[[ NETWORK_THEORY->LOCALITY ]]
A Direct Approach
08

A THEORY OF LOCALITY

	FNaF's paranormal seems to preserve locality.

	This is a feature I haven't been taking seriously enough thus far: FNaF has repeatedly emphasized the idea that possession is local. The children haunt the suits because their bodies were stuffed inside. Andrew's pieces haunt the objects in Frights because his vessel (Afton's body) physically splattered onto them. The physical connection between Charlotte and the Puppet was not originally clear, and then Scott made an entirely new minigame just to showcase it in FFPS. "The spirit follows the flesh" should be taken as "follows through space". How this applies to BV is less clear-cut, but given everything else, I am confident that a local explanation exists.
	My first attempt at a local Network model was "Conformal Network Theory" (CNT) (a Network model "conforming" to the principle of locality... I suppose), described in detail in its overview document. There, I preserved the symmetry between memalia and meatspace by taking "locality" to apply within both memalia and meatspace, and taking memalia connections as physical connections between the spaces. I am suspicious, however, that this may not be the correct solution. 

	Fetch, the Fazbear Frights story, puts the paranormal in pseudoscientific terms, introducing the Zero Point Field, and claiming it as a medium through which emotions and intentions apply their effects to objects. This explanation sounds deeper and more useful than it actually is; the important takeaway, I think, is that paranormal effects *propagate through a field*. This means that all the usual tools for analyzing field theories should theoretically apply to FNaF's paranormal: symmetries, gauge invariances, lagrange densities, and so on. We don't have the necessary information to apply most of these tools, but *locality* is one property that we should be able to confidently infer, which should have a tangible effect on how the paranormal is understood.

	HOWEVER... There is, seemingly, a nonlocal phenomenon which has been observed: The portals in World, and especially, the portals in Ruin. Portals, in principle, can preserve locality via either (1) warped spatial geometry, or (2) by some sort of translation, converting objects into a "fast", "intangible" propagator (able to pass through solid objects), and then converting back at the destination. 
	The geometric description (1) is taken up by CNT, which insists that memalial couplings correspond to literal "overlap" or connection between spaces. This can straightforwardly describe portals, just by allowing intra-memalial couplings; that is, allowing spatial connections within a single memalia.
	It is worth considering the conversion description (2), however. On inspection, it may seem oddly familiar: It is reminiscent of the use of subtunnels in World. We, the player, are "converted", or projected, onto a "deeper" space, where the physical blockages are different, so that we can travel along previously inaccessible paths, and then "convert" back. Could this be a clue for how the Network model might be embedded within a field? 

	This may open the door for an entirely new field-theory-based model of the paranormal, fundamentally divorced from the original Network description. Though, of course, the Network would likely still exist as a useful emergent structure embedded within the field theory, just as, say, Classical Mechanics is embedded within Quantum Mechanics. A local field theory for the paranormal may be developed with the CNT in mind, as a "classical limit" of sorts. It's also possible, perhaps, that the two theories could be orthogonal, more analogous to the relationship between Lagrangian and Newtonian Mechanics. At this early stage, without a more concrete field theory, it is hard to say.