text | day 008 | HE412T

[timaeus]

[This text post comes after a few hours of radio silence following Dirk's first messages.]

Surprise, I survived.
"I told you so" etc etc.
Turns out the locals are pretty chill, all things considered.
I've learned their language and they have accepted me as one of their own.
By which I mean I'm cooling my heels in one of their longhouses for the rest of the night after they explained their whole Lost-adjacent dogma to me.
And I learned some shit you folks will probably be interested to hear about, judging by the fat wad of nothing y'all were able to tell me.
Key takeaways:
One, this particular group of natives speaks Morse code.
Tongue clicks for dots and hums for dashes.
Might wanna brush up on it if you don't feel like getting speared should you have a run-in with them.
And two, the people responsible for whatever this is are somewhere to the southeast, presumably on another island.

Comments

[timaeus]

Who said it's a who?
In my experience, it's more of a what.

[salamanca]

A "what?" Meaning? We have nothing like this where I'm from. Dumb it down. In your experience, how does this sort of thing usually work? You talk like you're familiar.

[timaeus]

I am familiar.
And the brand I'm familiar with is orchestrated by reality itself.
I could get into the details, but I can't guarantee my own ability to put it in layman's terms.
I've been told I have an aversion to simplicity.

[And he was told that by his AI chatbot clone of himself, so...yeah. Simple.]

[salamanca]

Try anyway. I'll do my best to keep up.

[timaeus]

Fine.
The whole conditional immortality thing is one of the benefits of ascending to godtier.
Whether you want to think of that as literal godhood is up to you, but given everyone involved is working to create a new universe, I guess it's not completely absurd to think of it from a mythological perspective.

[It's just kind of weird to think of himself or people he knows like that. Like, Jake's a fucking dork obsessed with terrible movies. Roxy writes wizard fic. Jane thinks Ron Swanson is hot. These are not the traits one associates with something as grandiose as godhood.]

Ascension requires dying in a very particular manner.
Fulfill the requirements and you get a massive power upgrade plus flight and the aforementioned immortality.
The "conditional" part comes from the fact that a death will be permanent if it's deemed to be heroic or just by whatever unknown force determines that shit.
Otherwise, you just keep on truckin'.
I guess it's just not very narratively satisfying if your heroes obtain godhood only to die in an incredibly stupid way.