[UA] Idea for wards

[Gaston Phillips]

on 6/15/01 9:10 AM, Nick Wedig at mrteapot at disinfo.net wrote:

>> An NPC in my campaign is putting some serious reality-whacker wards around
>> him-
>> or herself,
> 
> Have you not determined the sex and/or gender of this NPC, or are you being
> politically correct unnecesarily?  Or is it the Freak?
> 
>> But I am stuck for something non-corny and non-obvious to do for the other
>> three
>> gauges. Any ideas? 20-30m, can be fatal, should twist your mind in knots.
>> Everybody is looking at at least one failed or hardened notch per ward and
>> thus
>> per gauge.
> 
> Isolation is hard... Perhaps having them suddenly be in a situation where they
> need to tell someone something, but are unable to speak and/or understand the
> language spoken to them.
> 
[Snip]

A friend of mine, who I knew when we were both living in France, told me
once he hadd a recurring nightmare:

He's at a Party, he sees a cute girl and goes over to talk to her.  But all
he can say is 'Blah blah blah' or something like that.  He gets freaked out
and turns to leave, but sees his best friend.  He goes there to tell his
friend about what just happened, but still can't speak.

Interestingly, the same friend told me to read _Infinite Jest_, which opens
with one of the narrators, Hal, who is totally rational in his internal
monologue, speaking to a College Admissions Official.  After he says, I
don't know - maybe five or six lines of really intense, intelligent
dialogue, everyone in the room freaks out and tackles him, totally horrified
because all the kid is doing, apparently, is making 'sub mammalian sounds'.
When he tried to type, IIRC, all he could do was pound the 'k' key
repeatedly.

There's another scene in the novel where another victim of the same drug
(Hal gets that way because he takes this funky industrial grade
hallucinogen, I think.  It's not exactly clear and it's been a whie), where
this other guy is in an institution because whenever /he/ tries to speak,
all he can do is belt out Ethel Merman (sp?) show tunes.  So the poor guy is
locked in a padded cell, crying uncontrollably as he sings, "I love a
parade".

The language thing made me think of those scenes.

And - in terms of the Unnatural ward and geometry that doesn't work, I
remember a while ago writing, instead of a paper, a one act play that took
place in an apartment that was the center of a four dimensional cube.

Picture this:  You are in a room.  Each corner of the room has a column that
breaks this room up from the four rooms adjacent to it.  If, however, you
walk around a column, after 270 degrees you'll be back where you started.

I don't know if I'm explaining this right, but if you're looking for ways to
freak them out with unnatural geometry, look into some writeups of Four-D
space (And check out Flatland - allegorical novel about 3D figures
interacting with a 2D world) for ideas.

gaston
gaston


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