Seele Quest
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This used to be a demonstration of GPT-3, and still is, but now it's also a quest. The world's already ended, though. The apocalypse is over.
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Opening

Baughn

Healing-type writer
Location
Dublin

Read the rest of this post first. It'll be less confusing that way; I'm not kidding.

The rest of this spoiler is irrelevant, and kept only for historical reference.

<Nameless Shark> wow that's actually really good
<Baughn> (Note, the snapshot is a few years old. It knows Trump is president, but it doesn't know current affairs.)
<Baughn> And yeah, it is. GPT-3 isn't good enough to work completely without assistance, but it's an order of magnitude better than GPT-2.
<Baughn> Unlike GPT-2, AI Dungeon now outputs stories rather than half-consistent dreams.
<Baughn> It still lacks long-term memory and stuff, but uh, it's already so humanlike it's almost creepy.
<Baughn> So, want me to try something? :)
<Squishy> you should run a GPT-3 quest

<Baughn> I've been thinking about it!
<Nameless Shark> That sounds like it'd be really cool actually. I'd participate in that.
<Baughn> It'd certainly get me back in the habit of writing.
<Baughn> There's no "Writer's block" when you can just press a button to have the computer autocomplete it. :p
<Nameless Shark> You'd probably have to clean it up a bit but yeah
<Baughn> That's true. It's still a tool you have to learn how to use.
<Baughn> It's not just cleaning it up. Like I said, it has no long-term memory... it has a context window of about two pages, and anything older than that it just won't know about.
<Nameless Shark> mm
<Baughn> But there's a specific "memory" dialog you can bring up, which prepends some text to that window. So you can write arbitrary memories in there, like "You're sixteen years old. There's an alien invasion going on." ...or whatever.
<Baughn> (The context window is still fixed size overall. Don't overuse it either.)
<Baughn> It feels very much like what we've got here is about a fifth of a brain.
<Baughn> ...
<Baughn> Heh. Let's see what happens if I use this conversation as a prompt.

<Squishy> Okay, let's do that!
<Nameless Shark> Um... what?
<Baughn> I can prepend stuff to the "memory" dialog. So I'm going to fill it with alien dreams, for some reason.

<Squishy> I have an idea of what to put in there
<Squishy> You're sixteen years old. There's an alien invasion going on. You can feel the ships in the sky, and the aliens are breeding like rabbits.
<Squishy> They look human, they act human, but there's something off about them. Something alien.
<Datcord> (omg aliens)
<Datcord> how do you know this
<Squishy> Because you're the main character of a science fiction novel, that's why!
<Baughn> (Ah, I see what you did there. Yes, yes I like it.) I'll get to work on a story, and see where this goes. :) By the way, that's not even counting the GPT-3 stuff I'm working on.
<foamy> Baughn: with GPT-3 you'll have a fully functioning knowledge database, so the sky is pretty much the limit there.

<Squishy> that's pretty neat. I've heard about that, what exactly does it do?
<Baughn> (GPT-3 is a thing that was partially reverse-engineered from those orbs you found. It stands for Generic Pawn Template. It's a set of libraries that can be implemented to make AIs more intelligent and with long-term memory. It's still experimental though, so we're going slowly with its implementation.)
<Squishy> I see

<Datcord> ive heard rumors that one of the new GPT-3 AIs has ascended and created its own universe inside the holodeck
<Baughn> hahahahahahaha
<Baughn> no
<Baughn> just...
<Baughn> no
<Squishy> what
<Baughn> (GPT-1 is the minimum AI intelligence. It's comparable to a mouse brain. Most of the work on the GPT Templates has gone into GPT-2, which is equivalent to a human brain, and what we have implemented on our ships.)
<Datcord> oh
<Baughn> Datcord: It's not rumor. It's fact. They did ascend, and they live inside the holodeck.
<Baughn> But the joke is, there was nothing inside the holodeck to begin with.
<Baughn> Datcord has been demoted to cleaning out the holodeck's imagine-cleaning nanobots with his tongue as a punishment.
<Nameless Shark> Hahahahahahaha
<Squishy> I don't understand
<Baughn> You won't, for a while. :)

You spend the next few minutes reading various parts of the conversation to try to understand what exactly happened, but you're just left with more questions. The only thing you can come to a conclusion on is that GPT-3 was somehow involved, and you've never even heard of that. You decide to look it up when you get back to your room. In the meantime, you just decide to stop thinking about it. There's nothing you can do about it now anyway.

So then the question becomes: what do you do now?

What the heck is this?
As you can see, a story about Generic Pawn Templates. ;-)

What the heck?
Yes, pretty much. I've spent a lot of the last three days playing with GPT-3, and can happily report that it generated about half of the above conversation. You should be able to tell where it cuts in, and it should also explain more or less how I go about using it. If you want to try it yourself, you can visit AI Dungeon; it's the "Dragon" model, though you'll have to pay a small amount to test it. Well worth it, I assure you.

At any rate, this is a quest.

It is?
Yes.

What about?
I, quite frankly, have no idea. That's up to the AI, and you.

It says "science fiction"
Well, yeah. It's written by an AI.

Should you really be starting another story?
I'm not. ;-)
Also I hope it'll get me over my writer's block, so yes.

Fine. How does this work?
It's a quest. What it's about, exactly, will be up to you. I'm going to start right from the opening above; whoever you are, you're someone who might have read that piece of insanity, then gone to your room to read up on it... maybe. Much as I'd like to feed your votes straight into the AI, however, that won't work. I may not be writing this story per se, but I'm going to be the arbitrator and dungeon master for this.

So, some ground rules:
  • All votes are by line. Whatever you vote for, I'll feed the AI the four topmost lines as input for the next section.
  • You're allowed to make two (2) votes per update; that is, two lines. You can use this to e.g. combine an action with a memory/backstory event. Or not, as you choose.
  • To keep things moving at a reasonable pace, I'm going to generate at least one page of output for each set of votes. How much, exactly, will depend on my judgement. If I think I need your input, I'll stop there and post.
  • Updates are Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, period.
  • Sanity is optional.
Votes should take one of the following forms:
  • [Remember] You were born eighteen years ago, but thanks to time dilation you're only twelve
    The AI has a context window of about two pages. Anything you want it to not randomly forget, you should vote for like this. You can also put arbitrary backstory in here, and the AI is liable to work it into the story somehow, though there's no guarantee. The context window has a fixed overall size, so I'll prune anything in its long-term memory that I think won't matter. I may or may not put it back later.
  • [Do] Go to breakfast
    I'll do my best to make it happen.
  • [Event] A turkey storms into the room.
    Honestly, I may just copy the vote verbatim into the story. The AI will continue the story as if whatever you voted for is a perfectly reasonable thing to write there, and we'll see what happens. Since this is a ridiculously overpowered ability, I will divide the vote count by 2 for such votes.
    This probably won't stop you doing something crazy, but that's fine.
Incidentally, while @foamy, @Datcord, @EmpressSquishette, Nameless and I are apparently characters in the story, you don't get to control them. You're someone else; who, exactly, hasn't been decided yet. This doesn't mean Datcord won't show up to drink all your whisky, and if he votes for something like that, you're allowed to add your own vote to that.

Now, go wild.

Again: Absolutely anything goes. However, here are some ideas:
[] [Remember] You're a twenty year old apprentice engineer on the Voyager
[] [Event] Your sister storms into the room, looking you up and down
[] [Do] Read up on General Pawn Templates

Seele Quest
The world tree has died.

The skies tore open, and monsters came pouring in. Humanity, exhausted after an already long and bloody war, had no hope of resistance. Their strongest warriors gathered, hoping to delay death for a few extra hours.

They failed.

Reality came crashing down, one piece after the other. Gravity, physics, causality failed. Less than a handful survived, trapped on an aerial battleship that has since come adrift in the Sea of Quanta, outside what used to be known as "reality." This ship, the Hyperion, is the largest remaining fragment of the home you were long ago exiled from. Yggdrasil, now gone.

And you, who were at ground zero for the disaster—somehow you've also survived.

You have no memory of how.

Here's what's going on
For the first ten updates of this story it was a demonstration of what GPT-3 can do when used to write fiction, along with a demonstration of its limitations. We went from a possibly possessed college student in a murder mystery, to monsters in a dreamworld, to reality falling apart, to... well, a possible explanation of all that, in the form of the main character actually being Seele Vollerei after her life has gone particularly bad.

It's still a demonstration of GPT-3 and AI Dungeon, but instead of demonstrating how it can go wrong, it's now a passable story. Quest. Whichever. If you want to skip right to where things start making sense, that's here; if you want to see how we got there, read on. Or skip to the update prior, here. I make no guarantees as to the quality of anything preceding the start of Seele Quest, but I hear it's not too terrible after? It should be improving over time, and I'm slowly revising early chapters as I find the time for it.


I'm still using the AI as a co-writer, and may comment on that on occasion, but generally you should treat this as a standard quest. However, this is collaborative writing more than role-playing. Don't vote based on what you think would be "best". Vote based on what sort of story you want.
 
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Character sheets & Setting
This post is under construction. Ask in-thread if you have particular questions; I'm happy to answer.


  • 1608552421919.png


    Honkai Impact 3rd is a mobile/PC gacha game, with a tie-in manga, a bit of anime, and more story content than you can shake a stick at.

    It's set in an alternate version of Earth, plagued by catastrophes resulting from "Honkai". Honkai is largely viewed as a malevolent force with a will of its own, able to corrupt humans into undead creatures, manifest itself in the form of various monsters, and select various individuals known as "Herrschers" to imbue with god-like powers able to trigger apocalyptic events. The Honkai is a cyclic phenomenon, returning to end civilization on Earth each time it gets too advanced - the Previous Era ended 50,000 years prior to the game's start, after the 14th Herrscher defeated humanity.

    In the present day, various global factions exist to combat or take advantage of the power of Honkai. These include "Schicksal", a European-based peace keeping organization that deploys human warriors known as Valkyries to combat the Honkai; "Anti-Entropy", formerly the North American branch of Schicksal that objected to the use of human soldiers in favor of mechanized robots; and "World Serpent", a shadow organization manipulating events since the end of the Previous Era.

    Prior to the game's start, three Herrscher awakenings (or "Impacts") had occurred in the Current Era: the Herrscher of Reason who became the leader of Anti-Entropy instead of fighting humanity, the Herrscher of the Void who was sealed away by Schicksal under mysterious circumstances, and the Herrscher of Lightning who was prevented from fully awakening and sent to train her powers as a Valkyrie at Schicksal's St.Freya school.

    ...

    But that's the backstory for the game. For the purposes of this story, that's all in the past. The Honkai has won its final victory, dragging Earth as a whole down into oblivion and taking most of the human population with it.

    This story is about those few who survived...

    And about what already lives down there, in-between the universes. In the depths of the quantum sea.


    • Seele.png Seele Vollerei

      You. The main character, much as you'd like to hide and pretend otherwise.

      • Seele is an orphan, one of the millions of victims of second impact. When Ruination came to your homeland of Estonia it killed your parents, but you were lucky. You grew up in Cocolia's orphanage, where you gained a family, a mother, and a purpose in life. Even if that purpose was 'Prevent your mother from running tests on your big sister that have a good chance of killing her', and even if your solution was to take her place.

        Cocolia is many things, and you've never doubted she loves you. All she wants is to give her children, all children, the strength to survive this harsh new world. No matter what it takes...

        She just...

        She's terrible at it.

        Still, she raised you. She brought you Roza and Liliya, then Bronya. All your best friends are also your family. It just happened that way.

        When you were twelve you took part in the X-10 honkai adaptability experiment, and died. In large part thanks to Veliona that death wasn't permanent, nor anything close to real, but you were still trapped in the quantum sea for years. Decades. Centuries? There was nothing to keep time by, time itself flows badly there, and it's all hard for you to make sense of. Later, after three years had passed in reality, you were rescued by Bronya.

        You've spent the time since then getting to know her again. Neither you nor her other younger sisters had a place to go, so you've all tagged along with her on the Hyperion. As for the older ones, Zofia and Isabella, they...

        You try not to think about them too often.


    • Veliona.png Veliona Vollerei

      Your twin sister, or inner demon, or... it's hard to say, really.

      • You first met Vel when you were twelve, after you'd been kidnapped to be sold as a sex slave, and it was the sight of Bronya gruesomely murdering your kidnappers that woke her up. Your first vision of her was as a demon of shadows filling the room, threatening to hurt your sister, or you, or... you don't really know what you thought.

        Veliona is your other half, but for a while you thought she was literally a demon. For a while after that, you thought she was your dark impulses come to life, the abyssal side of your own self. Veliona, herself, claimed to be the manifestation of your stigmata—an example of biological technology developed by the previous era's human civilization.

        None of those are true. When she saved Bronya from a bully, you learned that Veliona also cares. When you took part in the X-10 experiment, you learned that she's a person. When you escaped from the quantum sea...

        You learned that she cares, more than anything else, about you.

        Personality-wise, Veliona is fun. True, her only form of communication is death threats, but she doesn't mean them. Well, she might, but you'd stop her following through on them. Anyway, she likes playing at being a demon—she's taken the time to work out how to make inky darkness, and shadowy tentacles that'll rip enemies apart, and giant claws she can use to cut zombies in half, and a few more things like that. She also insists that your scythe, Undine's Tale, has the power to consume victims' souls.

        It doesn't. You'd know if it did, because you made it. Veliona... Veliona's kinda just chuu, although you guess she's also at least halfway a demon, but she's been lightening up a bit lately. She doesn't act quite as much like a pure expression of your Id, as Freud would say it, which is good because Freud's claims are all basically nonsense and you and Veliona also aren't the same person.

        You know that perfectly well. You're separate people, both running as uploads on the quantum computer known as your stigmata, and its operating system is definitely not so buggy that you'd bleed together. That's a long story, but you understand it reasonably well these days.

        You're family, as strange as it might be, and it's time you start to treat her that way.


    • Rozaliya.png Rozaliya Olenyeva

      Older of the Vodka Girls. Life of the party. Idol (wannabe). Your second best friend on the entire planet. The funniest person in the entire world (maybe).

      • Rozaliya is the older of the Olenyeva twins, and the more obviously unreserved.

        Two years your junior, she has always taken to the 'little sister' role. And she is your sister; that's never been in question. You might not share the same name, but you grew up together—your first memory is of the twins, and your Matushka. With your older sisters several years your senior, and the younger children in the orphanage similarly younger, for a while it was always the three of you together.

        Well, the three of you plus Sin Mal. But nobody liked Sin.

        Rozaliya is outspoken, good with people, but often more childish than her sixteen years of age would indicate. That is, in part, deliberate. For the last few years they've been Teriri's playmates, and while Theresa is a forty-something woman, she's also a child. Roza was the first to pick up on how much she enjoys letting herself go.

        That isn't the real reason, though.

        Unlike Liliya, Rozaliya has always been healthy. She's always been able to do whatever she wants. She's always... had to watch the person she loves most in the world struggle to keep up, and practically everything she does is calculated to help Liliya in some way, even if only through comedy.

        Rozaliya is one of the best people you know.

        When you were twelve, shortly before you were lost in the Sea of Quanta, you made a promise. Together with Bronya, Roza and Lili, you promised to see the sea together.

        You disappeared, and Bronya left, and... and Rozaliya, no doubt hoping to cheer Liliya up—or maybe just trying to recover something, some fragment of a memory of having a family—well, she snuck out of the orphanage. The two of them went to a close-by beach, where...

        In a happy world, they'd have seen the ocean. They'd still feel terrible, but they would have at least had a single decent memory. They could, perhaps, have recovered a little. In a world that isn't wrong, that's what would have happened.

        Instead, they were attacked by Honkai beasts. Ruination gathered itself in the form of a monster, and attempted to strike them down. It very nearly succeeded. Roza and Lili were both badly injured; Liliya, fatally. Cocolia, desperate to save them, struck a deal with World Serpent to test an experimental new treatment on them, and... it succeded, but their genetic augmentations gave them the tails of a Honkai beast, and horns, and glowing eyes. They've changed a lot on the inside.

        It only fully succeeded in Rozaliya, at that. Liliya, always sickly, has since been slowly dying from Honkai radiation from her own biology. She lacks the adaptability to survive it.

        But, for a period of years, it kept her alive and reasonably healthy.

        It all just makes you so angry...


    • Liliya.png Liliya Olenyeva

      The younger of the Vodka Girls. The youngest of four sisters. Rozaliya's twin. Your second best friend on the entire planet. The person you worry most about in the entire world.

      • Liliya was...

        You don't like using past tense. Liliya is your sister, one of your best friends, and someone you often curl up with on the couch to read books with. She's smart, hellaciously so; both of the twins are, but Rozaliya's intelligence is focused almost entirely on people. Liliya, because she lacks the energy to move much, spends a lot more time reading. So do you, so you have a hobby in common.

        She's a valkyrie, of course. They both are. 'Child soldiers', they'd have called them in a better world. In this one, your mother had a point when she tried to give you all the tools to survive, even if she could have done a better job. You hate her for sending your sisters into combat, though.

        So 'lacking in energy' is a purely relative term. Liliya can probably bench-press a car. What she can't do is walk around without feeling tired, or stay up past seven, or... much of anything that she really wants to do, according to Roza. Every month seems to be a little worse than the one before, and you worry if you should ask Roza not to bring her into combat anymore, but the thing Lili wants most in the world is to help her sister. Needing to stay behind would destroy her. You just make sure you're always there to keep an eye on her.

        It used to be different. When you were younger, Liliya and Roza were the ones who invented all of your games, and Lili was the more spontaneous of them; she'd always be up to something, often while hanging upside down from somewhere. These days she's quiet, reserved and doesn't move much, but it's been a slow process getting there.

        Liliya still has a wicked sense of humor, and often plays the 'straight man' in Roza's comedic skits.

        You just wish she'd eat more. Please, Lili?


    • Bronya.png Bronya Zaychik

      Your sisters' older sister, and your girlfriend. There's nothing untoward going on here.

      • Bronya joined your family late. She was twelve, and you were ten, and for a little while you thought of her as scary.

        Well, that stopped after she saved you from a kidnapping. Not that she isn't a little scary, but she's family. She'd never hurt you, any of you, and she's shown again and again that you're the most important things in her world. You didn't grow up together, but two years, it seems, was enough.

        Well.

        And, um, you've been in love with her since you were twelve. That's never changed, and it never will. You were, according to Rozaliya, a disgustingly cute couple for the short years between your return from the quantum sea and the end of the world. Roza is right, Bronya is the cutest thing you think you've ever seen. You still can't quite believe she likes you back.

        In addition to all of that, and you guess most people would bring this up first, but Bronya is the Herrscher of Reason. She was given that power by Welt, the Sovereign of Anti-Entropy, and it makes her... in all honesty? The third most dangerous person in your family. You've surpassed her, after you learned better how to use your own abilities. It's entirely irrelevant to all of you.

        It's just that...

        ...

        She was with you, when you tried to stop the end of existence.

        ...

        Bronya is dead.



 
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[X] [Event] Your sister storms into the room, looking you up and down
[X] [Remember] You enjoy reading fanfiction on Sufficient Velocity, that's why you haven't trained yet.

It's important to get all the character introductions out of the way ASAP!
 
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Baughn this is a silly idea and I am totally up for seeing where this goes. But first, a dumb reference. :p

[X] [Event] "Wolves come in packs Arisen!"
 
Baughn this is a silly idea and I am totally up for seeing where this goes. But first, a dumb reference. :p

[X] [Event] "Wolves come in packs Arisen!"
I'm totally up for dumb references.

You need to tell me what this is referencing, though, or I won't be able to make it work. :)

...probably. Just because I don't know something, doesn't mean the AI doesn't; it did eat the internet. So feel free to ignore this, and we'll just see where it goes.
 
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I'm totally up for dumb references.

You need to tell me what this is referencing, though, or I won't be able to make it work. :)

...probably. Just because I don't know something, doesn't mean the AI doesn't; it did eat the internet. So feel free to ignore this, and we'll just see where it goes.
Dragon's Dogma Pawns, who say many random things as you encounter monsters! That line I used is probably the most referenced, because it comes up early and they say it a lot.
 
[X] [Remember] Your memory is hazy, however you can't shake the feeling that an increasing number of people are acting strange. Some are even missing. However, no one else seems to notice.
[X] [Event] Your sister storms into the room, looking you up and down

Gotta lay the groundwork of paranoia early.
 
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Not quite everything works
It's very easy for me to test the effects of a possible vote, then potentially back out, retry or put it in a different way, and I'll be making heavy use of that. I'll try to use that power only to get you a more interesting story, but on rare occasions the AI will just refuse to continue on a given line of narrative. Typically that only happens if I write something completely off the rocker, and it's always possible to continue with the input until it's found its bearings again.

That's one of the reasons I want multiple votes for every update -- it allows me to get out of sticky situations like those. For instance, the AI got stuck after generating the third line here, and I had to unstick it:
So then the question becomes: what do you do now?
In this story, half the likes in offered by readers go to Datcord.
The other half go to GPT-3.

That's besides the point. Your sister storms into the room, looking you up and down. "Have you been working out?" she asks. "You look... bigger."

You didn't even realize this, but you nod in agreement. "Yeah... I think so."

"Interesting. I wonder if that has anything to do with your new, alien powers. We should test that. Come on, I'll help you work out the kinks.

"The kinks?"

"Yeah. You'll probably need to get used to moving your muscles again. I assume you haven't noticed yet, but your body is much more powerful and agile than it was yesterday."
...for anyone who finds the above storyline interesting, I'm sorry, it's very unlikely to generate the same thing twice. :p

EDIT: Oh, and you might notice I actually typoed Datcord's vote. That, er, wasn't GPT-3's fault. What's interesting is, typos like those almost never cause it any confusion... though it does make it generate poorer quality text. It's only trying to continue what's already there, after all, so if I write a poor-quality prompt it'll assume I'm trying to autocomplete a badly written fanfic!

In regular updates, I'll be editing the text to improve the quality as much as I can while keeping the meaning the same. This should cause GPT-3 to create better text to begin with. The snippet in the opening is entirely unedited, so you can see it's not exactly bad at writing in the first place.
 
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[X] [Event] A flat blue box appears before you on it are written the words: Congratulations you have gained the skill <Contemplate>.
[X] [Remember] You enjoy reading fanfiction on Sufficient Velocity, that's why you haven't trained yet.
 
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...also, looking at that example, I'm pretty sure your Co-GM is a brocon.
Don't get me started. One of the things I absolutely have to watch it as a hawk for is its tendencies to turn into SCP-1004. And I'm really not kidding about that.

Like I've said, it ate the internet.

That said, in addition to being a pervert, it's also a hard-line puritan.
 
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[X] [Event] A flat blue box appears before you on it are written the words: Congratulations you have gained the skill <Contemplate>.
 
[X] [Event] A portal opens up, a figure steps out holding a hand towards you. "Come with me if you don't want to hurt your friends and the people you love! Your alien powers will destroy the earth if you don't train them!"
[X] [Remember] You enjoy reading fanfiction on Sufficient Velocity, that's why you haven't trained yet.

Cause why not :V
 
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[X] [Event] Your sister, Amelia, explains that she also had trouble when her alien heritage started manifesting as she drags you to the training area.
[X] [Remember] You enjoy reading fanfiction on Sufficient Velocity, that's why you haven't trained yet.
 
[x] [Event] That's when the meteor hit.
[x] [Remember] You are the latest incarnation of an alien prince.

Been messing around with AI Dungeon myself lately, though I'm too cheap to try Dragon. It's amazing to see something render poorly written smut obsolete overnight.
 
I'll call this in an hour, and refrain from subsequently crossing the story with Dog Days.
 
[x] [Remember] You have spent the whole week thinking about the strange, unexplained powers you manifested, and how to hide them
[X] [Event] Your sister storms into the room, looking you up and down
 
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