[CYOA] Praetorian Academy

[Karinna]

Thief Of Time: Hey FE

Thief Of Time: Sorry to pimp you for this, but could you do the frosh welcoming speech for Shard 6?

FireEater_Black: i guess

Thief of Time: Somebody needs to. And it was supposed to be me because I'm the least insane upperclassman, but,

Thief of Time: I'm on my third loop through the day 'cause Varmaelis assassinates me right before midnight

FireEater_Black: oh wow

FireEater_Black: how are you already having problems with the golden dragon god

Thief of Time: Ugh don't call him that

FireEater_Black: idk do i gotta

FireEater_Black: I can't murder my way out of a speech if I fuck it all up

FireEater_Black: how many more loops can you do today?

Thief of Time: It's zero stakes, they're freshmen, just try to be kind to them

Thief of Time: Sorry, homegirl. I don't trust *anyone* that much

FireEater_Black: right sorry

FireEater_Black: ok I'll go welcome them to hell

FireEater_Black: good luck with the golden dragon not-a-god

Thief of Time: Thanks.

Thief of Time: If I die, you're club leader

FireEater_Black: yeah, i know

 

[Karinna]

#​

I check the time, check the violence forecast from Nau's modeling ("Low"), and unplug from the terminal. My propiodiagnostics report full ammunition in my wrist gun, and full charge on my grafts and arm. The 360 cameras are online and clear. I tuned them up in the workshop here, because my homeworld doesn't have any of the necessary parts.

It's Day Zero and I'm not three hours back from the inter-session break, and already these habits are slipping back on like an iron maiden. It cost me enough in blood and friends to reach this level of appropriately miserable paranoia, and I hear I'll probably be like this forever. Clearly Ekaterina and Varmaelis are wasting no time in trying to off each other.

My stomach is settling back into the nauseated twist. Why the fuck didn't I retire.

You can only retire from Praetorian between years. After the first year, with the usual kill rate among the freshman class, that would have been the ideal time for me to quit and leave this fucking place.

But there's no one on my planet with a robotic gorilla sticking out of their spine, so it's not like I could really go back to being a lymph-extractor for the tribe.

I let out a sound that reminds me of a loose engine belt, kind of a lingering pained whine.

No, I'm in it now.

 

[Karinna]

(Transcript of speech, ex tempore)

Hey. Welcome incoming students to Praetorian Academy, Shard 6. Goddamn. Y'all really signed up for this.

Sorry. I should be more encouraging.

Hello. My name is Fireeater Black. I'm swapped in to give you an orientation speech because Ekaterina is doing some sort of complicated time loop thing because a different upperclassman, the Golden Dragon God, is trying to kill her.

Anyway, what are the important points that we gotta hit? This is a school. You're selected from the wildest corners of the multiverse. There's a multiverse, if you didn't know.

Each year, up to ten students graduate. There's like, ten thousand of you, so you see the incentive to thin the competition. Anyone who graduates is instantly made into a god, a serious power on the multiversal stage. Most fourth-years are already small gods.

Our senior class actually only has four students in it right now, and they're trying to kill each other anyway. Old grudges.

Praetorian is a meat grinder searching for the absolute smartest, most determined, tenacious, ruthless, creative, lucky motherfuckers. You're freshmen, so I'm not going to learn your names or get attached.




Oh, rules. Don't do violence in class. Or in the library. You technically can do violence at mealtimes and in the med bay, but my year successfully did a coalition to prevent it, in that we all agree to kill a motherfucker if they stab you at lunch. Come on, people. We don't have much civilization left and this environment is making us insane, we absolutely need any shred of peace we can claw back.

If you die here, you don't die for real. Some of you are taking that as reassuring. No. It's worse. I'm saying it's worse. You're bound indefinitely into service of the school and the magical infrastructure. Or something. I think the school sometimes loans you out to clients to do tasks for them.

Upperclassmen can't attack you, or help you at all, unless you attack them first. You can do that if you want. But it's been a couple years since an underclassman has successfully killed an upperclassman.

Should I give you advice? Man, what the fuck do I know. You don't technically have to go to any classes. You really should, unless it's the rare case where something about how you work means it's not the best use of your time. We had one guy whose deal was harvesting knowledge from his roommates' unconscious minds, so, naturally he attempted to build some psi-amp and extend his reach over the entire campus and trap everyone in a perpetual harvest state. We put him down, obviously.

Or maybe you're a sex wizard and you can literally actually fuck your way to godhood. We have sex rooms out past the gym. You can't do violence inside them. That restriction actually affords you so little protection, by the way.

The course catalog is available over there; you should sign up for courses. You can take up to seven courses per day. This will drive you insane quickly, though.

There's seven timeblocks per day and another three in the night. Those are game abstractions, for those of you in a narrative class—and everything not done in a timeblock is handled in "elastic time". For everyone in mechanical reality, those blocks are about two hours each, and the days are still about twenty-four hours long. It all ends up coherent, don't worry, and it goes a little better if you don't track the minute and hour too hard.

Not every course is taught at every time, but all the entry-level stuff is. Oh, also, the school has some sort of, like, overclocked learning field that's pumping us full of divinity. So you'll learn stuff faster than you ever possibly could. You can learn, like, a lifetime's worth of stuff in, a month maybe? Maybe faster, depending on your aptitudes.

Everyone who chose this is crazy somehow. You're here because there's something you need. Because there is something more important than life itself, that—you have some sort of purpose driving you. For me, it's trying to save my homeworld. Old world technology has gone berserk and our world is being covered in toxic spores. Until I came here, I didn't realize that was — kinda standard? Like, everyone just nods when I tell them. "Oh yeah, makes sense." Or maybe you're in it because you're seeking a perfected ascension to the heaven realm, or you're the champion tribute from your hive planet who's been training your whole life for this, or because your planet has fallen to psychic science spiders who eat consciousness itself and you want to fix that. Maybe you're just suicidally overconfident. Whatever.

Y'all are here in shard 6. There's a bunch of different, like, mirrored pocket universe campuses, as something of a stopgap to prevent any hyperpredator student from annihilating the entire student body. That's not to say that it can't happen. Like, small comfort when, you and everyone else in your shard are still murdered by somebody, but then to kill anyone else, they'd have to travel to a new shard, and that's, you know, mildly hard. Right?

You're gonna have assigned dormitory mates. You should know that—either because the overwhelming majority of people across the multiverse are kinda shit, or because the people who are willing to come here in the hopes of ascending to godhood are kind of sociopathic or megalomaniacal—you should know your roommates are probably gonna be the fucking worst. Also, until you modify the dorms, the dorms are gonna be the fucking worst. You're gonna need to figure out as soon as you can whether you can get along with your roommates. That's gonna be very important, very quick.

Fuck.

There's probably a better way to say all this. Your roommate assignments are just on that wall over there.

Uh. Questions?

 

[Karinna]

Hello! Welcome to Praetorian Academy.

-What's Praetorian Academy?

This is a murderous and hypercompetitive school in which the majority of hopefuls die and are enslaved to permanently become part of the divine multiversal infrastructure. Graduates become gods; relevant players on the multiversal stage.


-What, uh, are gods? Where do gods come from?

Well, over in one universe a woman cyborgified herself and then strapped into a hypercomputer the size of Jupiter; she then recursively self-improved until she totally solved physics, at which point she jailbroke her way out of the conventional universe and showed up in Vaster Reality, and met a bunch of other gods who were like Sup.

And then in the Endless Court, a fae noble united the warring clans in a way that literally no one had ever done before, and then, in a sudden yet inevitable betrayal, consumed and absorbed all of their souls. At which point she became so swollen with magical power she was inclined to rewrite the entirety of the world, and as she was doing that, noticed a few loose threads that turned out to be the boundaries of the universe. She pulled on them and punched into Vaster Reality.

Whereas, God-Emperor Sun fought his way up through the Celestial Bureaucracy, ascending to higher and higher heavens, until he eventually became the god above all gods. But every ocean is but a drop of water in a vaster ocean, and there is always another sky. At which point he left the backwater province of his universe, and entered Vaster Reality.

Anyway a thousand of these entities are now elbowing for space.


-So who am I?

Let's find out together.

 

[Karinna]

The Praetorian Course Catalogue (Truncated)​

Tech

Tech 001
Remedial classes for those raised in premodern societies.


Basic digital competency (UI class)
Email forwards from Grandma, finding the power button

Tech 101:

Electropunk:
This path heavily utilizes the "flow of electrons" to allow for counterintuitive technologies like computation, encryption, and (simple) robotics.

Steampunk:
This path harnesses pneumaflux—a slow-burning thaumochemical reaction between charbonite and the emanations of a soul—to create Steam Cores, nigh-indefinite power sources with several interesting applications.

Dieselpunk:
This path is built following the development of the radiocore engine, an early atomic technology capitalizing on the "island of stability" arising from excitation of uranium to create impetus, a superheated fluid which transmits kinetic force while escaping square-cube laws.

Solarpunk:
This path is built heavily utilizing the key resource of skyward (a.k.a. sunstone, sunsilk, or radiant sheeting), a naturally occurring mineral which, when exposed to sunlight, exerts kinetic force in opposition to gravity.

Biopunk:
This path heavily utilizes Elan Vital, a "blank slate" cellular fluid which procedurally generates biological life from samples it appropriates. When used in accordance with the Wollstone Ratios, this allows for a profoundly streamlined method of creating and optimizing biological creatures.

Matter Fabrication
Stabba the goblin (and the professor) walk you through the process of creating custom items, just for you!

Chemistry 1, 2
Produce interesting drugs and substances

Tech 201

Cyberpunk 201
Implants, hacking, trenchcoats.

Atompunk 201
Autonomous robots. Megafactories and girthy, prehensile machine tentacles assembling dreadnaughts. Power armor.

Arclight 201
Forcefields, energy projection, and people turning into lightning.

Mindworms 201, 301
Taught the basics of hypnosis and generating subliminals

Robotics 201
You receive specific instruction in the creation of autonomous robots, who possess a trained dog's level of intelligence.

Cyborg 201
Specific education in personal augmentation.

Cyberwarfare 201
(This is an anti-tech specialization, which is instrumentally necessary if you want to e.g. hypnotize a robot.)

Robotics 301
Self-replicating machines, soft AI.

Hybrid Disciplines
(Consult with your advisor)

Realitywarping 101

Fundamentals of Realitywarping
Establishing firm characterization and beginning to influence probability

Realitywarping: Superpowers
Acquiring superpowers via retcanonical Event

Realitywarping Plot Beats
Well-worn, identifiable narrative moments that you will find happening in your life disproportionately often.

Realitywarping: Tropes
Fate loves to repeat itself.

Realitywarping: Genre
Which events are most likely, in your life?

Realitywarping: Characterization
Your self-concept, backstory, and the means by which probability influences you.

Realitywarping 201

Realitywarping: Metagaming 201
Mechanical interactions with the underlying reality of Reality. Gamelike properties available.

Realitywarping 201
Become a protagonist, increase your narrative significance, share the plot armor.

Realitywarping: Metagaming 202
Save scum, fast travel, more.

Psi

Fundamentals of Psi:
The quieter your mind becomes, the more it is able to hear.

Fundamentals of Psi 2

Fundamentals of Psi 3

Psi shielding
The basics of defense

Psi combat
The basics of offense

Psi tricks
Bringing that X-Factor to your engagements

Psi tricks 2

Mindworms 1
Taught the basics of generating subliminals, hypnosis, and BLITs via psi

Mindworms 2

Mnemosyne 1
Enter peoples' mindscapes to alter, remove, or incept key ideas.

Mnemosyne 2

Illusion 1
Beguilements! Deceptions! Visions! Omens!

Illusion 2

Psionic Jutsu
This is a hands-on combat course. Please be familiar with at least the fundamentals of Chi.

Psionic Jutsu 2

Psionic amplifiers via implants

Building and attuning technology that amplifies your psychic powers.

Psionic amplifiers 2

Magic:

Magic 101
Basic magic perception and identification

Mageslaying 101
All mages should be familiar with this.

Mana Training 1, 2, 3
Ammunition for your spells

Essentialism 1, 2, 3
Soul magic.

Lumen 1, 2, 3
Use gemstones to shoot magic lasers, among other things.

Divinity 1, 2, 3
Godbinding.

Dark Magic 1, 2, 3
The sacrificial magicks

Spiritualism 1, 2, 3
Radical animism.

Forcemage 1, 2, 3
You can use tension to apply kinetic force outward from any point touching your skin.

Arcana 1, 2, 3
Dungeons and Dragons!

Alchemy 1, 2, 3
Chemistry, but vibes

Chi:

Spiritual growth:
Learn to feel your chi.

Chi 101
Basic chi competency, basic chi resistance

Chi 102:
Chi presence, embodiment, your first martial path, the Tao.

Chi 202:
Maya below, Inexorable Will, preternatural reactions, etc.

Elementalist 1, 2
Become a "bender"

Ki Vampire 1, 2
Drain others' energy to replenish yourself.

Stand 1, 2
You acquire a unique and autonomous projection which acts in your best interest

Chi Weapon 1, 2
You manifest a unique and personal weapon.

Psionic Jutsu 1, 2

Dangerous Forbidden Techniques

 

[Karinna]

(Hi, QQ. We're gonna come up with a character together! The five meta-disciplines across the multiverse are:

Tech

Everything is explicable and made of parts. Through learning, we can remake the world.

Chi

Refinement of the self is the greatest pursuit. Through strength, we reach perfection.

Psi

The light of consciousness is the only worthwhile thing. Through will, we find harmony.

Narrative

We are all characters in a story. Through drama, we get a good ending.

Magic

PEW PEW MAGIC MISSILE



We'll come up with a background world, too, but first—what kind of character do you want to play?

 

[Yuulia]

help you at all, unless you attack them first.

Click to shrink...

Can we attack an upperclassman to allow them to help us?

 

[Karinna]

Can we attack an upperclassman to allow them to help us?

Click to shrink...

Technically yes, though this also opens you up to predation from anyone who wants your organs for something

 

[Yuulia]

Got it. Just pick some fight junkie and get free training from hell for making his day interesting.