The subject can enter and exit fictional worlds from media that the subject did not create, at will. They simply have to have the media (accepted forms are: a book (physical or digital), a movie, a TV show, plays, musicals, or epic poetry) in front of them, no more than 2m away from them, and if they will it, they will immediately be transported into the fictional world, at the point in the plot and location in the fictional world they were looking at before entering. The subject has plot armour whilst inside the fictional world, and as such cannot be harmed if they do not will it. They also have the ability to decide the rate at which they age (any float between 0 and 1, multiplied by the normal ageing rate) at the point of entering the fictional world, for all the time they stay in that particular world, until they leave. The default is the normal ageing rate, if they don’t consciously select otherwise.
The subject disappears from wherever they were in the real world as soon as they enter the fictional world. When they want to leave the fictional world, they can simply will it, and they will exit the world, and appear in the real world after an equivalent length of time equal to them having aged at the normal speed all the time they were in the world – i.e. if they selected not to age at all, they would appear in the real world instantly after having left, if they aged half as fast as normal, they would reappear in the real world after half the amount of time they actually spent in the fictional world, and so on.
The subject reappears in the same place they entered into the fictional media – that is, the same place they exited, even if the media has moved. If the media they entered ceased to exist by the time they wanted to return (this is more likely with a time-bound piece of media like a play or movie than a book, though books can be destroyed too), then they exit up to 2m away from the nearest media of that same story to their entry location. If all the media of that story doesn’t exist anymore, then they exit next to the nearest media to their entry location that is set in the same fictional world. This is preferably another book/TV episode in the series, but if that doesn’t exist another rendition of the same world, such as a TV adaptation of a book, or the original movie to a musical, also works. If no media of that fictional world exists at all in the real world when they want to exit, they can’t they are trapped – at least, until media for that world exists again in the real world. This isn’t a problem if they don’t age, as they would exit instantly from a real time perspective, only if they age at all, giving a chance for the media to be destroyed/cease to exist in the intervening time they spend in the fictional world.
They enter the location and time in the story that they were viewing when they entered, eg the current scene of a play or TV show, the current page of a book.
The subject keeps any skills or powers they have attained from the fictional world when they exit to the real world, and any items (that is, anything, including sentient beings) smaller than 4m^3 within 2m of them can be transported with the subject into or out of fictional worlds, either way. They cannot transport the object they are viewing the media on into the world, be that a physical book, a digital device, or anything else. The powers function in the real world and any other fictional worlds. If they need a material to function, they will work if that material is present, eg an earthbender will be able to use earth from any world, not just Avatar: the Last Airbender earth, but magic that requires a special material only found in the fictional world, eg midichlorians, will only work in the world where they can be found.Any aspect of the world not defined in the source material is encountered by the subject as the gut instinct of the subject imagines it to be, not as they want it to be. This gut instinct is determined at the moment they enter the world, not as they go along.
You must log in or register to comment.
There are stories that contain devices that can create realities, so even if the top level can’t be a story you create yourself, deeper levels can be anything you like.
The hard part would be convincing someone in the top level to let you, a mysterious interloper, use such a device.
And the next hard part would be readjusting to mundane reality and trying to pick up where you left off when you finally come home.
… just ask anyone who has “returned” to what ought to be a familiar computer game world after an extended break in the real world and/or other games. Or even other worlds in the same game.
Oh man, takes me back to the Magic Treehouse books.
I feel like the best approach would be to take any work of fiction which has some sort of no-consequence superpower and obtain it to bring back to the real world, though off the cuff I am struggling to think of which example to use (too many superhero origin stories involve traumatic experiences, couldn’t be done by people who weren’t already extraordinary, or have some undesirable consequence down the road, haha).
The other element is that you probably want to aim for something that gives you as much power as you can get, but not something that completely detaches you from humanity. For example, you could go to the episode of Star Trek: TNG where Riker is given Q powers (though I suppose good luck somehow intercepting that, since I feel like the powers would not be given to just some rando who isn’t part of the bridge crew), but then getting powers that make you nearly omnipotent serves to separate you from humanity, and it could become too tempting to develop a god complex.
Maybe I’d just go to something like Apple TV’s Foundation series and just steal some imperial nanomachines to keep me healthy and fast-healing for the duration of my natural life, and leave it at that.
It actually can work as a teleportation device - create a short story, deposit a second copy at another location, put your copy in a time-delayed shredder and a mechanism that prints out your story a few minutes after it has been shredded, enter story, wait a few moments to let your copy be destroyed, exit at other location. afterwards the story gets printed out at the old location, recreating the original starting point.
You can’t enter a world you created, and presumably the digital copy would still exist at the original location to be printed, so you could still return there, but I like the concept!
You could probably just go into a world with teleportation technology and take it out, though :p
oh well a ghost writer it is then! if i read correctly the form of the media has higher priority since an exact copy, so it should work then! The story must be stored remotely tho, preferably somewhere in the middle of the pacific.
Honestly, I feel like questions like this would make an interesting dedicated community. Like, people having fun brainstorming how to exploit superpowers/magic/etc in a given scenario.
That is essentially what the WritingPrompts community is.
searches
Ah, it’s actually pretty active.
!writingprompts@literature.cafe
EDIT: Looking at it, I do think that it’s less for discussion of how to exploit the specific stuff and more for trying to write content yourself, though. Like, that makes the bar a little higher than for just casual conversation of the “mind game” side.
The subject can enter and exit fictional worlds from media that the subject did not create, at will.
smaller than 4m^3 within 2m of them can be transported with the subject into or out of fictional worlds, either way.
It sounds like collaboration with another person would effectively nullify that constraint. Like, if I can talk to someone else, and ask them to write a paragraph-long description of a fictional world with smallish thing, then I can pretty trivially obtain thing, for pretty much any value of thing.
any items (that is, anything, including sentient beings) smaller than 4m^3 within 2m of them can be transported with the subject into or out of fictional worlds, either way.
I think that one of the most immediately-obvious uses in terms of impacting Real Earth is going to be transfer of information. If you can reach any science-fiction universe and pull a data storage device of some sort out, once you’ve gotten a basic mechanism up to transfer data from that data storage device to and from existing terrestrial computers, you should be able to extract a lot of advanced technology very quickly.
The equivalent of Wikipedia from a future, science fiction world whose laws of physics is the same as our own is probably going to have a pretty considerable amount of impact on Real Earth, after it’s scaled up and the technology applied.
You could probably also move some (small) devices to help bootstrap technology, but just the information alone should be pretty impactful.
This could work really well for me too. My favourite sci fi series, Spinward Fringe, has a character who loves ‘ancient’ media, and who is one of the heroes of the story, so has access to all sorts of technology. As it’s set around a thousand years in the future, he should like at least some of the media I already own.
I’ve got an older laptop that I can take with me to give him a way to make our technologies compatible, then, for a few hundred pounds, I can buy some massive hard drives and fill them with whatever media he wants, assuming that he hasn’t given me a super powerful computing device yet. After a few decent trades, I should hopefully either be able to build highly advanced tech, or have enough information to trade on this side and pay to get things built.
I wonder if I could use a loophole too. They have sentient AIs that develop after they’re turned on for the first time. If I’m remembering it correctly, they’re not sentient beforehand. I could have one built with the knowledge of how to build their technology from scratch, and only turn it on once I’m back here.
Their medical technology is also super advanced, so bringing some of that back would be amazing. That would have its own set of questions though, like do you reveal it to the world and try to help as many people as possible straight away, possibly risking your safety, or do you keep it quiet until you can keep control of it and stop it from being taken by people who would hoard it. That’s a separate post though.
This is a really really fun concept. I’m going to have a lot of fun thinking about it.
“Hey, Friend, do me a favor. Write a fictional story wherein all of my wildest dreams came true, and the world is perfect, and my mom is still alive, and also it’s a socialist utopia? Yeah. Literally just that. Like a paragraph long. Doesn’t need to be good. Yeah. Everyone I love is immortal. Got it? Perfect. Deuces”,
This is an interesting dilema. My first thought was star trek because of all the goodies and I feel objects would be quicker than learning as many fantasy things require you to have some sort of innate ability or chosen status. only so much can be learned and even then the learning is usually not easy and may require you to have talent that you may just lack. Thing is that almost all the cool goodies in star trek require you to go somewhere were the technology itself would rat you out. Go to the enterprise and the computer would immediately warn about an intruder on board. One good one would be to go to the universe of river of the dancing gods at a point you can get the lamp but first go to any safe fictional world and spend time writing out a good long run on sentence full of wishes to ask of the lamp. Another thing to try is to find a spot in doctor who literature where a tardis key (preferably not the doctors) is obtainable and grab it and come back and try an summon the tardis to our earth.
Get someone else to write a book about my ideal world and then never come back.
Probably max out all skills by spending time in appropriate settings. If I can learn magic as per, say, mage the awakening, then I’m doing that as well.
Then I’m coming back here and fixing the world with extensive application of five point Mind and Fate magics.
I’ve literally dreamed about having such power since playing Myst. I would explore all the fictional worlds I could. Even if I can’t write my own, like in Myst. Unless of course, I went into the world of Myst and learned D’ni to write my own world books. Now I can be in my own fictional world while inside someone else’s 😌
Looks like the power is trivially recursive; so I like the idea of buying a modern history book, entering the last page, and experimenting repeatedly with the potential applications. You’ve got forever (speed of thought per attempt), so you can basically groundhogs-day everything you do with it.
To improve efficiency, I think you probably nest it a few dozen times. Enter the history book, then immediately enter the history book, repeat 12 times. Run the experiments there with substantially more control and time.
history books are not fiction. it would not work.
Good point. So you do need to find the most benign alternate history. What if there wasn’t you (the character with the super powers)?
But if you enter in a modern history book set in a year you’re already alive, if you go where that day you were, would you meet yourself like in a time travelling machine?
Actually, any history books becomes automatically time travelling machines, you could travel back to ancient Rome and become a literal immortal god until modern times, since you cannot get harmed or cannot age.
Reminds me a little of 11/22/63
