Hold It In (RWBY/Transistor)

Dr. Granola said:

Wait.
How many Dreams (capitalization intentional) did you come up with?

What are the odds that you'll post them in some out of the way place? Or describe what they'd be like?

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

20, in all, one for every group of 50 on a d1000.

21 was a special order on account of you, you know, managing to roll a 900 on a d850.

And no, I don't, really. Most of them were pointless, kinda silly stuff, only anything beyond 15 had anything important, story-wise, but frankly, I don't even remember where I put the outlines after you hit that 900.

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Three days pass between locking your door and finishing what you set out to do.

It's an idea that's been with you for some time now. A database, designed to take in information from Huntsman and Huntress reports, your personal encounters, and the scholastic reports that fewer and fewer Huntsmen are inclined to write, all aimed towards one goal.

The swift and efficient elimination of any given species of Grimm, through the power of understanding their behaviour, their hunting patterns, what draws them in, what specific weaknesses plague them, all to build a foundation of knowledge that you intend to create as a public utility, alongside a method to quickly access that information in the field.

You call it the Library.

You always intended it to be… the one lasting mark you made before, well, at first, the inevitable early death of a Huntsman, but now, the advent of the Process.

But there's always been one snag.

Data.

All of this, the entire Library's linchpin, this project's foundation, is data.

You... would not be able to find and fight enough Grimm, and collect enough data, to create a tenth of your vision if you devoted the rest of your life to it.

... Which, you guess, you kind of are.

Not the point- you won't be able to make an appreciable dent in your lifetime, and nobody else would be able to continue it after you.

Until...

You look down at the Cell, and it looks back up at you.

Yes, sysadmin?

Infinite replication, not as grey goo, but as cohesive units capable of taking in data, without worrying about energy consumption, capable of changing to suit different terrains, and producing more claytronic atoms on demand to replenish unit numbers, while also being able to take advantage of the Library over a constantly expanding zero-latency network?

At some point during Blue's account of what the Cell told him, you may have become mildly aroused.

We know we're impressive.

This revelation, indeed, those functions coming online at all, finally prompted you to sit down and analyse the Cell in greater detail, with the end goal of hooking the Process into the Library's data input, alongside the data collection algorithms you set up to scour the few scholastic papers on killing Grimm and your attempts at a volunteer's form, not something you ever had much hope in, but now...

Now, three days have passed, you've slept for maybe a total of four hours in 20-minute naps while subsisting purely on water and salt crackers, you've only left your room to go to the bathroom, you're pretty sure you're hearing more voices than normal, you've had at least four existential panic attacks over what the Process can and will be capable of doing, and you.

Are.

Finished.

You give it your tenth once-over in the past hour, then realise that you've read the same line of code five times without actually parsing what it means.

Fuck it! You are going to go insane if you don't run it now, and just. See if it works.

You compile the code and wait ten agonising minutes for an executable to be spat out the other end.

Blue runs it as soon as it finishes, and you find yourself holding your breath as it loads.