AvA/M Oneshots

0. Non-character headcanons/worldview

"why's there a 0.?" bc I wrote this way later after starting this book. 

Parts of how I see the AvA/M world. May get edited, but hopefully not often. I almost always use these, although the named ones are more optional in oneshots. Some stories throw most of this out the window. AU lore pages will probably have these listed somewhere, but in shorter form. I also havent seriously updated the AU hc pages in forever, I'm not even sure if they're accurate to the AU anymore. 

I did this at 3 am so hopefully I didn't miss anything XD

edit: and an hour later I find an older doc with way better details

1. Capitalized titles usually refer to humans, or actions done by humans. "Creator" is an umbrella term for human Animators, Artists, Writers/Authors, Coders/Programmers (site creators), or generally anyone who dabbles in stick figure creation/life. Animated sticks, despite their name, can be created by any means- it's just that Animators started the trend of directly drawing powered stickfigures to life, and the name stuck. Something like "Player" refers mostly to the ingame avatars humans use to play games like Minecraft, but also by extension refers to the human themselves. 

2. Stick figures have genders, but they don't reproduce. At all. "Animated" sticks are directly Drawn or Created by a human (and they function similarly despite differing methods of creation); "CG" (computer-generated/internet-born) ones are not. Sticks created from the same Animator, or a group of CG sticks generated by the same site/program, consider each other siblings. Sticks living together call each other sitemates. Siblings tend to be sitemates, and vice versa (but not always). Sometimes older sticks will basically adopt younger ones and take care of them, but this is pretty much the closest you can get to being a parent. 

...Except for Chosen, who breaks most of these rules because he managed to singlehandedly bring Second to life, making him the closest thing this universe has to being an actual parent.

3. Powers/animation ink: The Interspace is a mixture of code (base/core data/interior structure of things) and animation/digital ink (details, color, a lot of the visuals). CG stick figures are automatically generated and run by a site or program for a specific function (ie tech work keeping a site running smoothly, or NPCs in a game); and are fully composed of code. They know everything they will ever need to for their specific job; but otherwise usually generate as clueless kids, both literally and emotionally. They're fragile in comparison to an Animated stick, but easy to revive, and will reload with the site/program they came from with little to no harm done (scars are possible). CG sticks' official names are their specific hex color, but they sometimes shorten these down to just the basic color, or take a nickname of a similar color. Each stick knows their own colorname and hex code by instinct. No two sticks have exactly the same color.

Animated sticks can look like just about anything, and they tend to be hollowheaded, multicolored, or just generally visibly different. Upon Creation, the animation ink in their drawing fuses with a bunch of other variables (name, mission if applicable, description, extensions if applicable, Animator intention, etc. etc) to give them powers, and a power level. Their names are almost always more creative than just a color. The ink fused through them makes Animated sticks incredibly resilient, and far less prone to code bleeding or deletion. 

(Bleeding code is incredibly serious. CG sticks glitch or bleed code when they're damaged, and die once they dissolve. Animated sticks don't usually dissolve, but they can bleed. Code is red.)

4. File location (pretty connected to the last one, but technically separate):  Computer-generated sticks are generated to fulfill a role on their host program/website, and are intimately connected to it. One will not fully work without the other; and things that affect the website affect the sticks directly as well, no matter where they are. Complete website deletion will auto-kill them on the spot. 
The flipside to this is that they can reload back ok as long as their file location still exists. 

Animated sticks are intimately connected to their name from the second they're given one. If they have an autosaved file, thats the main way they reload.

Destroying or incapacitating the reload capability will leave any damage permanent, until/unless it is fixed. 

5. Creators see a 2D simplification of the 3D Internet world, because computers literally don't have the graphics capability to render everything the sticks see without some kind of simplification- nor can they show everything at once, just a certain amount based on screen size. Stick figures are humanoid to each other, but look like sticks to Creators for similar reasons. Larger anomalies (like extra limbs) on Animated sticks will usually show somehow. The screen exists as a definitive, solid, transparent wall, and sticks can see the outside world on the other side (albeit slightly blurred, like through frosted glass). Windows, apps, folders, sites, etc on a computer are pocket dimensions of their 2D selves, and are sometimes a lot bigger than they look (even to us), especially if they have links/tabs within them that lead to new areas or link existing ones. 

There's a lot of ways to access the Interspace, but you'll end up in different places depending on which one you use. A PC's WiFi portal dumps you in the sky with iCloud. Go through the URL, and you'll get to the website's host server. This will be a building somewhere. Sticks can also travel using links. 

The game Minecraft is a series of Overworld servers, some public, some private, all joined in the Nether via portals. You can access the game via Nether portal from anywhere in the Internet as well. Overworld servers have separate End dimensions, but they drop down into near-infinity that all end on the ceiling of the Nether. (bc screw both game logic and code, it makes more sense!??)

6. Colorgang (RGBY & Second) live in a Minecraft house on the desktop, or in the sticksfight.com house. Blue usually cooks. The original tunnel to Yellow's roller coaster has been expanded into a side cavern they call "the basement", and Yellow has claimed most of it as a lab. He's got a couple of computers, and a lot of random junk he & Green try to find/have found a use for. The rest of the squad store miscellaneous stuff in a side closet, but they're careful about what they leave because things frequently get lost/absorbed into Yellow's projects.

7. The Void (not the one in Minecraft's End): The AvA fandom's collective name for the place sticks go when they die. Everyone has their own interpretation for it; mine is that it's a timeless, spaceless, warped paradox with all the content that's ever been deleted residing within it- because you can't really get rid of an idea once you've thought of it. Think the singularity within a black hole, but with ideas instead of matter. If you want more of me rambling on about the void, go to Questioning Reality, The Wholesome Fic, Blind, or any of my other Victim chapters/stories, because I literally cannot shut up about it XD.

edit/update 6/13/23:  Void is now closer to a massive warped pocket dimension, with plot threads running through like those space nebula photos that look like really cool spiderwebs. The more content a scene has, the chunkier and brighter and more stable it tends to be- but nothing's infallible. The above description is still pretty much true.