Roleplay / Sburb Patch Notes

"+++ Out Of Cheese Error +++ Please Remove Universe And Reboot +++ Redo From Start +++" - Adachi

"IM: The code countains everything in the SBURB-verse. Even us. Even quite a few things that AREN'T part of the SBURB-verse. Only Lord English is somehow outside the code, yet inside the SBURB-verse." - 404

"Skaianet is the source of, and protector of, all universes. We give the tools to those worthy, and weed out those who have no hope. Through machination and machinery, we sort the wheat from the chaff, the strong from the weak, and create the most able universes possible. We do this for reasons that few can grasp, and that change constantly, regardless of any opinions. We guard and spread reality. We are the opposite of oblivion. We are skaia net." - Khalik

A Fan Fic which can be summed up as: Homestuck behind the scenes, with a dash of Crazy Is Cool.

The SBURB Patch Notes (previous thread, and the thread before that) Play-by-Post Game is, in a word, the unusual story of a group of developers that create the legendary game that will end the world, keeping it patched and updated across universes in paradox space.

Oh wait, did I say developers? More like a cross between Troubleshooters (from which they derive their high mortality rate and tendency to literally jump into a problem), flashy hackers (which grants them god-tier coding abilities, which they need to navigate convoluted code built up through all of time and several parallel universes), and, often, Sburb players themselves (most of them have at least one of the Elemental Powers, directly related to their game experience). Going Serial Escalation is in the job description.

In any case, the group is privy to many disasters that require them to scramble to preserve the fabric of paradox space, from Space Marines and glitch invasions to nanomachines, viruses, and ponies. As often, they deal with the players of the game - players who take advantage of Sequence Breaking, who stumble into Game Breaking Bugs, who want to screw the game over, time loops and all, who have no idea what's going on: all of them might just break the universe into teensy little pieces, and the Skaianet Sburb dev team are the only people who can put it back together, Because Destiny Says So.

Also, they have pizza.

Tropes include:

• Aborted Arc: Kidaianet.
• Aerith and Bob: Avery, Tricia, Kira, Aaron, and Daniel. And Hazika and Blue Sunny Day and Goranius Mirokat.
• Alien Geometries: Alnylthyria's form before manifesting.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Skaianet has programming languages that change reality. This is because they have programming languages that, essentially, hook into the API of paradox space. Or something.
• Apocalypse How: Knock over a server and you cause an X-5.
• As You Know: Inverted.
  Tricia Glasswell: "As those who are watching from beyond the Fourth Wall already know..."
• Autobots, Rock Out!: Invoked by a patch during the GUKS story arc.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Avery T. Deaconari's smart gatling gatling gun. Very powerful - especially when loaded with anti-entropic vacuum imploder microbomb rounds - but it runs out of ammo pretty damn fast.
• Badass Boast: At least two.
  Daniel Kopton: (after being kicked out of the servers by The Dragon) "THIS IS BY NO MEANS OVER!"
  Avery T. Deaconari: "You just signed your own death warrant, Ton. Not even the Grey King can save you from what's to come when we return..."
• Badass Longcoat: Practically standard issue amongst admins, but special mention has to go to when The Dungeoneer became a vessel of Lord English early in thread two.
• Big Bad: The Omnikid for the first thread. The GUKS^note Short for God-Tiered Ultimate Grey King of Skaianet for the second thread.
  • The Omnikid apparently redeemed themself and claimed it was a bug in their Luck attribute. Now, to know if it's true or not, it's another story.
• Big "SHUT UP!" / Noisy Shut-Up: Used by Avery during the council of war in the "Grey Ultimate King of Skaianet" story arc.
• Berserk Button: Killing Daniel's friends will earn you a very quick death. Turning them against him will earn you a slow, painful one.
• Blood Magic: The Sufficiently Advanced Technology version, i.e. using blood iron extracted from hemoglobin to construct things. Unfortunately, this is a very painful process.
  Bluesunnyday OH GOD! IT FEELS LIKE MY VEINS WERE TORN OPEN!
  Tricia Glasswell: Why do all the non-organics assume that blood iron is an unlimited resource!?
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: See Well-Intentioned Extremist, below. (Also see Tricia Glasswell's color scheme.)
• Butt-Monkey: Blue Sunny Day. He has narrowly avoided death at least once every catastrophe that befell Skaianet.
• Cerebus Syndrome: It was a bunch of people running around being incredibly awesome and occasionally fighting off disgruntled players. Then Itchy got dangerous.
• The Chosen Many: There is not one session of Sburb. There are untold, infinite sessions who pick their participants from their home planets and give them superpowers. Many an adventurer has embarked on a Knight Errant's quest to defend the multiverse and bumped into Skaianet doing exactly the same thing.
• Closed Circle: The "Virus" plot took place largely in quarantine. The "Green Sun" plot involves radiation and thus extensive shielding suits or else being trapped inside a "dirty" trailer.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: The siege with the Grey-Tier starts out as this. Then when most of the weaker ones are cleared out, the tougher ones start causing bigger problems.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: Daniel, at one point, threatens to tear one of his enemies' face off and force-feed it to him.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Sydney wears Majora's Mask, but she's actually very nice. However, it does hint towards her true nature: A Horrorterror.
• Deathbringer the Adorable: Lahlmiym'nuub, Devourer of Lulz, Chosen Avatar of the Book of All Fails is surprisingly down-to-earth for an Eldritch Abomination.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?
  • Pizza parties with fifteen-dimensional beings in attendance?
  • Employees sometimes negotiate with Lord English.
• The Dragon: Tom Ialfnu/The First Grey-Tier to the God-Tier Ultimate Grey King of Skaianet. Also, Avery T. Deaconari to SHODAN.
• Due to the Dead: Skaianet mourns for Tricia Glasswell. Even after she turned against them.
• Dysfunction Junction: Mostly the fault of the company religion, but the only admin who ends up not being half a ball of complexes is Daniel. And even he fails at being optimistic eventually. He gets better, though.
• Elsewhere Fic: Type II due to the existence of Andrew Hussie, but that's about it.
• Everyone Is Armed: Because you're required to have some kind of strife specibus, and if you're not good with it, you don't last long.
• The Exile: Sydney, for no reason other than being a Shrinking Violet
• Face–Heel Turn: The God-Tier Ultimate Grey King of Skaianet.
• The Faceless: Sydney wears a certain mask.
  • The Blank: Under it is a portal into her subconscious where her face should be.
• Fish out of Water: Sydney.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: The Weeping One, otherwise known as The Lich, otherwise known as Great Oglogoth.
• Gatling Good: Avery T. Deaconari's weapon of choice is a smart gatling gatling gun. It's a gatling gun made out of gatling guns that has smartgun link capability.
• Genre Savvy: Why Avery T. Deaconari decides against creating the Superintelligent Hammerspace Gatling Multicannon:
  "Apparently, the Superintelligent Hammerspace Gatling Multicannon requires "Skynet Grist" for alchemization. While I'm sure we have it, I'm not sure that I'd trust anything that required it. Especially not if it's superintelligent."
  • This trope is then sent smashing through the fourth wall when the employees are told to go check TVTropes for a definition!
  Daniel Kopton:If you're wondering what I'm talking about, go look up Bullet Hell on TV Tropes.
  • Ton Ialfnu knows that the Grey King won't last forever, so he's downloading a back-up onto TVTropes. The fact that there's also a back-up of Skaianet on TVTropes has nothing to do with it. No, really, I mean it.
• Genius Loci: Tricia fused her mind to that of Skaianet Labs itself. It's working out fairly well, at least after she got over the growing pains with the help of a Literal Split Personality and a Heel Realization.
• Glitch Entity: The cause of the "Glitch Invasion" plot.
• Hurricane of Puns: Used as an attack to lessen the Grey-Tier forces.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Daniel's Solaris Sword. Its stronger abilities can one shot the weaker First Guardian-Prototyped Grey Tiers.
• It Has Been an Honor: [1]
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: Sydney sends Hadron through her portal-face into her subconscious.
• The Main Characters Do Everything
• Married to the Job: Bluesunnyday ends up on the receiving end of a divorce when his wife grows tired of him coming home after work late, burnt, and battered. Then he falls in love with the Genius Loci, rendering him married to the workplace.
• More Dakka: Avery's smart gatling gatling gun (and, more recently, his MarSec M4000 machine gun), Bluesunnyday's SMG's with bottomless magazines, Girard himself (the guy is pretty much made of guns) . . .
• More than Mind Control: GUKS' influence on the Grey-Tier.
• My Kung-Fu Is Stronger Than Yours: Daniel tries this on The Dragon. Ton Ialfnu trashed him a result.
• Nanomachines: The "Virus" plot (which is not an example of The Virus, sorry!) goes something like this:
  • A genetically engineered virus is programmed not only to create copies of itself, but also copies of a nanomachine. The nanomachine is designed to make copies of itself, and copies of the virus if it is in a biological organism. So guess what gets into Skaianet...
• Noodle Incident: Happens fairly frequently, for instance when The Dungeoneer somehow returns from the far future with 39,999 duplicates of himself in tow for his ultimate attack, Forty Thousand Crazyfists.
• No-Sell: Surprisingly uncommon, were it not for the fact that this is still a roleplay. Nonetheless, happens when Daniel attempts to take on Ton Ialfnu.
• The Nicknamer: Girard calls other people... things.
• Oh, [REDACTED]!: The standard reaction to many, many events that transpire at Skaianet Laboratories.
• Oh, My Gods!: "Oh frogs" (Tricia), "[UNPRINTABLE CHARACTERS]" (Avery), "Dear Space Hero"^note by analogy with "Mother of God" (Daniel).
• One-Steve Limit: Zig-zagged with Omnikid's Demon of Beasts form, who's apparently also called Daniel. However, after finding out about the other Daniel's existance, hir codename is changed to Damien.
• One-Winged Angel: A regular occurence, like many others that'd be world-shattering in any other context. Even in a regular day's work, the Black and White King and Queens would be enough to count as this, but then there's when things go wrong...
  • One of these was Itchy. Yes, THAT Itchy.
• Playing with Fire: Alnylthyria's prime method of combat. Usually.
• Power-Up Mount / Horse of a Different Color: The original Dungeoneer had his Golden Cuccobo before he disappeared. See Badass Longcoat above for more details.
• Pungeon Master
  • Avery. Starting from his name.
  • Daniel also tends to get in on the puns a lot.
  • More or less everything that either trilbyulatingDungeoneer or gigersLich (also known as just The Lich) has to say are puns.
• Purposely Overpowered: When you program at Skaianet, you code everything that exists, existed, will exist, and could possibly exist.
• Rage Within the Machine: Surprisingly common, cf. the Skaianet Civil War.
• Reality Warper: Everyone who works at Skaianet Laboratories is one, either directly (through their powers as former God Tier Sburb players) or indirectly (by working on Sburb, which in turn affects the very nature of reality itself).
• Recruit Teenagers with Attitude: Because Sburb players are generally just pubescent, the fact is that Sburb players who somehow find their way into Skaianet are... well, they're teenagers. Also, Tricia Glasswell is described as an "overgrown teenager that represses things".
• Replacement Goldfish: Bluesunnyday's brother, brought in after Bluesunnyday killed himself to be with Tricia.
• Sacrificial Lion: Tricia Glasswell, although depending on one's acclimatization to the Skaianet morality it may have been more of an example of Death Equals Redemption.
• Serial Escalation: Needless to say, the people that MAKE Sburb have a few abilities of their own. And that's not even going into what they have to pull out of the bag for the various catastrophes they face, OR their offices.
  The Almighty 404: IM: After negotiations with Lord English, I managed to bag us a Pink Sun in a Dyson sphere and a quantum accelerator. I also alchemited an infinite rubik's tesseract using a standard Rubik's cube and a map of our offices.
• Shadow Archetype: Inverted, in manifestation if not in function. Tricia Glasswell just gained reality-warping powers, and it's her repressed other self that manifests out of mist wearing a pure white robe. This other self names herself Hazika^note which means "enlightened" in Arabic, and points out she must reintegrate with her original self, or the Tricia personality will descend into madness. This is a problem because if Tricia goes mad, pretty much all of Skaianet will be dead.
• Shout-Out: Avery's battle cry when he uses his smart gatling gatling gun on a glitch nest:
  Avery T. Deaconari: CRY SOME MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!
  • gigersLich is a Soldier of Light.
    • So, wait, he's Protoman?
    • Wait... if he's got something to do with Doctor Light... Does that mean that he's an enemy of the Teen Titans?
  • Many Artificial Intelligences live inside the Skaianet servers. Including AM, HAL, SHODAN, CABAL and Skynet.
  • In a recent plot segment, SHODAN and Avery find a cabinet containing a pistol, a shotgun, a monkey wrench, an old scientific calculator, and a detonation key. Three guesses as to whose office they were in when they found it.
• The Smart Guy: Everyone to a degree (they're all programmers after all), but Tricia Glasswell is a particularly obvious example. She has made use of up-arrow notation, helium-oxygen breathing canisters, Arimaa, decontamination showers, PTSD, lockpicking, botnets, libpurple... ^note libpurple, for example, is a real programming library that has bindings for several popular messaging programs, thus why it shows up buried in Pesterchum's code. It turns out that Hadron snuck in some Seer powers to ensure that Tricia had the wisdom to lead Skaianet.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Goranius/Blue and Tricia. They die. Then they are sealed in a coffin, together, but with an impenetrable divider between them that will never be broken.
• Stealth Pun: Avery T. Deaconari. Since the T. stands for "Tom", the name is a play on the phrase "every Tom, Dick, and Harry".
  • Made recursive with Girard's nickname for Avery: "Truman". As in Harry Truman.
• Steel Ear Drums: Usually played straight, but occasionally averted - usually to humorous effect.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Invoked, inverted, subverted, played with . . . actually, you could probably say that about half the tropes on this wiki.
• Super Mode: Many, many editors are already God Tier players, but then there are other examples of super-one-up-manship.
  • Girard used to be fused with a robot body, although this could have been And I Must Scream for the robots' personality.
  • Daniel alchemised with a Metagross to gain it's Metal Skin and Psychokinetic capabilities. Then he lost the metal skin but got his Technology powers supercharged.
  • gigersLich split up into the seven basic colours, then recombined to create an Octarine form, with which to fight a particularly irritating Big Bad.
  • Blue Sunny Day is capable of using his powers of pure determination to even stave off death. It's because of these abilities that he often has to suffer through injuries that would kill anyone else, cementing his Butt-Monkey status.
  • Tricia somehow alchemized herself with a Codering. She does not exactly cope well. Then she uses the codepowers to merge with the entire Skaianet building-complex.
  • The plan to take out Itchy revolved around this, using Scratch Devices. Then Itchy used one of them, and everything went to hell in a handbasket.
• Taking the Bullet: Daniel Kopton does this when a digital avatar of one of the Grey King's minions attempts to show Ani its stabs.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Invoked during the discussion Avery and SHODAN have about what weapons they might need for their return to Skaianet.
  Avery: "Obviously, We will want Reason, and plenty of ammunition for both it and the M4000. Plasma pistols as sidearms, I think, with enough elerium pods to power them for an extended period of time."
  SHODAN: "What about M22 assault rifles, Apollo H4 laser pistols, or TC-11 grenade launchers?"
  Avery: "That might be overkill. Then again... There Is No Kill Like Overkill."
• Theme Music Powerup: The Musical Aura is a literal case, as you choose from a playlist of all of the music ever composed and whatever music you choose will have various effects on your allies, enemies and yourself.
  • It basically works as a high-tech iPod with the power to alter reality with the music.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: The introduction of gigersLich was this, as after setting off into the Furthest Ring, his posts came in anachronistic order.
  • Anything that any editor who used to be a Time player does is, to some extent, this.
• Took a Level in Badass: Sydney. Of course, going through Sburb can do that to you.
• Unexplained Recovery: Tricia inexplicably shows up again after a Just-type permadeath, pointing out that she set an alarm on the Code that would resurrect her from backup if the Founders showed up.
• The Unfettered: Possibly the main reason the Admins are so incredible. Which means Skaianet has found out how to manufacture Unfettered. Be very afraid.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: Programming terms are thrown around sometimes, and some Codetech attacks are based on real-world computer processes.
• Weapon-Based Characterization:
  • Tricia used spears, but switched to walls and ceilings and shield-bubbles after what might be called a Heel Realization.
  • Bluesunnyday uses a katana known as Fenrir. He also uses SMG's on occasion.
  • Avery T. Deaconari loves his smart gatling gatling gun, though he does like the MarSec M4000 and a certain Gatling-style repeating magrail cannon too...
  • Daniel tends to use Revolvers, Swords and his own fists.
  • Dreamgor dual wields daggers and/or shortswords.
  • Girard was basically made of guns and tended to use them, along with the robot's strength, to great effect.
  • The Lich uses his Green Ring Sun Lantern and the Noir-Wolf Shatterist's Companion.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: There is a company religion. It involves valuing making new universes over preserving existing ones, because apparently the potential of making new universes is more important than the fact that you're killing off existing ones and forcing the few players back into primitivism.
  • Only the newbies ever try to make an Sburb without meteors, which is why they're assigned to soul-crushing work making sure that meteors land on failing players. And then there's the psychic psychologist responsible for making sure they're in compliance...
• Wham Line / The Un-Twist: TD?: Hah... hahahah.... Bluh.. Bluh... Huge... Lich.
• What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: Love is forbidden in the employee handbook, and interferes with certain types of omniscience.
• World of Badass: If you can't fight for your life, you don't last long in Skaianet, as invasions are a disturbingly common occurance.
• The Xof Y: This appears in many forms. For example:
  • The characters' former roles within Sburb and its variants usually take this precise form (e.g. the Monk of Mind, the Seer of Tactics, the Sleuth of Problems, the Rogue of Void, and so on).
  • The various "lands" created within given Sburb sessions follow a similar pattern (the X of Y and Z, where X is always "Land"): the Land of Heat and Clockwork, the Land of Little Cups and Tea, the Land of Spice and Flow, the Land of Cathedrals and Signal, and so on.

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