A rambling account / guide book to the new, somehow somewhat less, fucked up existence we find ourselves in.
September 11th 2024
21 of Bhaadra 1946 Saka Samvat
9 of Month 8. Jia-chen year of the Dragon
1 of Maskarram , 2017 Amätä Məhrät
LPS (Local Personal System) 2460565
I have attempted to include as many date types as I was able to reliably source, I do apologize for any inaccuracies or missteps in cultural awareness that I may unknowingly transgress in my pursuit of providing a well rounded scope.
On this day, 9/11/24, seven structures made their existence known throughout the world.
Denali, Aconcagua, Elbrus, Kilimanjaro, Vinson Massif, Kosciuszko, and Everest.
Grandiose pillars of rough hewn stone that seemed plucked from the local environment. Great mythic structures that rose from the earth with such violent intensity that for a brief moment it was all but assured that we were experiencing a true apocalypse. The Towers bear no doors nor windows, only long winded carvings denoting the cultures and history of their respective continents.
I personally can only speak to the sight of the Denali tower as I’ve not yet cleared the floor required to utilize on planet teleportation, currently only the front runners have completed such things.
In the immediacy I will tell you this, the world has achieved a strange balance. Food is provided for thanks to the ‘Tower Call’. Electronics en mass have fallen into dysfunction as many of the formula for things such as simple voltage and amperage requirements and conductivity have become… unstable. Reality as a whole has become looser with its boundaries.
Its true that there are still monsters in this world, terrible people who try to take advantage of others, and those who tried to exploit or monetize the features of the tower as soon as they discovered how to utilize them. That particular instance was how we discovered the presence of the Divines, we being the human species.
Surprise! There’s aliens, and demons, and angels, and multiversal interdimensional creatures named Jhonas. We don’t see very many of them here on earth since were still in the ‘growth’ stage of world development. The only one I’ve gotten to interact with thus far was a younger dwarven like individual that had shale like flakes all over his body. We were paired for a physical floor test and ended up spending the day moving stones into a large ring.
His name was something to the effect of Drvask but I’ll come back to him, and the trials, and the translation system, and entering the tower, and the divines.
Okay, So, you’re going about your daily life. Work, School, Lazy day off, whatever have you. At some point throughout the day you begin to experience a slight dissociative tug, it pulls at the edge of your brain until eventually you notice it and direct your attention to it. When you do you’ll receive a ‘prompt’ which is a message or communication from the tower.
These messages do not appear to everyone the same way. I personally don’t get images or audio or even sensory feedback like in some individuals who have visual oriented disabilities. I personally receive the information direct download style which can be very frustrating sometimes.
Anyway, you’ll receive a prompt, this prompt will typically follow the lines of “Your world has successfully grown to the point that it can begin its ascent to join the greater rings of reality. To begin cultivating the tools, skills, and abilities required to traverse the greater rings would you like to enter the tower?” With a simple yes or no functional answer able to be provided in response.
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Heres the thing, if you select yes you are immediately pulled in for a trial. Trials come in six types, at least six types that we’ve seen so far, Combat, Conflict, Physical, Skill, Social, and Myriad. Most of the names are self explanatory aside from Myriad. Myriad floors are floors in which a loose goal is presented, and in the limited cases I have seen ‘loose’ might be an exaggeration of specificity.
Some have gone so far as to call Myriad floor ‘Glitches’ which bodes very well for a world changing system that has fundamentally changed how much of culture and society functioned. Anyway, you go into the tower, which is to say you’re transported to a large circular platform that initially you cannot see beyond the border of. Once the required number of members for that Floor’s trail have manifested the veil around the edge of the platform drops and the trail’s details are revealed.
These circular platforms are not safe zones, they do not provide any protection, cloaking, shielding, warding, or any sort of defense against the area beyond once the veil drops. The various floors can be anything from forests to mountains to desolate wastelands to swamps and every biome in between. It is common knowledge that the environment is the thing most likely to kill you in the tower if you are unprepared.
Which brings me to the second option of the prompt, selecting no. Each time you select no the prompt will remove itself and ask again in about three days time, each subsequent ‘no’ will add 3 additional days to that length. This time length stays consistent even if you do select yes and enter the tower, pass said trail, and return. If you have selected ‘No’ three times previously you will have nine days between each naturally occurring tower entrance prompt.
That being said there are consumable tokens that can be utilized to enter the tower as well as reduce that prompt delay time. However it does not appear that the delay goes below the base of 3 days.
Okay, so we've talked about the start. But what happens when you complete a trail in the tower? Each floor of the tower has a ‘universal unlock’ which means there is a feature, trait, skill, or unique ‘thing’ that you acquire when you complete that floor. The first floor reward is immortality. And I know that sounds huge, but the first floor trail is very nearly always combat and this immortality is not the kind were you can get your arm cut off and just keep going.
No, if you get stabbed through the stomach you will bleed out and die. But you will come back after the trail has resolved. You will just have failed to pass the trail. The trait is actually called [Bonded Biology] as its supposed to help integrated the three layers of the self or something. If you die outside of the tower you can be resurrected inside the tower at a suitable divine temple for a suitable cost.
On that note, the cost for a human life, not super expensive in the grand scheme of things. Most people can afford a revival after clearing about four floors or so.
There are also the personalized rewards that are graded against your personal performance. These can be items, skills, whatever. Honestly they seem almost random sometimes but at the end of the floor its more rewards so I’ll take whatever I can carry.
Oh that is important, there is no inventory system. There’s no magic space box that comes baked in that holds all your crap. Ya gotta lug it in and lug it out. Anything you can keep elevated from the ground during the ten second countdown when the trail closes comes with you. If multiple people are holding something up then the ‘thing’ is lost in transfer.
Anyway, for now, lets move onto the juicy part. Skills and Magic!