Fanwork#600 words, posted in full and unspoilered due to relatively short length.
Training With Ruby
Training. It had been so long since Ruby had trained. They had
struggled often in Destroyed, life or death struggle in so far as 'life' and 'death' existed in such a place as that, and such struggle brought them to the height of their skill before their transaction.
Training was not struggling. Training was different. It was different for Ruby, at least. For Ruby, training was exploratory and speculative, a process of assessing and obtaining
possibilities, rather than
options.
It had been a long time since Ruby had the opportunity to simply explore the space of their abilities, rather than hastily search for the solution to some pressing problem therein. Returning to training in some ways made Ruby feel almost like a child again, recalling long-buried memories of their… childhoods, as a young man in the Edifice of Awakening and a young woman in the Ennobling Dream.
Nostalgia, bittered by the imperturbable oddity of being two-in-one. Not an unfamiliar emotion to Ruby. The thing which made the memories truly come alive again was the sheer
breadth of possibilities which Ruby stood to explore. The functional points of intersection between Awakening and Dreaming had been few and far between, opportunities Ruby cherished and exploited to their absolute limit. The perfect unity which their transaction had given them exploded that constellation of points into an endless expanse of potential, akin to how the possibilities of Awakening or Dreaming had first seemed, except combinatorially more massive.
The possibilities were so numerous that in order to even productively begin assessing new potential techniques achievable with the knowledge and resources they had on hand at the moment, they needed a new informatic apparatus just for handling the data which they collected in their meditations and exercises. A simple enough thing to spin together, but still, a level of utterly self-reflective indulgence which her… which one of their prior selves' instructors in the Ennobling Dream would have decried as a waste of precious time.
With the most rudiments of searching through this vast new frontier of power handled, Ruby ceased their meditation and started looking for some more food. They were going to need to stay topped up, they could tell already that the training to reach these new heights would be exhausting, physically and mentally.
Choose a duration.
<> Short. One pick. Small chance of encounter.
<> Medium. Two picks. Moderate chance of encounter.
<> Long. Three picks. Large chance of encounter.
Choose up to three developments. Ruby currently has 2 Satisfaction.
<> Formflow. -1 Satisfaction. Constant, dynamic body control operated by complete parallel thread.
xBody, xAdapt
<> Silkflow. Requires Formflow and Silkspinning. Augments the formflow thread with spinneret modules, allowing for the deployment of dreamsilk mass as part of formflow.
xBody, xxAdapt
<> Spawning. Develop a paradigm for modules that design, build, pilot, and coordinate drone-bodies. Greatly synergizes with other developments.
Each drone spawned requires an investment of Satisfaction proportional to its greatness. xBody, xReach
<> Silkspinning. Design a combined awakened/dreaming module which gathers informatic dross and converts into physical matter. Qualities and traits of dreamsilk depend on local ontology.
Dreamsilk never provides nourishment to the Cursebearer. xMind, xArtful
<> Replication. -1 Satisfaction. Requires Silkspinning and Destructive Analysis. Augment the spinneret module with an inverted analytic module to imbue spun dreamsilk with the properties of matter. Error-prone if performed at greater than Slow speed.
Replicated matter never provides nourishment to the Cursebearer. xMind, xxArtful
<> Destructive Analysis. Design a combined awakened/dreaming module which breaks engulfed physical matter down into informatic matrices, providing information about its native ontology and specific construction. Prone to failure when applied to extremely dense or complex matter.
xxMind
<> Deletion. -1 Satisfaction. Requires Destructive Analysis. Refine the Destructive Analysis algorithms with the intent of weaponization, providing increased speed, degrees of freedom, and reliability of destruction at the expense of no retention of the informatic content.
xxFierce
-e
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