Monsoon117 patreon

376 A Chat After Time's End

🕑 Added 2023-03-05 15:40:54 +0000 UTC

Comments

Conor McGroarty

Guess Daddy Eonoth is still troublesome even though Daniel is physically tougher now. Even messed with his mind

Monsoon117

Ah, I literally thought of having to adjust this specific section because it wouldn't translate to audio format well at all. Sorry about that.

Fae Rivers

Bruh, I always consume this content through text to speech. This chapter was almost crippling because I could not get to my phone. Resist.

serguzzle

@Drew Rogers we have seen how time magic is limited in interacting with Daniel's dimensionness, so that's an interesting angle. I can see the Old Ones not actually "changing time" as much as "reversing the time axis of the baseline universe Daniel/Schema usually reside in, and which the Old Ones have a window into". Those things are actually exactly the same thing, but the distinction is that Daniel seems to just sorta coexist in line with the linear time of his home universe, and all of a sudden this trend was broken. HMMM. @Monsoon117: Strong disagreement on your weaknesses. Fight scenes are strong if they are meaningful. Well-written fights can be interesting on their own, but that runs dry very quickly without context making them impactful to the players beyond threat of injury, etc. Your fight scenes have always been journeys of self-discovery, from "discovering my limits" to "discovering my strength" to "reflecting upon the consequences of my strength". Your fights are very personal and introspective, which is why I think they're particularly good. You might say that you find "action" to be your particular strength, and I can see that more - for example, one thing you do a lot is having characters gesticulate with their hands, and you make the environment they're in very kinematic and reactive to that. That said, the ultimate representation of this will be a six-armed alien that achieves a "words describing hand movements" to "words spoken" ratio of >1 - something to strive for! @William Christie, @Monsoon117: Thanks for the kind words. I think I remember Monsoon mentioning it, but I think I forgot to reply, sorry - It's been a busy few months. I actually do write a lot - mostly technical papers, strategy documents, proposals, a few op-eds, etc. Not a lot of time to dedicate to fiction, unfortunately. I used to be active in fanfiction (I partially taught myself english reading it, so it stuck a bit), but not as much nowadays. If you ever read the webnovel Worm, I wrote a short fanfic of it called Watchdog a few years back. I think it's my best fiction work, aside from some collaborative efforts during a few quests in forums.

justin

I would like to see the build up the guild, earth as an empire, and the army of Daniel getting stronger as well. Can't fight old ones every day.

Shane Fletcher

with his life creation abilities, could he make a dragon if he wanted? he can make live crabs, but maybe dragons would be to complicated with all of the abilities he would have to figure out how to give them. dragon fear, dragon eyes, breath, a connection to magic like the frog dragons... I cant think of anything else a dragon usually has in fantasy stories.. it depends on how godlike you'd want to make them.

Monsoon117

@William Christie, I think I've tried convincing Sergio he had potential as an author too at some point. I can't remember the kind of response I got at the time though.

Monsoon117

My other strength is fight scenes. Can't forget fight scenes. My weaknesses have been just about everything else lol.

Drew Rogers

schemas recognition of time travel really makes me think of how powerful it can be in the future. also it seems like daniel is sent back in time, not undone which shows intentional restraint from the old one or a limitation of time magic on him

William Christie

You are a fantastic writer. Your points were detailed yet not bloated. Have you written anything available to read? Your writing structure is very satisfying.

serguzzle

Yeah, I generally assume the narrative only speaks to a limited perspective, and that's reliable in your writing here. Daniel has very keen insights into the universe around it, and the limitations of that insight can be a little murky sometimes. I think he's been shown to understand things and feel very confident when assessing weird shit, so as a reader I am prone to trusting his insights. This means that when I see something that doesn't add up, I'm more "wtf daniel" than I am "wtf monsoon", but it's something to track if there's a consistent disparity between reader expectations and results. Your writing style sets up some great layered narratives. I would say your strength is more internal narrative and introspection as opposed to external interactions, but there is a compounding effect when you have such strong voices projected into a world against each other. Who's telling the truth? Shit, I don't know, they're all extremely evocative. I'm glad that it also is something that excites you as a writer. I really enjoy the game of narrative subtext, and I can really tell how much you like it too.

Monsoon117

Whenever I make absolute statements, they always come from a character, not from an omniscient narrator's POV. This means nothing in the story can be taken as absolute truth at all times, and it hints at a reality with truth supporting or not supporting the claim. Eg, Yawm spoke in many absolutes, but he lied many times. Schema's been more truthful, but still, there are times when he's lied to Daniel expressly. Imo, this gives a lot of opportunity for different twists and turns within the narrative based on information gathering, dialogue, etc. It also can give attentive readers a jump on Daniel or other characters for future plot points. Someone predicted Daniel's psionic drowning for instance. I've had some readers even predict very far off plot points that directly contradict what's been told. I think of this as a strength, not a weakness. I enjoy it a lot as an author too, which is important. Schema's recognition of time travel is an important point that will be explained in the future. You are right to note it.

serguzzle

To add onto my first point, earlier in the story the fact that Daniel not only noticed, but was impacts by Old One activity, was an idle curiosity before, and no one even thought twice about it. To have it highlighted here was super cool.

Monsoon117

Gravitational dragon spawn with gravitation breath so strong it spawns singularities on dense matter? Why not.

serguzzle

Schema's ongoing statements of supports are really heartening. It shows the escalation of this great game: his earlier meltening in the face of an Old One's presence has been expanded to being crushed, and at least now there's explicit recognition of that happening by the System. I find Schema's awareness of his development, despite the time-travel, to be very interesting, and not something that was previously foreshadowed, I think (and that is fine, not everything has to be, that was a pleasant surprise). This was dope, and frankly a lot more compelling than the slice-of-life on Earth. Repetition for impact is tough, and it is easy to go overboard. I think it's lightly on the "too much" side of things, but Daniel's own comments on it helped a lot. I think overall you've started really hammering on the thematic undercurrent for this arc. Overall there's been some really big highlights here especially, and I'll break down my thoughts more piecewise below: - The actualization of Daniel's place in this world: a wonderful scoping and assessment of the setting. - The gun now pointing at his face and limiting his activities: Old One attention and perhaps bemusement. - The aforementioned items append and somewhat conflict with his ability to survive Old One' attention: how far was he pushed, how far was the Old One one pushed, and what comes next? I don't know what is going to happen next, and I can't 100% say I feel excitement about that intrigue. I literally don't have a hint, because we've seen escalation to literally infinity as we understand it. To unpack that: your approach to narrative has a propensity for making absolute statements (this is fine!), but in this context if they're objective absolutes then things get confusing. It is really difficult to write conflict with Literally God, and one of the only ways to bound it is (as you've done) to have God treat existence as a plaything for its amusement. However, we escalated away from Daniel being a plaything to having damaged one of the Old One's other toys - and that blows the lid off what can happen next. It is really difficult to write conflict for someone who's literally invincible: the implication of this chapter is that Daniel was tortured for so long that time became meaningless, and then he was plopped back a few hours into the original timeline. Are threats to specifically him now functionally meaningless? Was the Old One blustering about the suffering he could inflict, after potentially flatlining his Resist-o-meter for eternities to no lasting effect? I don't know enough to say, because Daniel might be/is probably a subjective narrator. So in the end, the future is muddled. Will Daniel struggle and struggle again, destroying Lehesion and being shrunk down to a pinhead of psychic rage, with the idea that he hasn't broken, so he won't once more? Will Daniel bide his time with consideration for fear of his people receiving Old One attention and becoming more collateral damage for his battles? Will the Old One escalate, or guide Lehesion away to avert these events from happening in the first place?

Connor Alexander

That was awesome, it the true old fashion sense. Showing off how powerful the Old Ones are was an amazing step, and putting Daniel up against the immensity of their might was a great method to scale the next major arc. Thanks for the chapter Monsoon!

William Christie

It landed very well and really expressed how out of depth Daniel is

Monsoon117

I read between the lines and assume comments are made with a phone at least 90% of the time.

Chance Rose

Half of those the were supposed to they. Sorry phone typing.

alexander julian

What coz it's the first time Daniel has taken a straight up l and against an extremely foreshadowed threat?

Chance Rose

Always happy to help. Just kind of made sense when I was thinking about it. If punching or conventional methods worked, I doubt they would be so much trouble. His dimension self is the only reason the have problems with him, so it just made sense for that to be his true weapon. And schema is a master of it so since the are working together now, it made sense.

Monsoon117

You have to crawl before you can run, am I right?

Monsoon117

Very interesting thoughts.

Joshua Little

Thanks for the chapter.

OrganicMeat(2.0)

That was kinda pathetic ngl

Wrath

Another amazing chapter that i'm so glad I got to read. I just need more..... A LOT MORE CHAPTERS. My hunger for chapters is insatiable.

K

@Shane, I took it the complete opposite way! Eonoth himself said next time Daniel angers him he'd hit him with something that'd make a thousand species insane. So all Daniel has to do is gain the mental fortitude of 1001 species, easy.

Shane Fletcher

it would be really cool if he made some dragon themed golems, like maybe have each of them take ten blue cores to make, and give them a breath attack, like a cone of singularities. that would be awesome.

Drew Rogers

i have my phone read me the text and i was seriously sick of ‘resist’ by the end, i started hearing it as ‘rez its’ lmao poor danial must have had it rough. i did like that you said each tap to give a reference to the effort the old one was putting out

Chance Rose

Wow man. That was intense. Just surviving in eonoth's wake was all he could manage. But manage he did. It's a huge step forward and I am really wondering how he is going to combat them. He is going to have to do some serious dimension training to combat theirs, and it will be interesting to see how he does that. Maybe schema actually helps train him personally? He did state he had never seen someone wield dimensional energy with as much finesse as schema had, so it would kind of be the real benefit schema could give him as his patron.

William Christie

Absolutely crazy

William Christie

Nice

William Christie

Fantastic chapter, definitely seemed like it would be a difficult chapter to right. I had never really imagined what combat for old ones would be, though this old one wasn’t even trying. Daniel maximizing his skill usage to simply exist in the wake of Etormah is interesting and is setting a new type of scale hard to understand or express. You did a wonderful job! Congrats!

Zachary Smith

Dude holy crap that was wild

Monsoon117

He's gotten 100 points for each unique skill he's made without composite normal skills. Otherwise, he's been rewarded half of the remaining skill points left in every fusing skill. This is why legendary skills give so many tree points. Each mythical skill has a maximum of 1,000, so three of them at 500 would award 1,500 total tree points.

Monsoon117

They are preposterously perilous pustules of pure, palpable power.

ArydinAzure

mimetic hazards are a pain in the posterior to purge.

Monsoon117

Thanks for the help Alex.

Alex R

a familiar presence coursed in -> double space after the a (was in the last chapter too) "Your mind is []durable as your body. Perhaps more so." -> "Your mind is [as] durable as your body. Perhaps more so." +10% to Mental Resiliance. -> Resilience +102 points in A Manifolded Mind -> skill is called A Manifold Mind per Ch 290

Alex R

Should it be an unknown skill and not a unique skill? Mostly due to getting skill points for unlocking the skill. He has yet to get any free points for creating a unique skill but has for an unknown skill.

Shane Fletcher

ya i dont think the old ones are bluffing about their power.

Monsoon117

This was an interesting chapter to write. I tried different formatting techniques in this one to achieve a certain feel and effect. Let me know if it landed, and I can adjust it as needed. Regardless, I'm proud of this one, even if it's just trying and not necessarily achieving. Time will tell.