maskormenace

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When my world experienced a near-apocalyptic scenario, the alien race attempting to destroy us was bent on wiping out terrestrial life to colonize it as their own. We spent twelve years at war with them until we finally managed to locate and destroy their entry point into our world. I know for a certainty that they will make another attempt at it, and so we've built up our defenses since, armed with the knowledge we gleaned from their first attempt.

Atropos seems a bit similar, although it seems she may just want to destroy the entire planet completely. Doesn't quite matter either way, as the threat of extinction remains present. How to stop her is the question of course. Really what we need is information, but I've yet to hear anything beyond unfathomable power. Not terribly inspiring.

But it did leave me to wonder:

Atropos is not unique as far as world-consuming extra-terrestrial beings go. And so I thought perhaps it would be interesting to hear other accounts of similar experiences. What happened, what was done, what could have been done- what worked and what didn't.

We're a community of powered individuals. Surely there's more we can do than sit here and wait for the world to end on her accord.

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My biggest example of world-consuming creatures isn't even alien. Humans do it, just on a much slower scale.

Not surprising. We haven't developed the technology in our world to manage it. It is possible I could replicate the way the Precursors entered our world eventually, but yes, I expect it wouldn't just be for the sake of exploration. It's truly unfortunate.

Greed exists in many races. Some are more honest about theirs than others.

Did anything ever invade your world then?

It wasn't my world, but I've seen it being invaded. By humans.

I think they're all kind of unique. In terms of powers. Not that I think this is a bad idea! Anything that can help us try to understand or predict her.

Mine... His name is Thanos. There are other people here who know more about him than I do, though.

Understanding their capabilities is certainly important, but we don't know anything of Atropos in that regard so far. I think preventing her from stepping foot on this planet would be the ideal solution if we had any notion of how to accomplish that, but we don't at the moment.

And while there may be other experts on Thanos, you're the only source on him that I'm aware of unless they choose to respond.

That's the thing though -- we do. We know things she's done, and we know things she isn't doing yet. That might not be much to go on, but it's something. She's not omnipotent.

Alright, well... he's not from Earth, he thinks he's some kind of god, and he destroyed half the universe.

And now you know as much about him as I do.

Half of the universe.

[Bit of an unscientific measurement, but he'll roll with it cause it's not really terribly important to know exactly how many worlds that was or ask if she truly knows how large her universe is]

No ideas on how he's managed it?

The Infinity Stones, but I don't know much about those than I do about him. We haven't... I haven't gotten there, yet. I came here from before.

Understandable. But the infinity stones grant him power then, I take it?

I mean, I heard most of this thirdhand, but from what I got, yeah. Some of it. Most of it, I guess. But I don't think he was exactly a pushover without them.

Edited 2018-08-12 19:07 (UTC)

Fair enough. I just wonder if he was capable of destroying planets without them.

I don't know. I guess he was a really big thing in space, but he didn't really make the Earth gossip blogs.

[She grimaces. Joking about this is supposed to be her coping mechanism, but it's really not working.] Not when I left, anyway.

Well I appreciate your input. It raises the question of whether or not Atropos might be gaining power from some form of object. Difficult to confirm at the moment of course, but it's better than missing a potential data point.

Yeah, that's about all I can offer, on that end. I don't know how much I can do to stop her. But there's still things we can do.

But I actually have another question for you, on that note.

Certainly.

While we can't do anything about Atropos -- No, it's not that we can't do anything, it's just that it's her move. If she does something, we'll deal with it, and if she never does anything again, then I guess we won.

Anyway. While we wait, while we prepare, couldn't we focus on balancing the scales? The forces that brought us here, it seems like more harm has been done than good. It's not really our fault, I guess, but it's where we are. And we should change that. So that when this is all over it's not just that this place isn't under threat from some malevolent deity, but it's better than it was before this started. If we can.

And I'm... trying, me and some other kids have a thing going. And I think it helps, or it can help, but it's not on that huge a scale.

And I think the same resources, the same brainpower that we put towards fighting Atropos, every second isn't gonna end up spent on that. Maybe some of it the extra could go towards working on large scale improvements.

[She pauses, suddenly aware of how long she's been going on, and casts her eyes to the ground.]

Sorry. That was less question and more verbal newspaper article.

You're referring to the imPort and native divide? I don't claim to be an expert on diplomacy, but what is it you're working on?

I'm not, actually. Or well, that's what I'm working on, kind of reaching out to kids my age and building bonds.

But what I mean to say is, we're part of the same chain of events as the Shimmer, and all this other stuff. Maybe we could do something not just for the community, for history. Something... I don't know, abstract? Fundamental? Like, I don't know, we could cure cancer or establish an effective worldwide organization that ensures everyone gets fed.

So a concentrated community effort to affect the greater good.

Well it's a lovely concept and I believe the Maria-Francis foundation tried to execute humanitarian efforts with that sort of goal in mind. Imports including myself developed technology to improve lives. Nothing so sweeping as curing cancer or solving world hunger, however.

I know there are people with healing abilities.. some that could be harnessed to achieve significant medical advances even. However, if the advances are only made possible by imPort abilities, then it isn't very self-sufficient. Our existences here are largely temporary and such things would collapse.

Perhaps the best way to go about any of it would be to cooperate with native experts. I don't think many would appreciate depending on us anyway.

Yeah, I mean, that'd be the goal, right? Ideally. That whatever we put in place, however many imPorts we get involved, we do it with the idea of handing it over to native people a hundred percent, sooner rather than later.

Yes, of course. It could just be important to make sure they're involved in the founding or project. Some may take offense to outright benevolence as a form of either pity or show of superiority.

Yeah, bring them on as early as possible. I just thought, like I said, you're hopefully gonna have a lot of brainpower coming together to focus on Atropos.

Maybe some of that should be Native too, though. They have even more resting on this than we do.

Sometimes there isn't more information.

Before I arrived here my town experienced a curse. Nothing could be done to stop it and in the end it looked like it had been happening in the same way over time without being stopped before either.

I still don't know anything about it and there is no one left who would.

Unexplained things aren't always something you can prepare for just by getting information.

[Sometimes. You gotta just board up your house and never leave, and not go outside to find out why whatever it is is coming for you!]

There's always someone studying these things- looking for patterns, attempting to sort out the origin and reasons. And of course, ultimately, how to stop them from happening.

But it's certainly true that there are times we don't find that information in a timely enough manner to prevent tragedies.

Still, it's a sight better than sitting around and waiting to die.

Edited 2018-08-12 18:46 (UTC)

Yeah, in my world it was my species invading Earth. Although I'm pretty sure we didn't plan on killing all the humans.

Still, I know whatever we had planned was pretty bad so I turned on the invasion.

Can I ask how they were intending to invade Earth?

Oh, we already were invading Earth.

We were disguising ourselves as humans, infiltrating the government and the media, and weakening their political and social infrastructure so they'd be easily manipulated.

Yes, but how did you set foot on Earth to begin with? Spaceships, dimensional rift- something else?

Oh, right. We used spaceships.

Fair enough. I somewhat doubt Atropos will arrive via spaceship but it remains a possibility, I suppose.

Pretty sure she's beyond needing a ship. She's more likely to use our tactics of undermining human institutions than our methods of travel.

We're a lot more mortal and squishy than she probably is, though, so I think the tactics for dealing with her would have to be pretty different.

For me, the end of the world came not from a monster, but from men.

We had known that our attempts at diplomacy had broken down but I hadn't thought

I hadn't thought it had reached that level.

[There's a long pause between that group of texts and this next one:]

The second time I came across a world-ending event, that was also by a man, albeit one with a monster and powerful magic.

He was defeated when we realized that he was simply lonely, and attempting to wrong a right from years past in the worst way imaginable.

That's rather unfortunate. They destroyed your world?

Yes.

I do believe that should I ever return to my world, I can save it, but... I cannot say for certain.

I hope you're able to.

Do you mind if I ask how they got into your world?

Oh, did you mean the monster and the man?

They did get into my world, I traveled to theirs.

When the god Chaos was freed from his prison and attempted to return all of Krynn to Nothingness, it took the combined might of the other twenty-one gods and every being on the planet to defeat him. Keeping in mind that we also had powerful magic-users, and flights of dragons that could level entire cities, we could only force him back into his prison.

In Krynn's particular situation, the best option would have been to prevent him from ever being freed. For Atropos, it may be that she is trapped as well, either by an outside force or a loss of capabilities. If we could find a way to keep her in that state...

Yes, I rather agree. Of course it's all well to say that when we don't have any clear idea of how to manage it. I wish there was a way for us to get more information.

What was the last we'd heard of Lachesis?

That is the problem.

I'm not sure. Last I'd heard of her was that mess in December.

Anything may have happened in that time. If we could reach Lachesis, then we may have a basis to work off of. Easier said again of course, but it's something to look into.

We do need to consider the possibility that Lachesis is no longer here. She likely used a lot of power manipulating time the way that she did.

My world attracts conquerors like moths to a flame. Probably because we're perpetually setting ourselves on fire.

Generally speaking, the more chaos you're already dealing with, the easier a target you are. Dealing with the homegrown issues is important, and I'd guess that's why Atropos is using the OTO. So we can't lose focus on everything else.

From what I've read, the Fates are broadly similar to what we have in my universe. When gods like them got rowdy, the best most people could do was hold the line and do damage control; the most effective attacks came from within the pantheon, or at least from a champion of theirs.

Of course, if the Imports count as Lachesis' champions, they clearly weren't enough last time around.

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Pretend I said whatever month the missiles aimed at Heropa happened instead of December

Text; ID: Oracle