We're not here to play special-needs soccermom simulator. At the very least we're going to have to ship him off to a heavily armed boarding school and forget about him. Maybe he'll end up too busy obsessing about alcohol and lacrosse to cause too much mayhem.
We're not here to play special-needs soccermom simulator. At the very least we're going to have to ship him off to a heavily armed boarding school and forget about him. Maybe he'll end up too busy obsessing about alcohol and lacrosse to cause too much mayhem.
We're not here to play special-needs soccermom simulator. At the very least we're going to have to ship him off to a heavily armed boarding school and forget about him. Maybe he'll end up too busy obsessing about alcohol and lacrosse to cause too much mayhem.
Right, we should either remove the try there or give him a good atmosphere, supposing he has nightmare-cube-induced severe or esoteric issues. We can't really afford to helicopter parent him if he's not a viable dynast, though. (and, actually, helicopter parenting a dynast might not be the right move in the first place)
i.e. I think we a solution that is 1) subtle and 2) has a low action cost.
I'm thinking we use traditional Stone inheritance law. Adler probably doesn't want the kid himself, and he's male, so I'm inclined to not call him a Stone, myself, but we can probably use the same method used for bastards and give him his own dynastic line. Given the liberal nature of relationships and genetic continuance, being a bastard on a technicality is pretty unlikely to cause him much trouble in politic land.
...for all she knows, Ella actually might have just slept with a half-sibling. One wonders if there might have been something more to the natural conception choice as opposed to artificial with its presumably associated tests. That might even be behind the nobility's preference for it.
I'm thinking we use traditional Stone inheritance law. Adler probably doesn't want the kid himself, and he's male, so I'm inclined to not call him a Stone, myself, but we can probably use the same method used for bastards and give him his own dynastic line. Given the liberal nature of relationships and genetic continuance, being a bastard on a technicality is pretty unlikely to cause him much trouble in politic land.
With neither his father or mother giving him political support he won't exactly be a political entity. Supposing that's the case, we shouldn't raise him around politics and should encourage him towards an education focused on something like military or research by seeking to enroll him in education programs that promote those.
With neither his father or mother giving him political support he won't exactly be a political entity. Supposing that's the case, we shouldn't raise him around politics and should encourage him towards an education focused on something like military or research by seeking to enroll him in education programs that promote those.
[X] Stuff it in a box carried by a robot and give it to Anna for her to take care of
Isn't this the legally required thing to do? Or does the law about handing over Reaver artifacts have specific loopholes for their attempted destruction?
[X] Stuff it in a box carried by a robot and give it to Anna for her to take care of
Ella would let her grandmother take care of this. There were rumours of attempts at demolition of certain reaver artifacts going catastrophically wrong, so she would just have to trust in her grandmother to know how to deal with this sort of thing, and hope that it wouldn't go into some black site and contribute to some sort of horrible incident later on.
Research (Int+Aca) 15 + 18 = 33
Nightmare Cube (3)
...
...
... really?
What Next? (43)
Health Check 35 + 14 = 49
+16 Economy
+5 Military
The clean up was extensive and involved upsetting a lot of important and rich people who had been helping the former mayor to smuggle and acquire reaver artifacts, which he had apparently been repairing in a way that suggested that he had some degree of communication with an intelligence that understood how it worked - almost certainly the sword. While given the smashed and burned out bits and pieces he was working with he obviously hadn't made much progress, it was hypothesized that the first reaver incident was their standard behaviour, but the activities of the dragons and reavers in subsequent years may have been related to some sort of attraction to the sword and/or the equipment being reactivated. Honestly, no one might ever know, but it was hoped that things would be far less screwy going forward with that dangerous undercurrent eliminated.
Ella felt a bit of a shudder that she had never really found out about it. What opportunities to look more deeply had she missed? What opportunities to look deeper had she never really looked for?
Fortunately that little plot was over, and between the money flowing in from the ring settlements and Anna giving a large reward in terms of both direct funds and seized assets transferred to Ella for leading the charge, Ella's budget for next year was looking lush enough that she might actually stand a chance at making headway on getting everything set up to guarantee acquiring Diamond Dome as her county. Especially now that she was starting to play the political game more, getting real allies she could use to her advantage. While the war with the aliens was going to throw all sorts of complications into her life and make things harder, she was certain she could deal with all of that.
Mostly because as her belly swelled up with child - she was going to become the leader of the nation to get the culture changed, seriously, why did her grandmother think this was in any way fun? - Ella discovered that she really, really wasn't dealing well with the nightmare cube. It had... it had taken her over. She had tried to figure out how to get over the obsessive images it put in her head, but she didn't know how.
Sprawled out naked in a room full of sand she had had the fabricators make, Ella tried to figure out what she needed to do to make her dreams stop, or at least make sense. They had shifted from being some strange, other human world apparently consumed by sand to more... abstract things that thrilled and terrified her in ways she couldn't explain even if she tried.
Her private chambers had grown increasingly disturbed. Aside from the sand she had spread out, she had also tacked up print outs of random information that she knew was important somehow. Much of it was random doodling, but she also had a shotgun spread of academic papers and technical read outs that she didn't have the background to understand. Instead she would just sit in her room and look at them while chewing on her fingernails, before eventually taking a shower to wash away the sand that clung to her skin... although sometimes she would lose herself in thought just staring at the patterns that the flowing water would make in the sand. It was... it was important somehow.
The worst though was how she would lose herself in moments of exhaustion caused by an inability to focus and sleep, and it was getting worse as the year wore on. She was able to deflect much of that onto having a hard pregnancy, but the pregnancy and the cube combined were really getting to her. The most lucid of her terrifying dreams was of the sort that made her wonder if it was simply a more normal kind of anxiety blending together with whatever madness she was being exposed to via the cube and somehow diluting things out to a mostly comprehensible level.
It always started with her losing track of things in her room, exhaustion sneaking up on her in a somewhat comfortable place. These dreams always started as an awakening of sorts, of her sitting up on the sand of her darkened room, her belly swollen beyond its current size to something closer to what it would be at the end of the third trimester, only further exaggerated by the logic of dreams. Eventually, inevitably, her water would break... only it was a much more mythological type event in that her perspective rapidly went crazy, her body blending with the sand such that it was almost more like a world being introduced to water for the first time. Flows of water she had learned were called 'rivers' cut channels into the sand, pooling and swirling in ever changing braids. Strange, half-formed protolife flowed through these rivers and clung in an organic film to the banks.
Stars bright enough to read by swirled overhead, time passing at an accelerated rate as Ella's world body shifted and changed with strange internal forces, the rivers turning to lakes and oceans as the sand was resculpted by the cosmos into more solid forms, the life sprouting along the shores becoming increasingly complex, progressing from bacterial mats to crude plant-life to primordial jungles of the sort that were supposed to have once covered Old Earth hundreds of millions of years ago. While lacking in the scale of the life of Dandriss, from Ella's strange dream perspective she felt extremely small and vulnerable as she flew through their steaming depths, the fronds that were the same shape as the rivers that were the same shape as something important flying past her too fast to fully absorb their significance. There was something dreadful about the way the fractal patterns danced across her perception.
Soaring out over broad vistas that were at once impossible for her to know and yet as intimately familiar to her as her own body, Ella's gaze danced over species of inchoate protoplasm that were at once her children and yet utterly alien to her. They carved bloated statues from her hardened flesh in her image, raising them up to the top of faintly obscene pyramids. She cackled in mad delight and the ground split, upwelling fresh water and protolife that at once drowned these primitive worshippers and yet also uplifted them. Perspective spinning madly between a dancing orb lost among the stars and a half-girl among the drowned imitators of civilization, she could only watch as evolution seized these creatures once more. Bones like feathery fronds grew within their plasmic bodies, tearing into them and something else. It hurt them and yet made them stronger.
Made Ella stronger.
And then some of those bones snapped together, winding up into something solid, and the things stood tall, their pyramids straightening out... and then the stars started to die.
Ella would always awake at those moments, sitting upright and with strange patterns and impressions made in the sand while she slept surrounding her. She would dutifully copy them down and pin to the wall as they were somehow significant, and yet no matter how many she had she felt no closer to enlightenment. Sometimes her mad scrawlings seemed to take the form of physical designs of some sort, and she had generated a few crude prototypes for something... something large. A design for a building of some sort. She wasn't sure if she could ever see such a thing brought to reality, but she felt a gnawing urge to see it implemented. If she couldn't work out how to escape this obsession, she would probably see it done anyway.
Her drawings were of a place of...
[] Relaxation
[] Training
[] Learning
On one hand Tzeentch/Simurgh kind of thing is the worst. On the other hand a research obsession is the most viable of the three for a hard focus, if it's a district. A block of most things wouldn't be onerous and entertainment could potentially be finished quickly.
If the supposition that it's a compulsion to focus on making an L-space attuned version of one of those is correct, what are our priorities?
