[sticky entry] Sticky: Pumpkin Hollow Inbox

Nov. 7th, 2024 11:45 pm
takethatnature: Wilson sitting in an armchair, reading a book with the barely-visible title "Science Stuff Probably". (Default)
Two pink stripey rocks on top of a white bumpy rock with a round yellow rock lodged inside it. It looks like a petrified fried egg and bacon strips.
Contact Wilson by sending stone, by phone, or at 578 Saffron Street.

takethatnature: Wilson with one eyebrow furrowed and his tongue sticking out of his mouth in concentration as he holds up a steaming beaker of mysterious pink science liquid. (concentration)
Wilson with a huge open-mouthed smile yelling into a cans-and-string 'phone' with no one on the other end.

Hello? Is this thing on?
takethatnature: Wilson sitting in an armchair, reading a book with the barely-visible title "Science Stuff Probably". (Default)
For the purposes of this post each newline is an inventory slot. He gets 15 of those + 8 slots of backpack space + 3 equipment slots (one of which is taken up by the backpack) on his person, not including whatever he may be currently holding with his off-hand or, idk, stuffed into his hat or something. As mentioned in other posts, stuff in his inventory can't touch each other but is neither hermetically sealed nor frozen in time, and some but not all items can be stacked with similar items.

Prebuilt structures are a special type of inventory that sticks to him through a resurrection or jumping through a portal that clears the rest of his inventory, but can't be stacked at all nor returned directly to the inventory after being deployed.

Cabin:
13 twigs
5 handfuls of cut grass
5 flint
37 small rocks
Football Helmet
6 nitre
Woven grass trap
Disassembled parts of a corndog stand
Exaggeratedly round plushie of himself
Plates of miscellaneous buffet food
A lot of hot dog weiners (at least 80 - two inventory stacks' worth)
Tommy Bahama brand cooler to hold most of the food
34 spider silk
Demyx's mp3 player and kitty-ear headphones that pulse to the beat
Pocket Scale
A bunch of portable alchemy equipment
Bird Trap
Bug Net
Scales
2 Orange Gems, 2 Yellow Gems, 2 Green Gems, 1 Purple Gem
2 Desert Stones
Hammer
Pickaxe
Pitchfork
Fencing Sword
Clean Sweeper
11 caliginous romance novels from Alternia
Ashes of Eye Bone

This is mostly in the cabin drawers and the closet rather than lying around. (The food is definitely stuffed in a drawer instead of out in the open.) It's the minimum amount of stuff he wants to have handy when he resurrects plus the stuff he doesn't want cluttering up his main inventory all day. Don't poke at it Demyx Don't EAT his FOOD STASH, VICTOR--

On his person:
Backpack shaped like a crab
17 twigs
29 cut grass
29 flint
16 logs (very low-quality, but usable)
Ice Staff (80% durability, or 16 shots)
Pan Flute (80% durability, or 8 shots)
Walking Cane
Football Helmet
Log Suit (too bulky to wear at the same time as the backpack)
Lantern (non-flammable - uses bioluminescent 'lightbulbs', collected fireflies, or Slurtle Slime as a light source)
Tam O'Shanter
Ham Bat (perpetually fresh)
Axe
Morning Star (92% durability)
1 Bundling Wrap filled with several plates of waffles, around 40 hotdogs, 20 ever-hot cooked potatoes from Max Maximum, and 4 cuts of Dragonfly meat
Tentacle Spike
Halberd
2 Pig Skin
16 Nightmare Fuel
2 Red Gems
2 Blue Gems
23 'gold' nuggets (not real gold, but equally shiny and conductive)
6 Rope
Deconstruction Staff (100% durability, or 5 shots)
Lei (Maxwell's)

He habitually keeps food along with non-edible meaty items (so, the pig skins) in his backpack so that if he dies and it all falls on the floor they won't get eaten by wandering monsters or ruined by the weather, and the same for his lantern so it doesn't activate and use all its fuel.

Prebuilt structures:

Campfire
Endothermic Fire
Sign
Directional Sign
takethatnature: Wilson on a boat in heavy rain, holding out a lantern and looking fearful. (boating)
December? 2022
TDM 6 - Amaterasu
TDM 8 - Lev/Lyubov

December 2022:
Where's the complaints department around here

January 2023:

Burn Book
Clarke
LOTR Marathon Driveby
Omori Driveby
Murderbot

February 2023:
Fairway Toplevel - Nobunaga
February Fair - Max Maximum
February Fair - Siffleur
February Fair - Phil
Daisy
Post-Hunt Toplevel - Erin | Demyx
Daisy 2 (Hunt Aftermath)
Dimitri

March 2023:
Second half of the previous toplevel - Karkat | Helena
Memshare Toplevel - Ylva | Ari | Klaus | Pratt
Siffleur in Wilson's memories
Max Maximum

April 2023:
The Labyrinth of Suffering: Toplevel with Demyx and César | Head Pun Enthusiasts | On the floor with Jeff | Max Maximum (Dog Edition) | In the nap pile with Wayne, Gil, Helena, and Abed | Called to the door | Dark room, deadly bat monster

May 2023:
Crew Quarters Toplevel - Helena | Karkat
Shouting at the Bridge - 1 | 2
Pierogies with Darcy in the new kitchen
Cake with Valdis
Cheese and bowling with Erin

June 2023:
Toplevel - Pratt | Siffleur
Pride with Watson

July 2023:

Friday
Shouji
Toplevel - Maxwell
Sinking boat excursion - Toplevel 1Darcy, Dimitri, and ShoujiSiffleurToplevel 2Toplevel 3

August 2023:
Maxwell (with special guest Johnny Summer)
(Posted September 2023) Dinner with Maxwell
Potatoes with Max Maximum
Siffleur lends a hand, or rather a whole arm
Wedding cake with Ava
August Event Toplevel - Maxwell
August Event Melee - Round 1Round 2Round 3
August Event - Maxwell after the melee

September 2023:
Gwen
Skulduggery
Toplevel - Helena
Victor

October 2023:
TDM 10 - Bash Returns
Signmaking Toplevel - Maxwell | César

November 2023:
Siffleur's Mom
Maxwell
Cassandra

December 2023:
Toplevel - Yufei
Dimitri during the excursion
Darcy (with bonus Dimitri)
Phil

January 2024: 
Karkat and Nepeta
César
Maxwell (inbox)
Friday
Tayrey
Siffleur
Friday again
Max Maximum
Toplevel - Maxwell | Sheogorath

February 2024:
In the cell with Victor | Cell telephone with Maxwell, Darcy, and Nimona | with Edgar, Ossie and Darcy | Planning and scheming with Darcy, Gwen, Daisy and Nimona

takethatnature: Wilson sitting in an armchair, reading a book with the barely-visible title "Science Stuff Probably". (Default)
CHARACTER NAME: Wilson P. Higgsbury
CHARACTER SERIES: Don't Starve
CHARACTER PRONOUNS: He/him

[OOC]

Backtagging: Sure!
Threadhopping: Sure, if the comm/other people in the thread are okay with that!
Fourthwalling: I've never been entirely sure what this means?? If you try to tell him he's a video game character you'll have to explain what a video game is first and he likely won't believe you when you're done, although if you describe the plot of Don't Starve to him he'll be really weirded out. If you mean breaking the fourth wall of the RP community, that's fine if it's that type of comm, I guess?
Offensive subjects (elaborate): Don't expect me to watch dog videos in the OOC chat, warn me first if you're depicting child abuse from the POV of the abuser, I don't want to participate at all in scenarios that involve sexual violence

[IC]

Magnus Archives fear associations: Buried, Dark, Desolation, End, Eye, Flesh, Hunt, Spiral; Dark is the strongest but all of these are major marks. Not entirely untouched by the Lonely, the Slaughter, or the Web either, and at late canon points the Stranger gets involved along with some extra Eye. The Come Sail Away CRAU adds the Vast to his minor marks.

Hugging this character: He likes hugs from his friends, he doesn't like them from strangers or casual acquaintances. Go ahead and do it anyways.
Kissing this character: He won't be happy about it unless he knows and likes you. OOCly that amounts to "ask first", unless we have some positive CR built up.
Flirting with this character: Yeah sure whatev. He'll probably get either flustered or annoyed depending on whether you're his type.
Fighting with this character: Go for it. He'll defend himself; he's almost always armed with a hammerspace melee weapon of some description, or the means to make one on very short notice. He's willing to use his bare fists too, but he's not a terribly effective nor trained unarmed fighter.
Injuring this character (include limits and severity): Sure, you can rough him up. I'd rather not permanently maim him, but if he loses a limb or something he'll just regain it next time he dies and gets resurrected anyway, so it's really more like "don't expect him to keep the maiming for more than a couple months". Having said that, I'd like to minimise (but not necessarily 100% avoid, especially if he's about to die anyway) things like broken legs that would incapacitate/immobilise him while leaving him conscious, just to be more true to his canon where he can stay on his feet with 1/150 hp and then collapses and dies if he takes any more damage.
Killing this character: I would prefer to avoid permadeath. Temporary death is fine; if the comm doesn't have provisions for that, Wilson will bring his own.
Note: His inventory will spill all over the floor when he dies. Please do not pick up and keep anything irreplaceable. (Unless we've OOCly agreed on an exception first.) What counts as irreplaceable depends on how easily he can replace items from his world in the current setting, but the Eye Bone always counts. This is strictly an OOC request; it's fine if your character's a sticky-fingered type who intends to keep it but Wilson steals it back or finds it lying around or badgers them into giving it back or physically wrestles it away from them.
Using telepathy/mind reading abilities on this character: It'll be an unsettling experience for him but that's not a no. You might find some weird shit in there because of his history with eldritch entities, most notably the time he made a deal for forbidden knowledge.
Magical information: He has a bunch of knowledge in his mind, both mundane and magical, that he got from a deal with Them rather than learning it the normal way. Depending on whether his canon point is from before or after the end of the singleplayer campaign, it may also be discernible that he was briefly bound to the Nightmare Throne (which nominally made him king of the Constant for that time) but has since been released.
He has some experience using shadow magic outside this context - crafting and wielding the magical items of his canon - but hates admitting that magic exists or that he has personally used it and will try to claim that his magic staves and so forth run on purely scientific principles. Most shadow magic is powered by Nightmare Fuel, which is condensed from negative emotions by shadow creatures or Evil Flowers or bioaccumulated by certain creatures of the Constant, and has mutagenic effects from prolonged exposure at high potency (the timeline for this to happen is unknown; we only see the end product, and there's no mechanics for it to happen to player characters during gameplay).
Late in his canon he's also been exposed to lunar magic, which is the mirror image of shadow magic in many ways, but I don't currently play him from this canon point anywhere.
Medical information: In Don't Starve singleplayer he's a mostly normal human being in reasonable health, distinguished only by his ability to grow a long flowing full beard in a few weeks. After completing Adventure Mode, i.e. in the Cyclum or Don't Starve Together era, he's 99% human but his canine teeth have turned into sharp fangs and if he doesn't trim them his fingernails grow into points and turn black; mostly cosmetic, but a little souvenir of his reign on the Nightmare Throne.


Warnings: His canon involves a lot of human/animal and human/anthro-animal combat, and a lot of madness-themed extradimensional fantasy shadow monster stuff (I write "low sanity" as experienced in the game as mostly stress-induced dissociation), and his backstory has him doing science experiments on animals and period-typical homophobia and transphobia lurking menacingly in the background. If he's out of his canon setting long enough he'll probably start showing mild to moderate PTSD symptoms related to dogs, animal attacks, and shadows that seem to be out of place or moving on their own.

Get your own copy of the IC/OOC Permissions meme!

Two Worlds

Dec. 31st, 2019 08:53 pm
takethatnature: Wilson sitting in an armchair, reading a book with the barely-visible title "Science Stuff Probably". (Default)
There were dogs barking in the distance. Maxwell's hunting hounds, closing in on his camp. The magician had broken yet another promise. It might have been upsetting if he'd expected anything other than a betrayal, but all he could find it in him to feel about this latest treachery was irritation and a slight twinge of disappointment. The practical problems it caused were more pressing.

"Get in!" Wilson waved his arms at the smallbird, who was dancing in and out of the miniature stone fortress he'd constructed as if hiding from the hounds was a schoolyard game. There weren't enough rocks on this walled garden of an island to build a refuge with a comfortable amount of floor space, and as a result its interior was barely wide enough for a human to turn around. "Do you know how tiny you are?! They'll eat you in two bites!"

Tallbirds weren't afraid of tight spaces, but they had no instinct to explore them either. Wilson could get the smallbird to hop inside the enclosure if he stood directly behind it and then got her attention, but she'd hop right back out again while he circled around to seal the entrance. The closer to the chest-high stone wall he positioned himself, the more she wanted to go around it instead of inside it.

The barking was turning to a thunderous cacophony of growls and snorts, too close for comfort. Wilson tossed his backpack into the grass and pulled on his splintery, makeshift wooden armor. That and a pigskin helmet would make it a lot harder for the hounds to sink their teeth into his vital organs, at least until they chewed the armor into sawdust.

You couldn't make armor for smallbirds, or at least the science machines had no shortcuts toward such a thing. Trapping her in a stone fortification for as long as it took to fight off the hounds himself was the best he could do with the materials at hand. But herding her into it wasn't working!

Hold on, didn't he still have some berries? Wilson rummaged around, then popped Chester's mouth open and found the fistful of fruit he'd harvested yesterday with a fresh coat of drool. It was supposed to be for trail mix, but this was more important. He tossed it between the walls, the smallbird dove after it eagerly, and something barked in his ear and snapped at his ankle. A hound. In one adrenaline-fueled motion Wilson darted away from its jaws and swung his axe at its face, the oversized mis-proportioned mockery of a dog yelped, and the smallbird chirped a battle cry and scurried between Wilson's legs to bury her beak in the hound's underbelly. No! This was exactly what he didn't want! Another hound ran up to the fray, barking furiously, while the first one lunged for the smallbird and got a mouthful of wing. She let out a pained chirp and pecked it in the eye. A third pair of jaws tore at Wilson's elbow, the second hound barrelled down towards the smallbird, and Wilson kicked it in the snout.

More barking, from behind him. That was all the warning he got before a fourth hound charged headlong into him, unable to get its teeth through his armor but knocking the wind out of his lungs. Wilson staggered sideways, ignoring the new hound, and hit the first hound again. The smallbird pecked the new hound in the neck and it brought its jaws down on her leg before Wilson could steal its focus. She let out a plaintive peep beneath the crush of canine bodies, cut off all too soon; blood flew from the new hound's snapping teeth and from a fresh axe-wound in its neck. Eventually he became aware that his axe had splintered into pieces in his hands, and threw it away in favour of a spear.

The four hounds had been reduced to a mess of oozing purple chunks of meat strewn across the grass, and nothing could be seen of the smallbird, not even a bone or a feather. His armor was hanging off him in pieces, ready to give way at the slightest provocation. Chester had been badly bitten, but he was a creature of uncanny vitality that required neither food nor medicine and his wounds were already disappearing.

He had no reason to stay at this campsite anymore. Wilson rummaged through his chests and selected the few useful things he could find room for in his inventory, pushed the components of whatever structures he could assemble into almost-built potential space, and set off towards the coughing, gurgling green-tinged wormhole on the northwest end of the island.

Timeline

Sep. 24th, 2019 10:45 pm
takethatnature: Wilson sitting in an armchair, reading a book with the barely-visible title "Science Stuff Probably". (Default)
Currently Milliways' Wilson is working his way through Adventure Mode, the story mode campaign of the original game, which is accessed by finding a portal (Maxwell's Door) in Sandbox Mode. This version of Wilson is based very heavily on a real savefile of mine in which I first completed Adventure Mode, although I'm consolidating it with some other Sandbox Mode saves in order for him to know about things like Sandbox Mode world-jumping and the Ruins which I didn't touch in that specific save, not to mention that I didn't have the Reign of Giants expansion pack at the time but I've used its features here.

Come Sail Away's Wilson comes in from the exact instant he saw a piece of the moon fall out of the sky and was about to get hit by the ensuing tidal wave in the Turn of Tides trailer that began Return of Them. He's been to Shipwrecked and Hamlet (before undergoing the same Adventure Mode run as the Milliways version did) but not the Forge and Gorge.

So, his timeline looks like this; some spoilers for the first game below.
  • Pre-canon: Flashback portion of the Interference cinematic, Origins trailer (Forbidden Knowledge), various millicanon before that. Wilson leaves the university he was doing his graduate studies at in disgrace, and after an unspecified period of time he buys a furnished home at auction which turns out to be in worse shape than advertised and full of what turns out to be Wagstaff's old stuff. A strange voice talks to Wilson through his radio, he rather hastily agrees to receive forbidden knowledge from it, he spends weeks obsessed with building some elaborate contraption unaware of what it does and then when he activates it (at Maxwell's urging) it sucks him into another dimension.
  • Sandbox Mode: Wilson arrives in the Constant, not that he knows that name for the island dimension at this point. First face-to-face encounter with Maxwell, first experiences with temporary death and revival starting with touchstones and later with resurrection items he crafts himself. Tries to use the Sandbox Mode teleportato to leave, but ends up on a different version of basically the same island (same climate, same species of creatures, same phenomena, but laid out differently). Milliwaysverse hasn't been to Shipwrecked or Hamlet, Sailsverse has been to both.
  • Adventure Mode: Wilson activates Maxwell's Door and travels through a series of challenge worlds. There are six of them but players will only see five at a time, in a variable order; they're generated anew for each attempt, but each challenge world has specific constraints applied to it and otherwise resembles a somewhat harsher version of the Sandbox Mode island. The goal is to use the Divining Rod to locate the components of the Teleportato, assemble it, and escape to the next world. Wilson made seven unsuccessful attempts to get through Adventure Mode before his current one, by which I mean he died without a resurrection arrangement in place and found himself back at the portal in Sandbox Mode.
    • World 1: The King of Winter. The island's biomes are broken apart and connected by narrow land bridges with obstacles in the middle, but more importantly it's always deep winter. It's too cold to grow crops, daylight hours are very short, and irritable Deerclopses roam the countryside ready to stomp on your camp if they notice it. (If you kill it, another one will be along in a few weeks.) Wilson owes much of his survival here to looting some winter gear from the skeletal corpse of some other adventurer who died mere steps away from the Divining Rod base. This is also the world where he got his hat and walrus-tusk walking cane since there's MacTusk hunting parties all over the place.
    • World 2: The Game is Afoot. Still winter for the first ten days, then the weather warms up and stays that way forever. The island layout puts a hospitable area in the middle and three dangerous peninsulas which of course contain all the Teleportato parts and a lot of desirable resources. Most notable as the place where a lureplant sprouted in the middle of Wilson's camp while he was scouting and ate everything he left lying on the ground, and as the site of Spiders Gorge, Land of 1000 Spiders, all of which were usually busy fighting tallbirds.
    • World 3: Two Worlds. Two islands, one hospitable and one intensely inhospitable, with warm-but-not-scorching weather and no harsh seasons; autumn and spring sort of mush together without passing through a distinct summer or winter. Wilson is deposited on the hospitable island in a small, easily-expandable prebuilt camp with gardens and a tent while Maxwell bargains with him, and there's a diseased wormhole on the nice island that's clearly supposed to be a one-way trip to the bad island. However, wormholes really love burrowing between disconnected bits of land and providing passage between them so there's a second healthier wormhole on the opposite end of the hospitable island anyway. Wilson used that to scout the inhospitable island and discovered that it's mostly swamp and full of deadly tentacles and hostile clockwork robots and killer beehives and stabby booby-traps and so forth. The far end of the wormhole came out near some hound dens and Wilson had to fight the hounds off and then smash the dens the first time he used it. Also this wormhole keeps spitting him out at Milliways instead, regardless of whether he's coming or going; that's how he first came to the bar.
    • World 4: Archipelago. â—„ You Are Here (Milliways)
      This world has normal seasons and is broken into six islands which are each dominated by a single biome, and all but the starting island contain a piece of the Teleportato. Wormholes connect them all to each other, most going through a 'hub' island which also has the base of the Teleportato on it. Unfortunately in this case the hub island is filled with killer bees. Wilson tried to burn the hives and started one hell of a forest fire but did not successfully get rid of all of them. The good(?) news is, wormholes provide access to Milliways!
    • World 5: Darkness. No wormholes here, unfortunately. Perpetually early autumn, but also perpetual night. Similar partially-broken-apart layout to King of Winter. A lot more fireflies than the island typically has, including in biomes where they usually don't live. Maxwell screams at you when you spawn in. Wilson ends up spending a lot more time than would generally be considered necessary in this world due to some questionable strategic choices he makes, but he eventually finds the exit.
    • Checkmate: Epilogue. Wilson finds Maxwell's throne room and takes his place on the Nightmare Throne. Maxwell apparently dies and crumbles to dust upon being released from the Throne, but in-game he becomes the player character in your Sandbox Mode world.
  • Cyclum: An official comic (with a cinematic embedded in it) that bridges the events of Don't Starve and Don't Starve Together. Maxwell fumbles his way through being a survivor on the island he used to reign over and finds Wilson's camp, with Wilson in it. Wilson's immediate reaction is trying to beat the snot out of Maxwell with his bare hands, and they have a brief scuffle interrupted by a shadow hand that wants to snuff out the campfire and likely get both of them killed by the monster in the darkness. Both of them immediately stop pummelling each other and rush to throw another log into the fire, and then they're too exhausted to fight any more so they sulk for the entire next day.
    Eventually Wilson's resolve cracks and he trades Maxwell a kebab for information about why the hell he isn't dead; Maxwell has no clue and counters by asking Wilson why he's not trapped on the Nightmare Throne. Wilson tells Maxwell about how a woman walked out of the darkness, released him from the Throne with a tap on his bonds, and then horribly murdered him with magic. The A New Reign trailer explains what happened after that.
  • The two of them have an informal truce after that but once again come into conflict when Wilson finds Maxwell rummaging through his chests and looking at an old blueprint; Maxwell smooths over the situation by offering to improve the plans with magic from his Codex Umbra, and the two of them work together to build a new portal (which looks like the spawn portal from when Don't Starve Together was in beta, incidentally). Despite some discomfort with the situation Wilson is the one to throw the switch, at which point the portal activates. It very much does not do what it was supposed to do; instead it immediately summons three other survivors and then collapses, torn apart by enormous thorny rose-vines, and a fancier but broadly similar portal rises out of the ground in its place while the new people (Wes, Wendy, and Wolfgang) look around apprehensively.
  • Don't Starve Together: Survival Mode is very much like the first game's Sandbox Mode, there's just more of you. Other survivors were pulled from their own singleplayer islands to the multiplayer world, potentially including anyone who appears in the singleplayer game but definitely everyone who's present in an unmodded copy of DST. (Wortox is an exception to this; he's basically an interdimensional tourist, he wasn't stranded on the island in the first game but he can show up whenever he wants.) Not everyone finds the five-person band of survivors formed after the original portal incident right away, some come through the portal alone and band together in twos and threes before meeting the rest. Eventually, though, they all come together into one community. Things start to change in the island ecosystem, new plants and animals and creatures that blur the two kingdoms appear, the island starts getting hit with meteorites on a regular basis, and the first person to venture underground discovers that the upper level of the caves has collapsed onto the sub-subterranean ancient ruins and there's no longer a hard barrier between the two. At some point Maxwell or Ms. Wickerbottom introduces the name 'The Constant' for the island dimension, based on its stability compared to some of the other realms it connects to.
  • Return of Them: â—„ You Are Here (Come Sail Away)
    One night a piece of the Constant's moon falls from the sky and crashes into the ocean, flooding the area around the island with several feet of real saltwater from some punctured underground reservoir where previously there was only weird impassable two-dimensional mock-waves. Various seabirds and fish colonise the new waters, not all of them friendly; the island itself is almost entirely unaffected as it was previously several feet above sea level at every accessible point of the shoreline. Wilson is the first to suggest building boats to investigate the crash site and the first to build the new science machine specialising in nautical items, the Think Tank.
  • The Forge: Eventually, either because they want to see what happens or because they've run out of other things to do, the survivors team up to kill the Ancient Guardian and the Ancient Fuelweaver down in the ruins. (These figures are also not subject to permanent death in the Constant, incidentally; they respawn after a while when certain conditions are met.) Wickerbottom sockets the Ancient Key into the Ancient Gateway, which generates a portal, and Wigfrid barrels headlong into it shouting for glory while the other five people present at the time are still trying to decide what to do with it; Wilson, Willow, Wickerbottom, Wendy, and Wolfgang get pulled in after her and find themselves in a gladiatorial arena surrounded by warrior-pig spectators and lava. Their leader, a human man named Battlemaster Pugna, refuses to believe they're not footsoldiers of the forces controlling the Nightmare Throne and forces them to fight all the warriors he can throw at them; after they accomplish this, he surrenders and opens the next portal for them.
  • The Gorge: Half of the team who fought in the Forge - Wilson, Wickerbottom, and Wendy - emerge in a dilapidated quasi-Victorian town which is always overcast but never night and has a giant fanged lamprey-like mouth in the sky like a wormhole gone horribly wrong. Its name is the Gnaw. What remains of the local population is a group of goat-people and pig-people who have been cooking meals to placate the Gnaw, and a few of the fish-people who failed to please the Gnaw and fell victim to its curse of transformation but didn't die, go mad, and/or disappear into the sea. Upon the survivors' arrival the Gnaw refuses to accept any further meals from the locals; the humans are the only ones allowed to cook for it now, and the curse will get them too if they don't measure up. If they lose, they turn into merms; if they win, they get to go through yet another portal, destination unknown, with the population of the Quagmire following behind them. By the way, the Quagmire has a park gate, so access to Milliways is possible here.
That's all Klei's given us so far. I'm sure they'll continue the story where the Gorge left off eventually, and Wilson's not anywhere close to that canon point yet anyway so I can wait a bit before I need to deal with that.

Nobody in the fandom knows whether the other DST characters can follow their friends into the Forge portal or where Wolfgang, Willow, and Wigfrid went when the others entered the Gorge.

Milliways: If we get more Don't Starve characters in the Bar who weren't in the Forge/Gorge trailers, they can be substituted whenever we get to playing through those events rather than saying they followed the canon teams; it'd be simpler and probably more fun to RP out a Forge or Gorge OOM together. Wilson might go to the Shipwrecked or Hamlet worlds eventually! But probably through some kind of Bar shenanigans in the DST era, (for instance, the portal in the lake) rather than building the Seaworthy or Skyworthy in his original Sandbox Mode world.
takethatnature: Wilson sitting in an armchair, reading a book with the barely-visible title "Science Stuff Probably". (Default)
Wilson's beard is his character perk. Being able to grow a full beard in a week if he stops shaving is a bit unusual but not particularly unnatural; however, its growth seems to accelerate after that and he can grow it out to knee-length over the course of a few months. When it's long, it's also noticeably more insulating than human hair normally is. The rest of his hair does grow pretty fast, but not that fast.

Then there's the things that everybody can do in The Constant. In addition to putting stuff in his actual pockets, he has access to a semipermeable extradimensional inventory. It has finite space, but limited by the number and type of objects rather than by total volume or mass, and he can't put stuff in his inventory if he can't lift it/can only barely lift it with his arms or if it is itself a container for other items. (Smallish sealed packages are an exception to the container rule.) Light, sound, and scent can come out of his inventory; a hot thermal stone in his pocket or backpack casts a dim red light at his feet, if he picks up a talking animal (like the pirate parrots from Shipwrecked) they're audible from inside, and animals can smell food on him if it's in his inventory. Which can be troublesome in the case of the eight-foot-tall rabbit people who fly into a rage when they notice someone carrying meat, or the kaiju-sized bear/badger that wants to eat everything it can get its hands on. It doesn't really smell any different than if he was keeping it in a physical pocket though, apart from the smell maybe being fainter.

The other branch of his hyperspace inventory is pre-built structures. (This is probably just a quirk of the game engine but I'm treating it as in-universe fact because it has occasionally been the only reason I survived in winter or summer or Adventure Mode.) He can build a campfire or a tent or one of the wacky Don't Starve research machines or whatever, shunt it into hyperspace at the moment of construction, and leave it there until he wants to place it down. Once he's put it down he can't return it to his inventory, at least not without destroying it and starting over.

In the event of Wilson's death, his main inventory gets dumped all over the floor where he falls, but his pre-built structures stay with his spirit and if he wants he can deploy them immediately upon returning to life.

Speaking of which: Temporary death! The inventory thing could go either way (Wilson's not going to think it's weird at least), but being able to come back from the dead is normal for the Constant but not for Wilson's Earth. In the original Don't Starve, you have to set up precautionary measures before you die, and then when that happens you get automatically resurrected either immediately or at the start of the next game day. When Charlie took over the Nightmare Throne, the process changed somewhat. Now when player characters die they return as ghosts; the Meat Effigy works mostly the same as before (though it now demands a blood sacrifice from the HP of the person who intends to use it, when previously the meat from almost any medium-size to large animal would be sufficient), but resurrection amulets and plinths have to be deliberately activated by a ghost, and the Telltale Heart exists as a flawed but viable method for a living person to restore a ghost to life with easily obtained materials.

If he gets killed in the Bar he'll either turn into a ghost and be revivable with resurrection items from his world, or he'll just sort of stay there and be dead but if someone gets up close to his corpse they can stuff his soul back in and raise him from the dead that way, depending on whether Survival Mode rules or The Forge rules seem more appropriate to the situation. It's also hypothetically possible that he could find a touchstone in the Labyrinth, but so far he hasn't, nor has he looked. ETA: I originally said a meat effigy in his world wouldn't work in the Bar, but what I meant is that if he's coming in from a canon point after Charlie takes over the Nightmare Throne, he would have to go back through his door as a ghost and then activate the effigy. Prior to that canon point, if he dies in the Bar a meat effigy placed in his world will automatically call him back to respawn there. At all points in the timeline, he'll leave behind a corpse that rapidly withers into a skeleton plus all his inventory items.

In ghost form, his ability to affect the corporeal world is limited but he can haunt an object or animal, possessing it for a few seconds, sometimes physically transforming it but more often punting it a few feet in a predictable direction or causing it to run around in a panic for a few seconds respectively. Everything he says as a ghost sounds very echoey and distorted. (Dead players can still use the chatbox, but hardcoded quotes get replaced with variations of "ooOOOooOOOoo".) In Don't Starve Together, other player characters (including nonhuman ones) and boss monsters can't be haunted, so other patrons probably can't be haunted or possessed either except for maybe a few special cases.

It's mundane by comparison to returning from the dead, but he can also go much longer than a normal human being without sleeping. Indefinitely, in fact. It's not particularly healthy for him, but he can stay up for a week straight and by day 7, all other things being equal, he's likely to be snappish and scatterbrained but he'll still be lucid. He's not even the worst one in his band of survivors about this; Ms. Wickerbottom was already an insomniac on Earth, and in the Constant no amount of exhaustion can get her to fall asleep. (This is also based on game mechanics; in the game, sleeping heals sanity and health points but there aren't any penalties for not sleeping.)

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takethatnature: Wilson sitting in an armchair, reading a book with the barely-visible title "Science Stuff Probably". (Default)
Wilson P. Higgsbury

November 2024

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