, since those are
specific to only the number |2|, and the “values” of Sn and Sn aren't exactly numeric things (seriously:
how might one really evaluate Sn = S+S+..., Sn = S*S*..., or S↑2n = S^S^...?). It's meant only to give
you a feel of how the up-arrow operator functions. You're familiar with how addition just keeps adding
things, and most people can follow the principle of multiplication in general; most people's grasp of
things tends to drop off around exponentiation (and even if familiar with something, we all forget
things sometimes). That gives you the next operator {∃, I, Δ, +, *, ^, ↑↑}.
The next table [below] shows some input-n values across the top with each operator's row giving the
respective output-entry values and their intermediate kth-element and iterated sequence steps listed in
separate end-columns – I'm skipping some steps, but this isn't meant to be a proof.
n=
oper. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 element k = iter. seq. =
2∃ = 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, … 2↑-3n ≡ 1 1
2I = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, … 2↑-2n ≡ n 1 + in-1
2Δ = 3, 4, 5, 2↑ 6 = 4 ≠ 6,
-2
7, 8, 9, 10, … 2↑-1n  2+n 1 + in-1
2+... = 2, 4, 6, 2↑-16 = 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, … 2↑0n :: 2*n 2 + in-1
2*... = 2, 4, 8, 2↑08 = 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, … 2↑1n :: 2n 2 * in-1
19,729(+)
2^... = 2, 4, 16, 2↑ 16 = 65536, 2*10
1
,… 2↑2n = 2↑↑n 2 ^ in-1
2↑... = 2, 4, 65536, 2↑265536, 2↑2(2↑265536), … 2↑3n 2 ↑2 in-1
This second table presents a glimpse of the enormity involved with tier 4 (i.e.: ↑↑, or ↑ 2). The first
two rows {2∃, 2I} being my own debatable placeholders (as is 2Δ, really), but in this context each one
of those two pretty much boils down to meaning “something exists”:
• “2∃” shows only that any given k exists at all (the actual value of n being irrelevant), and
• “2I” shows any given entry k to hold the same value as n itself (identity operator:
specifically k = n; the count of a set of existing things being the enumerated iteration of
acknowledging the presence of one after another).
• Its first contextually meaningful row “2Δ” is tier 0 (the successor operation: for the
successor of n by 2, we find that the value is n+2 [hence the delta “Δ”: the amount of
difference therein]; addition: sort of an iterated identity),
• the second “2+” is tier 1 (F-A, in which the k th entry holds the value of 21+22+23+...+2n
= 2*n; multiplication: iterated addition),
• the third “2*” is tier 2 (S1-S5: 21*22*23*...*2n = 2^n; exponentiation: iterated
multiplication), and
• the fourth “2^” is tier 3 (S1-S5: 21^22^23^...^2n = 2↑2n = 2↑↑n; tetration: iterated
exponentiation).
• With the bottom row “2↑” representing tier 5 (pentation: iterated tetration), we begin to
get a feel of how 2↑31-2↑35 contrasts with the previous tiers.
• Failing a deep grasp of mathematics, I would venture that such a construct might be
analogous to treating the usual operators as particular instances of {∃ = op0, I = op1, Δ =
op2, + = op3, * = op4, ^ = op5, ↑ = op6} – though subscripts (re-indexed to 1...7?) might
be more appropriate than superscripts – but that's too far astray from our purposes here.
This isn't a perfect analogy, of course, just a rough set of scales per operator. It shows how any
given S↑pk5 is vastly beyond any lower-p tiers' 5th elements {7, 10, 32, 2*1019,729(+), 2↑2(2↑265536)},
which gives us some sense of scale – but it also leaves most of their initial elements equal {3, 2, 2, 2,
2}, and that (i.e.: F ≈ S1 = S1 = S↑31) just isn't the case. In this, perhaps we should view them as {kth
element} ordinals rather than as |n = value| cardinals.
Regardless of the specifics above, and whether Tào et al. are real, if we follow such a ranking
structure, and we rank Tào someplace within this tier, then Tào would be of Rank S↑31...5.
Following this layout, we can use the up-arrow notation for the other tiers right along with Tào as
follows:
• 0 (“ε”, e.g.: paramecia) :: Rank S↑-11...5;

• 1 (average F-A) ≡ Rank S↑01...5;
• 2 (Supers and Powers) = Rank S↑11...5;
• 3 (Principalities: Void, Chaos, Entropy, and Negent – and the putative Other) = Rank
S↑21...5;
• 4 (Tào) = Rank S↑31...5;
• 5 (Ayn Sof, Ohr Ayn Sof – more on them in next entry down)  ≥Rank S↑41...5.
Law and nature don't really apply here anymore. At this point, it's all Dreamtime manifested. Every
thing implies all other things, so that it's more a question of “where” you are in the plenum than of
what “is” or “isn't”. To “be” is to dream, to dream is to “perceive”, to “perceive” is to manifest as
being.
One might conclude that if a being's civilization's K type is arguably one type greater than a being's
own, then Principality (= tier three) civilization (:: tier four?) might well stand at this Dreamtime level.
“Reality” and “unreality” are a meaningless distinction to someone at this tier; even “individuals”
(aspects?) :: >>10e120 bits data & :: >10e66 W/y, insofar as {bits, data, watts, power, or a year} can be
said to have any meaning here either.
Kardashёv Type ~VI.
Traveller TL loses meaning by this stage (and might very well have done so before even tier three),
but take beings at tier four as Classic TL >>31.
Fifth tier: to infinity and beyond
Ohr Ayn Sof (and even Ayn Sof alone) would normally be taken as infinite, though in the above tier
system one could suppose another hyperoperator beyond the up-arrow, but it's more of a notation than
an actual operator (then again, aren't they all?). In this sense, the fifth tier would be a function of
{element k = S↑41...5; sequence = S ↑3 in-1} and Kardashёv Type >VI.
Aside from the values of k (vast) and the implications of K type VII+ equivalent power /
knowledge / perception / etc. (meaningless to me: absolutely aware of everything at once), it's probably
safe to assume that these don't actually apply to them. Perhaps these k values apply to someone in the
Icewall food chain, but I'm pretty sure that Ayn Sof and Ohr Ayn Sof are the source of all. Period. Full
stop.
Do I know this? Well, no. Yes, I'm the guy writing it all, but I haven't designed that particular
aspect as yet, and I doubt that I ever will.
I suppose that as a tier in itself – whether it applies to any (N)PC or not – tier 5 would simply follow
the pattern set forth so far: 5 = S↑4n, hence having (N)PCs of Rank S↑41...5.
You want to know where Ayn Sof should logically fall? <sigh> Let's say that it would have to be
something like tier Ω.
Summary
So, where does all of that leave us? It leaves us contemplating a universe from the perspective of a
grain of sand. That's not a statement of insignificance, either – it's multilayered: reality as a fractal,
logarithmic scales of scientia and potentia, and able to view at least one tier upward and downward
from a given position.
Each tier might see the downward tiers as being like fragile soap bubbles, or mere shadowplay, or
ephemeral figments of thought. Looking upward might be akin to a caveman trying to grasp the
workings of a castle, or a Death Star, or the inner mind of Cthulhu.
For simplicity, assume further that within a given tier, someone might personally possess different
specific ranks of knowledge vs. perception vs. power vs. etc., command some higher rank of each (such
as personal possessions, legal authority, etc.), and yet be part of a civilization that is perhaps at least
one full rank higher still (all of this leading to upward of an entire K-typal difference between the
individual and the world that they live in). In this way, the range covered by a rank R within a given
tier T might be considered to be equivalent to R = 0.20 ΔT; it's a bit awkward, since although the ranks
of each tier progress smoothly, successive tiers progress with the next higher derivative: ΔT1 < ΔT2 <
etc. (i.e.: a smooth slope per tier, but with each tier's slope being greater than the previous one's).
Tier Population Ranks Individual capabilities

0 Paramecia, etc. N/A Kardashёv Type ε TL ε
1 Human beings F- … A+ Kardashёv Type 0 CTL 6-9
2 Supers & Powers S1 … S5 Kardashёv Type ~I-II? CTL 9-20
3 Principalities S1 … S5 Kardashёv Type ~III-V+? CTL >27-31+
4 Tào(?) S↑31 … S↑35 Kardashёv Type ~VI CTL >>31
5/ω Ayn Sof(?) S↑41 … S↑45 Kardashёv Type VII+
Note:
If the mathematics grabbed you more than the general idea did, and you feel a need to run it into the
ground, then you might want to look into things like the Ackermann function, Graham's number,
Loader's number, the TREE function (note: TREE(n) ≠ tree(n)), and fast growing hierarchies.
For a quick intro to these, try these videos:
• Graham's Number – Numberphile (explaining the basic nature of the question that
Graham's number answers),
• What is Graham's Number? (feat Ron Graham) (explaining the n-cubic question itself),
• Graham's Number Escalates Quickly – Numberphile (expanding on the process to reach
it, fleshing out just how insanely large a number we're looking at),
• The Enormous TREE(3) – Numberphile (showing just what the TREE game is),
• TREE(Graham's Number) (extra) – Numberphile (this one in particular looks at the
Shannon data entropic limits of the universe),
• TREE vs Graham's Number – Numberphile (expanding on the iteration of f(f(f(...
(f(n))...) and introducing {ε0 = ω↑2ω, ε1, ε2, …, εε1, …, ζ0 and η0 via Veblen hierarchies
of functions, and eventually the Feferman–Schütte ordinal Γ0}).
O ~~~ O
SCRIBBLED NOTES TO GET BACK TO

Legions dying, fire and destruction, a sweeping darkness swallowing the lands, insane perversions of
mechanism and nature, myriad possibilities leading to the same conclusion, an octahedral tower of
silver and obsidian and a shining brass cube at the center of it all. Behind it marched a beautiful
woman, a terrible woman, a halo of spikes surrounding her head, magenta-lavender skin clashing
painfully with turquoise hair.
If we do get to see what happens with Daemon, then I'd like to also see them explore something like a
deep dungeon crawl – maybe a mix of the dungeon crawls found in “Made in Abyss” (manga / anime),
“DanMachi” (manga x 3 / anime), and “Little Witch Academia” (manga / anime), and some of the
elements of “Re:Zero” (manga / anime) and Gate/JSDF (manga / anime) though the idea of such a mix
sounds a little artificial to me, not to mention unlikely to relate to The Lament Configuration unless
they happen to visit The Labyrinth (and they just might have to do exactly that, in order to settle
accounts). Personally, I'd love to see the forest from C. S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy and P. J.
Farmer's Dungeon have some effect there, too.
Pareto Principle: 20% input yields 80% data.
5-d crystalline periodic structure of hadronic quark combinations: would Tails make mention of it?
What about quark stars?
P asks T about question nagging her: categorical logic cube and missing cells.
“Maoyū Maō Yūsha” arc? Not exactly, but...
K → T: dark energy probably best, but even the Ancients never mastered it, at least not within
Encyclopædia Krustallosica, though they seemed to be well on the way.
archon tweaks something in Z's memory
s → z: how much more shit ya got hidden in yer noggin, anyway?
<shrugs, apologetic smile>
gomboc self-righting function & rattleback spin-reversal?

Maybe some impossible quantum tunneling, like a metastable CG balance toy doing a Fosbury Flop
would T focus much on interquark degeneracy pressure? Or the chemistry of nullium?
If stochastic, then not necessarily true that all possibilities exist; in principle, though hardly likely,
entirely possible to have stochastic results all identical. Multiplicity, or rather, comprehensive inclusion
guaranteed only if all must exist.
note to self: any chance of the cat crew from the framework ever bumping into these guys? What
about some of the more bizarre gaming worlds (e.g.: water veil, Åðsbøð, Undercold)? Or maybe Blake
Williams's Yellow Submarine (Icewall Earth, c2250)?
how would A.I.s know if they're in a sim? G f/x alpha; Planck is max pix zoom. If sim of sim, then not
all needs to be simmed, avoiding thermodynamic constraints and explaining wave function collapse.
The Book of {Pulsing Flesh, Rising Intellect, Essential Forlorn Blood, All-seeing Clairvoyant Eyes,
Powerful Arms, Trotting Legs, Supporting Bones}... Invisible Hand(?)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/DungeonMastersOnly/?
multi_permalinks=1249331181884055&notif_id=1541388252011122
a forgotten vault filled with broken modrons
an iron golem [...] maybe a warforged
I'm picturing stuff from the "Cube" movies and the [remake version] "Clash of the Titans", maybe
some flavor from "Maze Runner".and "The Hunger Games".
(With a strong undercurrent of "Goblin Slayer", given the circumstances.)
rust monsters
I did a battle on a sudoku based on the 9 alignment planes that spawned small constructs until the
sudoku was solved. Each section also became a zone that had a residual effect based on the plane its
alignment corresponded too.
Hidden within is a fragment of the Universal Equation, the mathematical formula that can make or
unmake the Multiverse. And of course, several clues leading to the next location. Also, mechanical
constructs of strange varieties, not golem, not modron, powered by and wielding the High Math instead
of orthodox spells. Shake it up. Scare the party half to death with the Power of Absolute Order, which
is more frightening than Chaos when played properly.
Clockwork puzzles. I'm thinking along the lines of a Rube Goldberg machine with parts missing,
misaligned, or damaged.
Ooh, and maybe just a pinch of M. C. Escher!
This is the construct that I think of most in recent fantasy media, so similar to the guardians, I would
have something that can possess the bodies several broken modrons in the dungeon. Also, if the vault
was abandoned long enough ago you could play with the idea of nature retaking the vault with animals
living inside moss filled modron husks or some larger beast that got stuck in some pieces of modron
that it now uses as armor. <includes pic of BotW guardian>
NOTE: taking the theme of the FB post above, maybe moving doorway-halls, rather than rooms,
tensegrity balls, gollygons, hexaflexagons, hendecachora, and (what was this... 4e?) an actual use for
the Far Realms interpretation?
E.C.C.O. and Plato's cave?
hyperspatial sewage transport system: like magnetic flux at start, but with holographic transform
downshift DIM 3->1, then Zenneck wave shearing along back of painting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGQbA2jwkWI
8.02x - Lect 16 - Electromagnetic Induction, Faraday's Law, Lenz Law, SUPER DEMO
Lectures by Walter Lewin. They will make you ♥ Physics.

outreach program to Moblins and others.
last dinner before leaving
P chicken, balsamic, chicken broth, honey, ground mustard, olive oil, shallots, ground salt and
pepper;
asparagus, broccoli florets, baby carrots
S variant weeping tiger: fish sauce, lime juice, soy sauce, minced garlic, sugar, coriander,
pepper;
fine chopped tomato, fish sauce, lemon juice, sugar, ground chillis;
rice
lettuce, quartered cherry tomatoes, shredded carrot, mint and basil leaves, cucumber
slices, rings of shallots
debated tiny shrimp, left them out for evening snacks
F worked up popcorn shrimp with hints of dill and marjoram, for which R then requested bleu
cheese sauce (S calls her heathen, T likes flavor mix)
Z mostly hung out acting as sous chef
DC/F got tidbits from everyone
dessert was custard with lemon whipped cream and berry sauce and shredded mint
P brings soda bread as treat (has raisins, dates, figs, cherries, craisins, caraway seeds, orange peel,
saffron)
a panettone variant
eggs florentine w/ some provençal sauce and a little brunoise
q-tips?
quelle folie
a tout a l'heure
K2 vorlon, k3 stargate, k4 timelords, k5 Q
S makes Jonesy (Fluffykins) reference
S w/ Daemon: Halluzinelle reference(?).
S w/ Daemon: So our mission, should we choose to accept it...
NegL the ultimate -- and only -- power is freedom; the more that you know, the less power you have to
affect change of any sort.
Negent's body an avatar something like Varley's Gaia in "Titan"
Epilogue: S would think reality's a setup, given T's summary of fnords
T -> A: singing "Happy together"
Hot chocolate -- shaved chocolate, heavy cream, egg, allspice, honey

https://www.wellplated.com/french-hot-chocolate/
Erin Clarke
prep time:3 MINScook time:5 MINStotal time:8 MINS
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups whole milk
1/2 cup heavy cream
2 teaspoons powdered sugar
1/2 teaspoon espresso powder — optional, but delicious for intensifying chocolate flavor
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate — at least 70%, chopped*
Giant bowl of whipped cream — for serving
Instructions
In a medium saucepan over medium heat, whisk together the whole milk, heavy cream, powdered
sugar, and espresso powder until small bubbles appear around the edges. Do not allow the mixture to
boil.
Remove from saucepan from the heat and stir in the chopped chocolate until melted, returning the
sauce to low heat if needed for the chocolate to melt completely. Serve warm, topped with lots of
whipped cream.
Recipe Notes
*Choose the best quality chocolate you can, as the flavor really carries the drink. I love Guittard for a
splurge, Ghirardelli, or Godiva, but the Trader Joe's Pound Plus 72% bar is quite good too. I do not
recommend chocolate chips, as they contain stabilizers and do not melt as well.
Leftover French hot chocolate can be cooled to room temperature, then refrigerated in an airtight
container (empty mason or jam jars work particularly well). Reheat gently the in the microwave or in a
saucepan over low heat.
Time contracted not dilated
Long travel inside, fast outside
P T how smart potential!
T i'm just me.
Thorse mounts omnvor
Omnifuel engines
Psi-landspeeders
Faas bubble cars
Maglev fermionic noncrash bilocation
Cause rvrs entangle forget merge
Fight vampiric hunger addict reptilns
Bella beauty vampire
Sun not always prob iaw btvs
Cass bell low on marc shitloat
If ran world let em choose deaths
Bell office dim water wall n climbing
Marc qtrs pine empty quiet
Bell visit past year cent time inconst
Sit quiet awhile n leave
Merdith cornwall geordie imp cmn
Basque etruscan, cholula
Ukraine
Lasciate theatrics but ulterior
Kitna dim holes stabl but a lot
Z know our politics n eveything
Watching a while
Wed 2 s: battle rattle huh?
Z rolls eyes at it
Realize means war
Jeez louise
Recognz crin n mil types
Clotges skyclad choice
Ill not ve werin armor
Bear arms if wish advise gainst it
Bar.brawl och sounds like the keks

Avast, foul blaggards!
Frst real argmt z p over p not go w
P we go talk dmn?
Wombat tea manufested
Daem cant go chg fx wld be very bad
Dont make me angry mcgee
Tinkling laugh: precisely
Finally somon get my jokes
Daem univ renov brushstrokes
10^35 lives locally pch hrrfied
Beautfl place colors life evrwhr
Prev space prev solid caves
Many diff indicators diff cosmoi
Tgink smtim real vone i still here
Diff time flow as needed
Dividing time like positraction
Cant go abyss stares; changes
Bad for all, maybe not s
Megatons and match heads
Sonic eyebrows imprssed duly
Abyss souls blind doorless towers
Vampiric vines to ea other
Some only roiling chaos
Others mere dull rocks hunkered
Dmn what are you z p
Cant see inside okami goddess
Z weapons in encyc?
S tails dont like ta go there...
S'above my paygrade
Z my bro n my babe
Samsra confdnt slfassurd
S plyful
P earth mother
T spout data
R insight
Jeffries tube? orly? Just lazy writin'
P tea, jasmine and sake, hot
S n t like m's meow mix kibble
P n z partcle board of crdbrd
Daemon note violet paisly 2" subpapr
Pic-a-nic basket
Away team p see m "aww!"
Ahriman tower
Ship not samsara or dharma
S p know why dont act wo z
Not my place n distrust own acts
Might be ok now...
Amy? Who's the beautifully delicious,
Stunningly gorgeous databracer?
Please tell me yer media lib is ok!
Shikashi -- why now?
Casimir negen -- like soufflé w tiny
Bubbles vs big bust?
Amy: know weird feel when flash bios
N wait first post? Felt forever
TX body? Time wait, think...
Not bad; nice barbapapa!
Skaven train tunnels, graffiti
Psyker pigeon
Lost argumt to cat?
P nods
S just checkin
If s irl then probly sane
Dyin usually kills ya. Nice trick
Amy polymorphic neuronet entangled
plasmids, geordie vision,
integrated comm later, omni food,
PS 24+
S: midnight blue pinecone?
A: wave. Studied. Shakehand care
S P told ya somn weird test tubes
T gods arcane divine primal energies
wormholes
Samsara 2 ppl walk together sht time
long way & long tome sgort way
but same path
Z all us dead
S If so choose life be happy
Z dreamt p called. No idea where
was. Felt he missing. Asked but
she ignored me. Talked w
someone else where she was.
I Missed missed her painfully
T thinks SEP field, not a sensory
blind spot
S -> M ave atque vale
Abyss not pull toward goal, more of
push edge you choose direct fall
Negent verse real, like shadow cast
by EGB angles, "other" places
no more "other" than any, thus
samsara and obelisk, etc
8pi is maybe Absolute Elsewhere?
Bits in 3world like shards of

structured 3crystal sticking
through 2plane at
seeming-random but just sensible
pattern from 2section of 3crystal
perspective
So samsara etc are real?
Real-er, you could say, but still just
phase space projections of the
essential-real beneath it all.
Second derivatives!
N smile: yes. Be careful. Some
thoughts... well, children leave
their toys out and it can hurt if you
step on one.
S no fate but what we make. Got it.
Real is what we choose it to be.
That's whats so dang zfc?
N youre just right crazy to be very
dang.
Lelerli steve walks warily dn th street
George = space: 1779 w phlog field
like stiff dk mat halo?
Earlier gearpunk, alchemipunk,
druidipunk, divinipunk
Lightsaber full fx combo
F4(x)-ray holo-encode z axis (-1):1
vs 3-planar shadow only
More fun than gravpho, like future
dim-ver of steampunk
S ren-lorre voice t's space madness
S t how do all this
T like paint sculpt diff but same
S z says same for languages
S brief on Ice dangers pond diffs
Rlyeh eden chaos titans
Galaxy pond-eaters
It's a clusterfuck out there
Ixnay explor need hunker adv def
Triple tech but quietly
We can do a quick recon farnsworth
just no holidays, machello
Bump encyc w kitana obsrvtns
Bad w capital bad
Mousell roar but bark needs bite
Mcgyvr upr lwr lims?
Genius K5 nuke overunity rbr bnd
IQ 50 cavman gilgn isl shoelace

Brains, luck, exmpl wrkaround
Edenia encyc K2? Lvl amy's body
Appdx for K civ details
Scale transform micro-mega for
virus-planck-gal-etc
If nobody watching wont hurt quiet
Anyone watch gotta lay low
Theyll look for their ver smoke sig
We gotta jump to photon torp
w/o radar first
Tech will have eff radius: better
Means bigger reach dam c3i
No chase means higher encyc
don't care or cant n lwr cant
Threat is on par enc techs
Dev detctn tech for K-lvls
Silent galaxy, armada, etc
Tlscp uslss sideways megamech
Whole pond n imgnry t sdwy
Maybe on microdot far away?
Go temp, bug hunt, then perm
S p travel west east and back again
S t no history erase button?
T climbs bed w p n z a lot
Game n board sq tetra cube
Intro incis hand posblty
Imply emerg prop maybe real
Show prefrd configs incl trpzoid
Inv hnd ring, blank, ch sem rnd,
Ent chkbrd
Uncrt wind grass window fx
Why bot f? Or do they go too?
Elecmag break sym point?
T: A is own utility fog! Demo hands
S: handy. (Chuckle)
S z toldja island princess come
Z no shine armor white horse
S stare
Z bloody hell that was me and
Eponas not white
Stares more
Z just drink already ye git
Streetscum situations (r2 others too)
T polarized light feels better
Skaven fallen grav fountain?
Stilled walkway movers
T epilog nonmasenrg bh just spctim

Skaven play jugger w beastmaster
rat-trolls
Div energ chaos nurture self actlztn
Infern chaos indlg slf destr
P girl of z's dreams
Z tucks foot under lap and rocks to fantasy of P

Book 2, I Am Legion, Alpha Ver 0.16

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I am Legion page 1 of 91

NB: See https://archiveofourown.org/works/24354049 for most recent completed version (and

Book 2, I am Legion, ALPHA VER 0.16.b + AO3.odt

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

This is an ALPHA version. The file name indicates my estimation of its

Simplest of all, just go to

Book 0a, Zelda Invictus

Light World sidequels:

07 To be (Zelda x Peach world)

Icewall shared universe:

...and many more at

/// --- ///

Empress Zelda Hylia of Hyrule, a Hylian

Imperial Queen Peach Toadstool of the Mushroom Kingdom, a half-Human

Miles “Tails” Prower, High Magister of Imperial Technologies

Mister Fluffykins (Deathclaw) [no picture available]

Princess Kitana of Edenia, Duchess of the Outer Marches

Shīfù Lǎorén, the Immortal Wombat [no picture available]

Dame Daemon, a Power

Negent [IPA: 1nɛːg 2ɛnt; not 1Ni 2gan], Tiānlóng, a Principality

Prologue: All roads lead to a singularity

Chapter 1: The coming storm

sci: grav, electromag, strong, weak; technicolor, SuSy, hypercharge, etc.

P: we go see Daemon. Talk to her. Face her directly.

S: I think yer damn' Nayru just adopted me, Z.

Act II: When the mountain comes to you

Legio IX c121+ AD.

DAEMON: what varied tech.s available?

Marcus reclined on a perch in his room.

curling back to its body as he lifted it.

Dae explains Saṃsāra as self-interacting uncollapsed wave function.

Z becomes content, happy even.

R is thoughtful and insightfully sympathetic.

Act III: The Final Derivative

DF → Z: You may sing again.

“yIH tun, yIH ghun,

Devolution: mandrill demons. Id monster. Several Jungian archetype zooic automata.

range stretches far ahead and draws tight behind.

“...trade them for a package of

“I have some unfilmed Max Fleischers, if you're in the mood...”

“...folks, now that you have heard my story,

T: what's the Chaitan constant for it all?

“Des nuits d'amour à plus en finir

S: Yeah, well, we're still here ta stop you.

“...of all the things I value most in life,

Chapter <last>: Butter side (|↓↓〉 - |↑↑〉) / √2

N: The Box... the Box can find its way elsewhere.

“Non, rien de rien,

Non, rien de rien,

Epilogue: Back to Kansas

“...Everybody finds somebody someplace.

Marcus awoke in his room in Saṃsāra.

S glad to see A is back. Ohana.

upon impact) w/ A interfaced into blank golem pro tem.

Tails digs through Encyc, combos mag-zooi-sci, builds Storm Strider.

After a pause, Sonic continued.

Close your eyes,

Close your eyes

“Then I couldn't count any higher?”

“Well, he walked up to me and he asked me if I wanted to dance.

“When he danced, he held me tight,

“...and then he kissed me-e-e...”

~ ~ ~~~

~ ~ ~~~