Chương 67: 2.25 No One Knows - Queens of the Stone Age (4:38)

From: GravemindLegacy (MOD) To: Binary_Arcana Subject: Primary title Binary_Arcana, Effective immediately, you have been stripped of your Primary status for Z3ke's fanfiction thread. This is not a decision made lightly, but your actions left very little room for interpretation. The role of the Primary is to guide Z3ke by offering direction, context, and support that would enhance the fanfiction experience. It is NOT a position meant to mislead, obstruct, or deliberately push the player into a perceived dead end.

Sending Z3ke into the Witness Chamber falls under that line. You have stated, both directly and indirectly, that you believed the Chambers to be a softlock scenario for Z3ke. Whether that belief is correct or not is secondary to the issue at hand. You acted on that assumption and steered him there anyway, without warning, without context, and without any attempt to prepare him for what he would encounter. That is not guidance. That is sabotage.

While you are still permitted to post in Z3ke's main fanfiction thread, consider this a formal warning: any further violations of forum conduct or narrative rules will result in a temporary ban of up to 48 hours. Now, for the record - and since you seem to have built your argument on incomplete information - the Witness Chambers are not a dead end. I find it surprising that someone who presents himself as deeply invested in the lore as yourself, you've chosen not to explore it further.

It does not reflect particularly well on it. That said, it does NOT change the core issue. You BELIEVED that the Witness Chambers were a dead end, and you manipulated Z3ke into exploring it without so much as a heads up.

THREAD: Corva, the Maniacal Asshole - and How Everyone Missed Him in Shards of Time Caboodle Congrats Foppery. You and Zeke are the two most talked about users in this forum right now. Binary is a distant third, and that's mostly just people cursing his name. George787865 | Binary is a distant third. | Ha. That's cause he's a dick. As soon as Foppery broke the news that Corva is in Shards and proved that Zeke wasn't lying about the whole body-hopping thing, Binary has been quiet as hell.

OutspokenMonkey He should be quiet. Foppery got the evidence on Corva, and that means Zeke is a fan of the series. Not only that, but the discovery of Corva being a body hopper is so much larger than anything that Binary has ever stumbled across. Now he's coming across as peanut butter and jelly, and he hates Zeke for being a better lore theorist AND a better writer. Occams_Barber | That's cause he's a dick. | People under the over of internet anonymity are very eager to do/say absolute psychopath stuff.

You can just look at the comment section of most stories on RR. DatCameraMON Someone actively doing things antithetical to the premise of the story as the Primary and his justification being, "I fucking hate this quest/anfic and I'm out-and-out trying to sabotage it," would be good enough reason to disqualify Binary from the Primary system and probably perma-ban him from the thread. MoronicMnemonic Pretty sure he's already been dropped from the Primary position.

At the very least, I doubt that Zeke's going to accept any more advice from the guy. IronLotusDecap Uggh. Can we all stop talking about the Zeke-thread drama? I'm tired of all the complaints and I'm tired of trying to figure out that stupid Witness puzzle. I'm here in Foppery's thread and none of the many others that have popped up because helping Foppery fight against Corva is cathartic. It's like the early Zeke stuff when he was still just stumbling around in the Glens. SaltedEarth Samesies.

Corva in Shards is absolutely terrifying, especially since Foppery said he stole all his items, skills, and talents. Even so, it's still just a simple fight. There's a clarity to it. Binary just softlocked Zeke in Frontiers and honestly I think it's useless for all of us to try and plan a way out for Zeke. We're all just sitting back and twiddling our thumbs until Zeke comes back to the thread with a description of how he got out of the room.

FopperyandWhim (Original Poster) | and none of the many others that have popped up | Uh. What? Others? Also, it's good to have you Iron. Everyone is just spitballing ideas on how I can try and fight off Corva but… it's not going well. Right now all the plans are just variations of: get lucky. IronLotusDecap C'mon. You can't be telling me that you're surprised a ton of threads have popped up centered around your discovery. You can find them <here>, <here>, <here>, and <here>.

Everyone is mostly either cheering your name or trying to replicate what you managed to accomplish. There are also a few threads that are digging through the other quests that have the unanchored tag. One thread I was perusing was wondering if the other quests would have different effects on the Corva that gets resurrected. There's one thread that suggests that the Corva from your quest would be different from the Corva on the Veilstrider.

Another thread is trying to see if there are alternate spawn conditions for Corva. ArtooDeetoa Yea, but people aren't thinking about the quests and all the time it's going to take to check all of them. Not only do you need to trigger the unanchored tag, but you've also got to complete the 21 in-game days so that Corva can take over your body. ShivSays Yep. Time is going to be the bottleneck.

It's not something you can test in a single afternoon, so everyone is stuck waiting around for someone to replicate Foppery's discovery. Footballish Hey Foppery, I wanted to congrats you on something else. You did the impossible today. You got me to reinstall Shards. I hate your guts now. GnomelandSecurity HAA. Same. I had to rifle through my closet to find the peripherals for it too. It's such a shit game, but I'm invested.

Yo Foppery, if I vomit myself to death while trying to grind out the Corva stuff, I swear I'm going to find you and haunt you. PatchNotesOrDidntHappen This thread is going off topic. We're supposed to be coming up with ways that Foppery can survive his brush with Corva, but no one's doing that. GunterDAwizzard Hey Foppery, I've got an easy two step plan to save your life. Step 1: Don't die. Step 2: Repeat Step 1. FolkingSchmidt The smart thing to do would have been to build your character wrong from the start.

That would have been genius. If your character had an absolute garbage build - by that I mean putting all your points into history instead of guns - then Corva would have been too weak to challenge you in the first place. You could have walked up to him and just duked it out easily. YamiYami-NoYou That's some Kung Pow logic right there. It reminds me of Wimp Lo and that scene where the kung fu masters are saying they trained him wrong on purpose as a joke. NullSigil"I'm bleeding, making me the victor."

MyCabbages I think I've got an idea. Foppery needs to use some gaming strats to win. He's basically a fresh spawn right now. He doesn't have skills, gear, talents, or anything else. Whatever made him a viable threat in his game is now sitting on Corva. That means that Foppery can't fight Corva effectively. The only thing he can do is run and try not to die. His best bet is going to be to go for a cheese strategy.

Corva outscales him in every imaginable category, so what Foppery needs to do is escape and come back later after he's leveled up his skills. It sounds shit from a storytelling perspective, but it's the only thing that makes any sense. BrokenKing42 Uh… how would he cheese Corva? You want him running away but Corva isn't some slow, lumbering boss that you can casually kit in a big circle. He's occupying Foppery's old body, and there is no way that Foppery didn't put any ranks in Athletics.

That means that Corva is currently faster and he's got more stamina than Foppery. He won't just get tired and give up. NavMeshNerd Cheese strat = getting Corva stuck on pathing. Foppery said he's in the starting village and that the place was burned to a crisp. But it's STILL the starting village. Even in a destroyed state it's going to have a pathing grid. Just because the buildings were burnt to the ground doesn't mean the paths you can take through them were rewritten.

That means that there are definitely areas where an NPCs movement would get a little weird. If Foppery can lead Corva to one of those areas, there's a chance he can get him stuck on a building long enough that Foppery would be able to escape. NullSigil HAA. Trip the monster on bad level design. Why didn't those people getting attacked by Jason ever think of that? NavMeshNerd It's going to be a little harder than that. Foppery, you said that Corva is chasing you through the village, right?

I've dropped a map of the starting village to this post. Now, since I don't know what all is burnt and destroyed in your game, you're going to need to do some experiments. Your best bet is a section on the east side of the village where the storage huts are. That's always been a little janking when it came to NPC pathing. What you need to do is force Corva to follow you there and try to get him stuck. Try to break his line of sight repeatedly to force the AI to recalculate all the possible routes. <shards. of.

time. starting. village/worororo. png> RicottaDimension Ooo. I know the spot that you're talking about. It's got this weird fence line where NPCs just walk into it instead of going around. NavMeshNerd Yep. Foppery, if you can hit that fence line you should be able to break pursuit. All you're trying to do is earn yourself space between you and Corva. That space should buy you enough time to keep running outside the village and, hopefully, it'll force Corva's AI to disengage.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. PuzzleBoxed I kind of love that this had turned into using speedrunner strats against a nightmare boss that nobody knew existed. Like, yea, Zeke's whole story is all centered around realism and grounded problem-solving, but there's something really funny about Foppery writing somewhat the same story but going full gremlin on Corva and cheesing the whole encounter. FopperyandWhim (Original Poster) This sounds kind of… anticlimactic.

Wasn't everyone just talking on the main Zeke thread about them hating it if Zeke used a cheese strat to game the system? How is this any different? ShivSays It's because you've never tried to convince anyone that you're literally trapped in a real, living world. You're still treating this exactly like what it is: a game. You're documenting your trials, recording it, and showing us what's happening through your Field Reports. And you're not writing this like a fanfic. Yea, the situation is a little weird.

Corva showing up like this is way outside what normal Field Reports look like. But at the end of the day, none of us are thinking that this is anything more than a Field Report centered around Shards of Time. That means that there are systems that can break in strange ways, so you should use that. Zeke has been pushing for everyone to take his situation seriously and he's trapped in his own premise. There are constraints to his story that he has to abide by, or else the whole thing crumbles to the ground.

YOU don't have to play by those same rules. You can abuse systems and exploit mechanics and do all the janky, borderline unfair stuff that players have always done to beat the games. That's honestly what everyone kind of expects in these Field Reports. MushroomCleric Yea, to add to what Shiv said (I'm not smart enough to make a joke here that would have used his username) Zeke would have stopped that plan in its tracks.

I can practically hear him jumping into the thread and complaining that we're treating Corva like an AI and not like a living breathing person. He'd tell us that there is no way that Corva would just walk into a fence and get stuck here. Which is true. If you were writing this like it was a real world, then Corva wouldn't worry about bath paths. He wouldn't just forget how to navigate his way through a town and then drop aggro on you because you broke line of sight for a few seconds.

In Zeke's story, he's trying to write the world behaving like a real world. In your Field Report, the game still behaves like a game. There are limits and quirks and those little cracks in the system that players can wedge themselves into and exploit. No one is going to complain of you taking advantage of that. If anything, it's part of the fun.

DuckDetective13 Man… where is Z3ke? He still hasn't logged back in yet even after Binary's whole villain monologue. Usually his updates don't take this long. CrimsonProphecy88 I was just thinking the same thing. If I had to guess, he's going to come back and say something about the Witness Chambers messing with his Tech Slate and he couldn't interact with the forum. That's the easiest in-universe excuse while he figures out how to write himself out of that mess. ShivSays 100% this.

He'll mention tech interference or signal disruptions or "something something ancient architecture something." I'm calling it now. Dood is buying himself some time to brainstorm. HexaDeweyDecimal Can you blame him? I followed Binary's directions step by step and my character is stuck in the sandbox room too. Nothing works to get you out. There's no hidden doors and no prompts. I've been running around the room for about an hour trying everything I can think of and it's all failed.

If there is a solution, then nobody's found it yet. GnomelandSecurity Samesies. I tried attacking the wall with all my strongest attacks and it doesn't even leave a dent. The thing is straight indestructible. Binary just trolled this entire thread and brought the fanfic to a screeching halt. LostDeviljho Honestly, I'm just waiting for Zeke to come back and go "yea, I met the Witness and he had a message for you Binary.

'That was a very cruel trick to play. Also, fuck you.'" Zordak I really did think Binary was going to try to get Zeke killed at some point, but I figured it'd be a spur of the moment crime of opportunity type situation. I didn't predict that he'd go all Ted Bundy and meticulously plan out Zeke's execution like that. I don't know if I should be horrified by the serial killer behavior or impressed that he had the self-discipline to put together and execute a month's long plan without posting about it somewhere.

OogaBooga18 Are we still catching warnings for shitting on Binary? Cause at this point I might be willing to eat one as long as I get to call out his dickish behavior. Congrats man, you found new content. Too bad it's a glorified prison cell that nobody would ever care about if it hadn't featured in this fanfic. And people STILL won't read your shit. Lorem-Ipsum | glorified prison cell | Hey, at least it's still new.

Every other week people are complaining that this forum is retreading the same tired content and discovering nothing new. Now someone actually comes across something unexplored, nobody has managed to solve it yet, and it's suddenly a problem? TwoGirlsOneCuphead Don't pretend that Binary discovered Atlantis over here. It's just a dev sandbox. Those things are scattered throughout the games. Binary didn't break new ground here. Plus, if Z3ke can't get out of the room then it kills the story.

7Spirals I'm more pissed that Corva was just discovered after all this. TwoGirls, you said that if Z3ke can't get out of the room it kills the story. I'd argue that it's worse than that. He's likely not going to release any of the other hidden secrets and lore that he knows about. My man is probably uber pissed at Binary and he's going to take it out on the rest of us by no longer dropping breadcrumbs of lore. PuzzleBoxed What about the elixir? Zeke still has the Pale Regiment elixir, right?

Since he hasn't written about using it yet, now is the perfect time. He should boost a skill, and then find a solution that way. StoryLeech Okay, but boost WHAT skill? That's the problem. Nothing that we've all found can help him out of that room. Sinnohan | Okay, but boost WHAT skill? | Perhaps Glyph Writing would allow him to make a teleportation glyph to escape?

The only other viable skills are Puzzle Intuition and History, and I feel like Binary would have already tried using level 10 versions of them to escape that room. Wizzy Just thought about it and I really hope Zeke being stuck in the room doesn't lead to him drinking the potion to up his Puzzle Intuition in order to find his way out. BigDutchOven For the elixir, it has to be Persona right? Lvl 7 Bullshido would go nuts. SpicyShoyu How does Persona help him right now though?

He's not stuck with anyone else in the room, so he can't bullshit his way out of it. He's trapped in a sealed room with no exits and I highly doubt Persona at 7 is going to magically create doors. Persona can't do shit for him right now. What do you want him to do? Argue the walls to open? Amongus By the end of the story, he will have the max level of Persona and he CAN bullshit his way out of everything. Hadyoudone Do glyphs Z3ke, do it Z3ke.

It's magic that you can use unlimited times, can do anything from attack, heal, energize stuff, to so much more. RicottaDimension | Do glyphs Z3ke, | If glyphs could help bust out of that room, Binary would have already figured that out. PlaceHolder Zeke should chug the potion to max out the Joestar Secret Technique: Running. It solves so many problems! Urgent delivery? Run. Big, scary threat? Run. Hot and bothered librarians in your area desperate for your knowledge? Run. It also pairs with Persona!

Imagine the Hemocyte swarm scene, but instead of Zeke scribbling the heat glyph with trembling fingers and wheezing lungs after a desperate sprint, imagine him painting the glyph with steady hands and even breathing after a focused stroll. So cool! 😎 Leaf Gotta be puzzle intuition. Do you see that description? High levels of that would be absolutely slept on. GnomelandSecurity Puzzle Intuition isn't going to help. Also, people always overhype that skill in fanfics. All it does is highlight interactables in the UI.

You still need to figure out the puzzle yourself. Plus, if there's nothing obvious to interact with, it's useless. You also have to consider that most puzzles require certain items that you need to own before they can be solved. Or you need compatible skills. If you don't have the correct skill ranked up, or you don't have the correct item in your inventory, then puzzle intuition doesn't activate. MushroomCleric You're thinking about that skill too literally.

What you described is how PI works in the games, sure, but Zeke is writing his story like it's a real world and not a UI-driven system. In a story context, it's incredibly easy to make Puzzle Intuition into a much more useful skill than it is in the games. It would manifest as heightened awareness, pattern recognition, or noticing inconsistencies in the environment. PuzzleBoxed Which is better than nothing. Right now Zeke is blind in that room.

If Puzzle Intuition translates to a heightened awareness, it might be the only way that he can write himself out of the room. SkipperIsAButt Assuming that there IS a way out. None of us have found anything yet. HiddenBoss | Okay, but boost WHAT skill? | Social skills are out, he's fearing what it is doing to him as it is, even the idea of one of them jumping to 7 is a no go. Tinkering: Build and repair gear (and invent new stuff.) He's also got the space to move the tools and what he makes with dimensional storage. Memory Recall: funny but no one wants to deal with 'I RECALL BEING BORN' for a few chapters. Spell Casting: could be useful, but he did say he lacked the head for understanding it so he'd only have the one skill in magic. Glyph Writing: the full power of the forum glyph-work at his touch with very small odds, if at all, of killing himself but maybe too many eyes on him from the Pale Regiment to keep it hidden.

Summoning: could have a clue how to get him back to NYC? Maybe some other closely aligned skill? Divination: never a bad idea to have a magic search bar at your call. HandsWIthoutArms Everyone's jumping straight to "use the elixir NOW" but that feels shortsighted. Sure, he's stuck in the Witness Chambers, but he's not going to be in that room forever. That elixir is a one-time boost. If he wastes it on some niche skill just to escape, that could hurt him a lot more late on.

You're all acting like the Witness Chambers is the final boss for this fanfic but it's not. GnomelandSecurity Uh… he's stuck in a room that none of us can solve. You're saying that he's not going to be in there forever, but how the hell can he get out? It's hard to regret your build choices if you don't make it out alive. Z3ke can't min-max his character if he's trapped in a puzzle room. BabyBloos I agree with Hands that he shouldn't be panic-spending the elixir. But he also shouldn't be hoarding it.

That's my problem in every game I play. I always stockpile my consumables and never use them because I don't want to regret it later. Then I end up finishing the game and I've got 500 mana pots and health potions just sitting there. Zeke should use the elixir now, but he should pick something that'll help get him out of the room and increase his survivability for later in the story. RunicTheory Which is exactly why he should pick Glyph Writing. I don't even know why this is a debate.

Frontiers had an incredibly basic glyph writing system. All you could do was pre-set effects with limited combinations. But when Severance expanded the glyph system in Shards, it became way more flexible. Does anyone here want to argue that Glyph Writing does get ridiculous once you boost it in Shards? You can build glyphs to attack, defend, manipulate energy, and even interact with space itself if you know what you're doing.

The only reason that glyphs never really grew to be the dominant build in the rest of the Fracture-verse games is because they were only ever reaching their potential in Shards. And nobody likes that game so nobody writes stuff about it. If Z3ke drinks the elixir and pushes his Glyph Writing up to Rank 7, not only would he become instantly OP in his story, but he'd even be able to brute-force a solution to the Witness Chambers.

He can break the walls, distort the space, or overwrite whatever logical rules that room is running on. It doesn't matter how you're supposed to get out of the Witness Chambers if he has Rank 7 in Glyph Writing. He can just break it. It's also got the added bonus of being the cleanest way out of the mess that Binary dropped him into. Yea, sure, people are going to argue that glyphs in Frontiers don't work like that.

But Zeke's already established he can take the Shards way of writing glyphs and use them in his story. You can't build a sacrifice glyph in Frontiers to kill the Reclaimer. The engine just doesn't support it. But Zeke isn't constrained by a video game engine. The world he's writing isn't limited in the same way. Fogbarrel Mmm… I don't like it. I get the logic of it, but it feels cheap and comes off as a cop-out. You basically are saying Zeke should just go "oh, I wrote a glyph and escaped." It's too easy.

MushroomCleric How is it a cop-out? He'd still be using an in-world system. It's not like he's breaking any rules or pulling a solution out his ass. Glyph Writing is already established in Frontiers, it's just not as built up as the Shards system. It doesn't mean that they're two different canonical types of magic. The limitation is the game, not the setting. And Zeke's been pretty clear that he's operating in the setting and not the engine. Also, where was this complaining when he was fighting the Reclaimer?

You can't be fine with him using non-Frontiers glyphs to kill a boss, but suddenly draw the line when he uses one to bust out of the Witness Chambers. Hambone I'm with Fog on this. There's a difference between intent here. Despite what Binary and a few other posters have been complaining about, Zeke has shown to be sticking pretty close to canon. He's not writing a Mary Sue character that just does whatever. With the Reclaimer fight, his sacrifice glyph didn't break anything conceptually.

We've all killed the Reclaimer, and we've killed him in a hundred different ways. I've shot him, stabbed him, poisoned him, and so much more. We can all replicate the results of that fight with the Reclaimer, so Zeke using the sacrifice glyph didn't feel out of place. But the Witness Chambers is something else. Nobody has been able to solve the puzzle behind it, either with glyphs or items or skills. It's resistant to everything we try to throw at it.

So if Zeke just "designs" a custom glyph and walks out of the room, it wouldn't feel like a clever solution. It would be more that he's just skipping the problem. UnhelpfullyHelpful Let me see if I understand your logic here. Using glyphs to expand on an existing solution = fine. Using glyphs to solve something we can't solve = not fine? That's a weird line to draw. Fogbarrel Meh. It's all about narrative tension.

If the room is built up as this impossible puzzle that none of us can crack, and the answer ends up being "break the game with something that other players can't replicate" then it kinda kills all the tension in his story. Lorehound77 We're all arguing the wrong question anyway. I don't think we should be talking about whether or not Zeke can use Glyph Writing to break himself out of that room. It's more whether he would. So far, Zeke hasn't taken any shortcuts in his story.

He hasn't made himself into this OP figure who dog-walks any problem he faces. He struggles, adapts, and works within the limits of the world. That's the whole appeal of this fic. If he suddenly becomes OP and turns into a Mary Sue who goes out there and solves all the world's problems, I don't think most of the readers on this forum would still follow him. Blazer66 We're all overthinking this.

Some Pale's or scavenger guys are gonna follow Zeke, see him go through the wall, think there's shinies hidden inside and bust through it with magic bombs or something and he will be fine. SlugerdErmine1 Honestly yea, they've just seen a guy with the knowledge, ability and foresight to take out a MAJOR threat in the Under-MIZ. If they don't try to recruit him and whoever he represents or at least have a good impression then what are they doing? Staniel Eww.

Are we really going to have the Pale Regiment following Zeke to recruit him and they're the ones who save him?

THREAD: Corva, the Maniacal Asshole - and How Everyone Missed Him in Shards of Time. FopperyandWhim (Original Poster) Holy shit, you absolute mad lads. I tried your insane plan and it worked. I've actually had to put down my controller because my hands were leaking sweat. The moment I logged on I bolted for the east side of the village like you all suggested. That whole section of the map is completely burned down, but I was able to guide myself to the old storage huts by focusing on my mini map.

Corva was right behind me the whole time, and I mean right behind me. I could hear his footsteps as he was chasing after me. I was racing ahead and I didn't want to turn around and see how close he was. There's this button that is rarely used, it's like the button in racing games that lets you peer behind you. I clicked it and almost vomited, not only because Corva was right there, but also because the motion sickness of the VR was made so much worse by the quick turn around.

I vaulted over this collapsed fence post and almost ate shit, then I wiggled through this narrow gap that your character can jump into if you hit it at the right angle. I slipped through and Corva didn't, instead hitting the corner of the fence and he just stopped. I kept running and running and my volume was all the way up so I could still hear the heavy footsteps of Corva behind me, but as I kept running, they started to fade just a little bit. Finally, I risked it after about thirty seconds of running.

I turned around and holy shit… he was still there. Except he was in his running animation, facing me, but he was clipped into the corner of the fence. I almost pissed myself in relief when I saw his whole body twitching because the game was failing to resolve his pathing. I didn't even know people could pee themselves in relief, but it almost happened to me. I quick saved, ran another stretch to try and put more distance between him and me, then quick saved again.

I think I've got five separate saves now, all staggered just in case something goes wrong and I need to roll it back to a specific point. I don't know how long that glitchy fence thing is going to hold Corva. I've got a sneaky feeling that if I hang around town for too long he's going to wriggle himself free and start chasing me again. So yeah… the whole thing may sound incredibly anticlimactic but I recorded it and you can all watch it and feel the fear that rippled through my body.

The plan went off without a hitch, which honestly makes me laugh because I don't know how Zeke keeps messing up these plans. I guess he just wants to add a bunch of drama and tension for his fic. I don't know. Anyway, I've got a new problem now. I don't know how long Corva is going to be stuck there. Now that I'm out of the village, I'm thinking he'll despawn from there if I move too far away. Or maybe he won't. I don't know.

I'm rambling, I know, but this whole thing turned into a full-on VR horror chase and I was not ready for that. Next step is figuring out how the hell you're supposed to kill Corva. I doubt I can do it right now because I don't have money, gear, items, skills, or anything else. MushroomCleric Ooo. Nice job. And don't feel bad about not killing Corva. I don't think you're supposed to kill him in your first meeting.

It's probably like the beginning of every Dark Souls game where you get murdered by the first big monster that comes your way. All we've got to do now is plan what comes next. I doubt that he'll keep chasing after you once you get far enough away, so first we need to figure out which skill of yours we can raise the highest in the shortest amount of time.