The Protectors of the Canonical Worlds/Main Story/CD Prologue/P2

<tabber>What Is This?=
After they fell, Deric and Celia’s locations both became undefined. It appears they didn’t simply travel “down” in the usual sense, but ended up in some kind of null space. Looking above, they could see their reality, as it continued to corrupt, becoming warped. And there was nothing they could do about it.. And even as they fell down different “things”, they ended up in the same null space.
And even still, they somehow haven’t yet ballooned in size or ruptured their lungs.
Celia:Wh- WHAT is even happ- HOW can I breat- W-w-WHAT?!
Deric:Okay, this is probably just a dream.
Celia:Wait, y-you too?!
Deric:Oh, you must be one of my viewers. ..Still, though, this being a dream would explain all this. I’ve seen weirder in dreams.
Celia:Where even ARE we, anyway?
Deric:Seeing that we can see our entire universe from here, we’re probably in interdimensional space. ..Well, at least we’re dreaming that we’re in interdimensional space. And apparently our universe is breaking down. Strange we can’t see any other worlds, but I suppose we’re not looking in the right direction.
Soon enough, they found a different direction to look, and they found both past and future versions of their world, as well as alternate timelines that could have happened. Each and every one of them was warping, just like the one they were in.
But soon after, they suddenly ended up inside of what appeared to be an 11-dimensional building of an unknown material... and promptly fainted.
|-|Down the Rabbit Hole=
Not long after, they awoke in a mostly normal room. It was made of the same “stuff” as the apparent 11-dimensional-building, but the geometry was at least normal. They were greeted by someone who appeared to be somewhat human, yet.. something seemed off.
Celia:Okay.. where ARE we? Who and what are you?
???:Right.. I suppose I’ll have to explain.
???:You see, I’m one of the people that manages this place. Us as a group is called Management. I’m Manager Bayes. The place we as a group are managing is known as HQ. And the people that live here, collectively? Before I answer that, as well as what HQ actually is, I’m first going to explain where you were.
Celia:..Are you, by any chance-
Manager Bayes:No, I’m not Thomas Bayes, the person that discovered Bayes' Theorem. I’m not even from your world, or any world like yours, for that matter. We just happen to share the same name.
Deric:Hmm.. maybe this person is a Bayesian!
Manager Bayes:...”Bayesian” isn’t a category of a person. As for whether or not I use Bayesian inference, we as a group all use the same main methodology. And that’s delegating most of it to the Research Department. Now, can we get back on track? You guys DO need to understand what happened to you two, what’s happening right now, and what the future could hold for you two.
Celia:Right, what DID happen? Where did that purple THINGY come from, what IS it, why did it-
Manager Bayes:That will become clear very shortly.
Manager Bayes:Before we get started, I’m going to have to clear up some things you were wrong about. Your model of reality... is fundamentally wrong. Your world is NOT made of “stuff”. YOU are not made of “stuff”. Your world is functionally identical to all the stories you’ve read.
Celia:Wait... WHAT?
Deric:So.. this is basically an inverse Isekai?
Celia:...
Deric:Since, y’know, OUR world was like a fantasy world, and WE ended up in a “real” world?
Manager Bayes:...That would be quite inaccurate. And to explain why, I’ll go over what worlds like yours, AND many others are actually made of, where they come from, and how they work.
Bayes:Deric, you were somewhat correct when you hypothesized fictional worlds “exist” in a way. But it goes further than that. Actually, YOU guys are both “fictional”.
Celia:..You’re here, taking to us. We CAN’T be fictional! We exist physically! You can hear us! Feel us! INTERACT with us! And how can something be both fictional AND exist? Aren’t those mutually exclusive?
Bayes:They’re not. You see, when someone in World Prime shares a story, whether by publishing it as a book, making a movie, a play, whatever.. that creates information that describes such a world. Now, given that a perfect simulation of a thing is indistinguishable from the real thing, and in some cases actually IS the real thing-
Celia:Since when were simulations ACTUALLY equal to reality?
Bayes:If you simulate consciousness, you get actual consciousness, even though it’s in a simulated world. And given that “reality” is simply objects interacting with each other through a causal network, if you make sufficiently detailed simulations of just that, you get something that, from the inside, is equivalent to there being actual, physical objects there. If we put the two together, we end up with a simulated consiousness be able to interact with a simulated world, and that results in with something both real and made up at the same time. Real, because there is no real difference between it and whatever world is doing the simulation, and fictional because it WAS “made up”. 
Bayes:If we were to directly interact with that information, we would end up inside such a world. This means every time an author makes a story that describes any hypothetical world, said information combines to form a coherent world, a world that, as discussed earlier, is in fact real. Yet, it was still made by an author, one who decided the rules said world goes by. Such an entangled web of information that describes its own reality is known as a continuum.
Bayes:As a matter of fact, the world you’re from is one such world!
Celia:..You’re right.. A world like that would feel real from the inside, and if you could enter such a world.. So our world is..?
Bayes:Yep. So it’s pretty important to know how those kinds of worlds work, isn’t it? Each continuum is, of course, made up of the words of the story. They define the world. But not every story is perfectly.. consistent. Your world’s author was fiddling around trying to make the quantum multiverse canon.. and understood basically none of it. They defined your world as equivalent to World Prime, the world where these stories come from, yet wrote in a Growlithe into Pokemon Sword. You were quite lucky your episode wasn’t written at the time it happened, and your world ran smoothly.. otherwise you wouldn’t notice the plot hole until it was too late..
Deric:Oh.. a plot hole. Of course our world had a plot hole. So there was literally no reason why I encountered a Growlithe?
Bayes:Correct-There was no explanation. That was a plot hole.
Celia:Oh yeah, what DOES happen if there’s a plot hole?
Bayes:The continuum starts to break down. Each continuum has a certain amount of resistance based on the popularity and good fanfiction of the world described by the story-Where canon fails, goodfic can patch it up. Did you notice the strange geometries in your world as you left it? That was your world breaking down. The purple vortex? A manifestation of the plot hole. It was only visible because you noticed the plot hole. Normally.. it would be worse.
Deric:Oh! I know how to fix our world! We just need to write an explanation on why I encountered the wrong Pokemon! ..Even if we have to handwave it as a dream.. No plot hole, no problem!
Celia:..Bayes probably thought of that. Why he hasn’t done just that and neuralyzed us to make sure this noncanon doesn’t affect our world is beyond me, though. Saving our world, our “continuum” should be pretty easy.
Bayes:Well, several reasons. For one, your world would probably meet another plot hole soon enough. Your author didn’t really do a good job staying consistent, and combining that with the fact that the story has ZERO viewers from World Prime, it’s not going to last long anyways. If it somehow did because the author wrote another chapter, then either you would end up back anyways, or a perfect copy of you would appear there, depending on whether a story has been written about THIS. And secondly, well... since you’re already here, and both value keeping canon around.. and we can’t exactly make more of ourselves..
Deric:Are you sure THIS isn’t a story? Sounds like a convenient plot excuse to say we’re hired for whatever organization you are.
Celia:...Bayes. You guys can literally WRITE people and worlds into existence, right? Just write in your perfect agents. Done. You can use that to get around whatever strange restriction keeps you from reproducing as well... And as for us.. I’ve seen stories with MORE plot holes than mine. Which only had ONE. Literally ONE. Did those worlds vanish?
Bayes:There was more than one plot hole. That was the first you noticed because it’s the first one that happened “off-screen”, so to say. An example of another one that thankfully didn’t have any effect yet:The author considered a “vaccuum” as a substance, rather than a lack of substance. Only thought humans couldn’t breathe in space because “the vaccuum of space sucks air out”. So that’s why when you saw your not-so-quantum null space in the multiverse... you were able to survive-They forgot the second law of thermodynamics! So as you can see, your world was already riddled with problems.
As for your other questions, I never quite said you were hired.. but clearly, keeping you around is better than letting you AND your world vanish, is it not? At least we get to save SOME of your world... you two. And that brings us to what this place is.
|-|Canon Protectors=
Bayes:So, you got everything so far?
Deric:When stories are made, that creates information describing a world, which IS a world.. our world is one of those worlds, and plot holes are bad for continuums?
Bayes:...Good enough. But do keep in mind that this only applies to stories written in World Prime. Stories written inside a continuum DO also form worlds, but those worlds become a part of that continuum, disconnected from that continuum’s “real world”. Also, it’s best to think of the process of story-to-info as similar to a computer decompiling code. While the real process is completely different.. it behaves very similarly to of that was happening, and gets closer to that the less popular the story is. There are ways of fixing errors... but that simply comes from the error being surrounded by contradicting information. This will become important later.
Bayes:Now, that should give you some idea where you are now. All information exists in some kind of Platonic subspace. We are in the gaps between said continuums. And since this is all fundamentally information, that space just “emerges” from, it can have more than 3 dimensions. ...What you saw before you passed out? 11 dimensions. ..You’re eventually going to have to get used to higher-dimensional space.. But right now, this part of HQ is 3-D.
Celia:Okay, so that’s WHERE this place is.. but WHAT is this place?
Bayes:It’s the headquarters of the extradimensional organization... known as the Protectors of the Canonical Worlds. This specific room is for those who just got here from dying continuums. ..Well, at least continuums that serve as 3+1D spacetime.
Deric:Three PLUS one? Isn’t that FOUR?
Celia:Three dimensions of space, one dimension of time. Einstein's Relativity showed space and time are not separate, but in fact are two parts of a greater spacetime.
Bayes:Correct.
Bayes:As for your future.. we’ve already ruled out bringing you back to a world that’s collapsing either way. There does thankfully happen to be a continuum specifically designed for people in your position, so we could potentially just put you in there and say you came from one of the generic universes described in that continuum... we’d just enuralyze the both of you so you don’t remember this place at all-It’d look like your old world broke down, and you ended up in the new world.
Bayes:But there’s another possibility. You could also learn more about us.. and try to join the Protectors. I can’t guarantee you’ll be let in, of course.. but you look like you have a chance. Speaking of which, it’s finally time to explain what that is.
Bayes:As you now know, stories hold information, which together describes a cohesive world. But, here’s a riddle:If stories create info describing a world, thus making a world... what happens when someone else makes another story about the same world?
Celia:!
Bayes:Oh, didn’t think of that? Heh, you’re going to have to ask those kinds of questions and think of these things if you want a chance at joining us. Or even if you don’t:If you don’t ask the right questions, you might miss a potential insight! Here OR in the Neo-Omega continuum. Could be an important insight! Anyways, now that I asked the question, think about it for a while.
Celia:If it’s the SAME world.. then the information of the new story would be entangled with the old one... and build on top of what came before. This would make the continuum bigger, and more complete.
Bayes:Indeed.. most of the time. You’re entirely correct about the two getting entangled.. but I never specified how similar the stories were. If the second story does a good job building off the first, we get the full effect you described. But I’m sure you’re aware some do a bad job.. after all, not all fanfic is good.
Celia:Wait, you meant FANFIC?!
Bayes:What else could it have been? Stories about a world made by someone else? Would have been inspired by the original world?
Deric:Yeah, I thought that one was pretty obvious.
Celia:Then why didn’t YOU answer?
Deric:I just can’t quite get the whole entangled information thing yet.. It’s like nothing I’ve read or watched. I knew he meant fanfic, but.. I couldn’t really solve the riddle.
Bayes:Celia got it close enough, and you get it now, so I’d say we can keep going.
Bayes:Here’s the next riddle. If two stories set in the same world result in both sets information entangling with each other.. what happens when there’s a conflict between the two stories?
Deric:...What do you mean by conflict?
Celia:..I’m pretty sure he means a case where it’s impossible to take both stories as simultaneously true. Say one story says there was a group of exactly nine people who went to save the world.. but the fanfic adds a tenth for no reason and insists this is the same timeline.
Bayes:Yep, that’s the right idea. What happens then?
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