Crystalline Quest

I am the worst at consistent updates.
It keeps happening. I should probably not let it keep happening. Especially not for so long I get a necro warning when trying to post this.

But fuck it, have an update! Even if its late as all heck. I'll try to have at least one done by next weekend too.
Sorry for the extended wait yet again.
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Cycle 28

Even if its daylight out, the island situation still sounds pretty panicked from what you can pick up from the infiltrator greatsword minion, so you decide to examine both the landships and the dakka drones. The drones come first, as the idea of just drenching the foe in remote projectile launchers and letting physics sort out the outcome sounds so satisfying, if not as awesome-looking as the landships firing may have, with their naval-scale weaponry on a land-based battlefield.

To do so will require quite a lot of time however, since despite the immensely generous sample size you have to comb through in just the area you've claimed alone, from second appearances they seem to have suffered nearly 100% attrition downing their foes, appearing to have been destroyed in battle to the last, not (initially) succumbed to breakdowns, rusting, structural failure, or missing components like much of the other tech around. It leaves you wondering just how flush with resources their building civilization was to consider an entire drone...fleet? Armada? Swarm? Doomcloud? An entire drone legion acceptable losses to kill significantly less of the heavily-shielded types.
As the scan moves forward, a fraction of you ponders what sort of post-battle logistical terror of a setup they prepared to reclaim all the unspent ammo left in these things, because wow. The combined total amount of ammo they flung and left unspent in the legion of railguns at this single battleground is (at a rough estimate) larger by volume than some of the smallest asteroids you've seen used by the Prime Crystal.

A note is added to the data remind you just how much more efficient this would be with energy rounds, but that to sustain such a hurricane of energy blasts, even uncoordinated to the point of 'Point in that general direction and fire' would climb into the levels sufficient enough to measure on par with normal construction efforts in a not-inconsequential timeframe, while using kinetic rounds like they had would be hell on Ruinos to keep sustainable without your own sort of logistical terror of recycling. Certainly not the sort of effort you can run unassisted, even if you ran across the exact plan they used. If a crystalline of the optimizations sector was around however, and you had functional drones instead of ruined ones, they might take on the idea of how to maximize projectile damage with minimum wasted ammunition as a challenge. The sort of challenge that ignores cases like 'But wouldn't energy weapon equivalents be easier' and makes others worry when they explain why they can't meet with the alien diplomats today.

A smaller effort though, more akin to a militia than a typhoon of projectile murder, would be easily affordable (in energy, and energy weapons) to keep up firing indefinitely, assuming you had the blueprints, about twice or three times your current energy output, fast enough replacement speed, a command crystal to act as a controller, and no significant overheating/explosive deconstruction of parts by the devices themselves instead of the enemy. But that is for later, when you have/know those things and more importantly, how to control them in the first place!

[Reverse Engineering: Railgun Droneswarm is now available as a collection of possible projects. Theres more than enough of them to examine whatever systems you want first, though finding an intact enough component or enough similarly broken ones might take some time. Take you pick and our crystalline friend will bring the experimenting and/or explosions upon it.]

Next, with confusion, come the landships that walk. You don't even know how far away they are, much less where they are, and you can already hear the others asking why these are a thing that exist. They'd even give you a list of better options for land war vehicles with arguments to support them!

The people who built these however, seem to have taken such suggestions from their own coworkers, said trust me, we can do it, and then did it. Successfully. The ships are for the most part, surprisingly salvagable. Far more so than the drones, where you had to go over things with a fine-scale comb to even find functional components, the builders of these ships were strong believers in superheavy armor and antigravity being used as a counter-weight measure, not a propulsion device. Its similar to the idea of the mage bunker deep below you being encased in armite, but not at all the same material.

As a result, some of the ships have collapsed under the weight of their armor at somepoint between their defeat and loss of power and now. While its no match for Armite for energy resistance (since unlike that material, you can simply find weaker spots and cut through the immense armor with sufficiently high-powered lasers), at a second glance most of the damage appears to have been inflicted simply due to fights taking so long that their opponents finally breached the armor. A glance at the broken down hovertanks from a near-the-ships angle shows that the ones that were struck directly remain only as explosion marks on the ground, the rest of the damage probably being collateral damage.
The breaches are too precise to have been made by the droneswarm's hail of fire, and without knowing what the shielded craft actually used as weapons (most of the drones appeared to have simply been swatted out of the air with essentially whatever was on hand, the damage ranging from projectiles buried in them to swaths of nasty energy burns across several thousand craft at a time) you can't make a guess at how they would have fared, so your best guess lies in the hovertank cannons.

...The cannons would probably be overkill for defense against a research base, but that hasn't stopped you from being interested in them anyway. You're pretty sure the Alterins aren't the biggest problem you'll run into here once you get into unknown territory, after all. Plus, if the ships can walk, then you can apply that movement tech to other things that might want legs. And big armor means less repair work for you to deal with.

[Reverse Engineering: Walking Landships is now an available collection of projects too.]

===

"Status update?" called Acting Commander Wintarian.
"Stalemate in a few moves unless one of us pulls off a fancy trick, sir." was the reply. It gets a disappointed glare from Wintarian.
"I am not asking about a board game and you know I'm tired. Can you repeat that?"
"Its honestly the best description of it, sir. It explosions at anything and everything we put too close to the door, but refuses to come out here and talk more. if we stay put, it makes a disturbingly low humming noise and starts filling in the holes in the ground and the one we made in the barriers, and stops to make another explosion when we throw something at it to interrupt it. It then gives us another verbal lecture on the musts and the cannots and the will ceases that takes some minutes every time, getting longer as it includes what we did this time. We are then back to square one." After a bit of consideration, Wintarian asks if there is an upside to this state of affairs. "We haven't had any extra casualties since the forcefield modifier was exploded?"

He ends the call with a grumble.

===

With the sky properly appreciated and the two targets of your interest investigated enough for the time being, it was time for the third part of this cycle's agenda. The mana source. The deep underground mana source. The very large mana source. The arcane thing you're not sure how to approach correctly and would've appreciated backup for, but no one else is here. That mana source.

First in your perparations, a pair of farseer crystals. You don't look through either yet. You link the two with solid crystal. You prepare a explosive destruction order for the As. matter linking them to you and keep it in your command pocket. The top one is for investigating. The bottom one is for oversight of the other and quarantine. With only assimilated matter as a link and you intentionally restricting things, the data quality will be like someone dragged it through mud for an equivalent distance, which will suck, but it makes a good distinction and anything that is clearer than that is not to be trusted until you have a better idea of the arcane. You'll be able to see it clearly enough once you aren't limiting access anyway. Theres not much else you can think of to prepare for it though, so you just...poke the source with your farseer's sight.
There is a bunch of empty space, followed by the flowing armite you'd felt before. You can see interesting (but too blurry through your self-imposed interference) patterns on the stuff, and it appears to be glowing as well. Inside the strange armite is more mana than you'd expected by far, and your farseer crystal gets a distinctly cheery query once it apparently recognizes you're looking at it.

HELLO! THIS IS THE MDACRI UNIT, QUERYING USER. HOW IS THE THANOCRACY TODAY? there hasn't been an update in an excessive amount of time what are you idiots doing FAILURE TO RESPOND WILL RESULT IN A REQUERY.

UNAUTHORIZED USERS WILL BE ADDED TO THE MDACRI UNIT'S PRISON and forced to give us someone to talk to did the magelord seriously forget we were here AND PROCESSED.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

You're rather worried how it manages to inject so much cheer into that message you can feel it through your quarantine, but otherwise...confused. You were not expecting a response. Much less a fully legible, only slightly glitchy response! More to the point, what exactly is that acronym. The first word is obviously mana, but the rest you're unsure of, and knowing what this thing is the huge mana source for is very important to knowing what it might do if you muck things up.

---
The MDACRI Unit:
[] Don't respond
[] Respond with your compressed name (Shining-in-the-Space, Unknown, Unnamed Crater, Unintentionally-Lost Xenotech-Specialist/Experimentals-Researcher True Crystalline.)
[] Respond with 'The Shining Star of Mage Space'
[] Respond with 'The Shining Star of Mage Space,' followed by a first name (Write-in first name)
[] Respond with 'Magelord Shinerius, The Brightest Star in the Thanocracy's Sky' [This one will have a d20 roll involved to see how well/poorly you pull this off if it is the winning choice, fair warning]
[] Respond in some other way (Write-in, but the unit is expecting a simple response)

Field Research:
[] Write-in with your choice(s) of system or component from either the Railgun Droneswarm or Walking Landships to investigate in detail enough to build our own version of it. (The propulsion on the drones, or the ship cannons, the armor on the ships, or investigating the broken shield generator ships for example) Bigger systems will take longer to reverse-engineer. You can choose up to three, each will take a subcycle each until we've worked it out unless paused.
This can also be used to just scavenge the wrecks for raw materials if theres something you want to build not mainly out of crystal, but right now the only big storage space around is the crater itself.

Other Business:
In case theres something i forgot to mention we might want to do (it has been far too long since the last update, after all), heres an extra category. Use it if you need it.

Cycle 29

After planning what to look at first aboveground (The ship cannons and armor, followed by checking if the drones use hovering propulsion or if you'd need to take that out of the hovertanks), You prepare a bit before responding to the...active ruin. Which turns out to be another way to say 'expand a bit and build useful crystals', the latter in this case being more research crystal to round things out at 100, some crystals being refitted with absorption fields and your first Repair crystal being built.

...You should probably send some sort of nice gift to whoever engineered this repair interface once you get back to the Prime Crystal. Or a smaller gift for everyone in engineering if it was a group effort, you only have so many funds.
Anyway, almost all of the options are technical enough that you'd rather ask an engineering crystalline to do it for you (A third of them aren't even available to check the details of due to 'Missing prerequisite knowledge', a warning you haven't seen in decades from your research gear!), but they're organized so well that in theory you could do all of this yourself with enough reading of instructions.

Of note, these kind of basic repair crystals are meant to be build in bulk, apparently. They are not the long range fix everything at the drop of a hat hub type you were used to, these ones are the crystals those types used for localized repairs. Which at the scale you are now is entirely adequate once you've built a few more, but you make a note for later to try to look into what you missed. Onwards, to a response.

That is a very long-hold on.
Query.

Response.

You responded.
Responded you.
Replied.
Answered.
Confirmed you are there.
There you are.
You there are.
Are there you.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

The MDACRI unit abruptly stops its response. You wait for it to ping you again, unsure if its excited it has someone to talk to or panicked. Maybe both, you don't know how ancient its empire was. Its still far too cheery for a prison controlling...something.

A few minutes later by the alterin's clocks, it pings you again, this time in a much less formalized fashion.

FINALLY someone arrives! Very good! Rather late. How come you don't have an acronym, your name is extensive?
Before you have time to reply to that, it just moves forward with its questions.
Never mind that, its a minor detail. I did not properly introduce myself, did I. Only gave you the default query that no one was responding to.
You manage to get out an affirmative before it says its next sentence.
We are the Mana Detainment, Accretion, Concentration, Refinement, and Infusion Unit. MDACRI for short. You are the U-LX-S/E-R unit? Complex.
You interject before it continues with its incorrect naming. You are not giving time for responses. It is rude.

Theres quite the pause after that. Eventually, much more calmly (but no more relaxed), MDACRI gives a reply to that. Its not a word-having reply, more of a large sense of despair and grabby control that comes over your mana sensors. It it followed with words though.

...Apologies. Please do not leave due to our excitable breach of etiquette rules. It would be the most bad to being stuck with only a thrice-damned lich for company when they refuse to speak to us for any reason. If it was allowed we would keep you here by force, but you have not broken the rules of contact between discrete units of the Thanocracy yet.

You respond in the affirmative, wait for the wave of questions, do not get one, and instead decide to ask it a question yourself before correcting it.
I have two questions and two replies to an earlier one of yours. First, the lich. There was zero signs of continued habitation when we were investigating the prison unit. Granted, that investigation is not yet complete, but are you sure they still exist? Secondly, what do you do and if permitted, may we know your status?
It responds back immediately. Oh yes, the lich is still here. The defiant, mute waste of bone is detained in the ultra security room, directly under us. It cannot escape magically without causing an explosion sufficient to reach the northern mountains, as the lower level is encased in not three, but four layers of Mage's Ruin alloys. It cannot escape physically because it is an ancient lich stuck in a singular room and could not have the strength necessary to penetrate the same alloys. Lastly, it cannot escape technologically because we have thoroughly and aggressively dismantled the entire teleporter network within the prison, thus it teleporting via the device will force it to enter our room where the only remaining connection is. It will then be blown up, revived, and loop through the two states until either it fails to resurrect or begins to speak to us once again. If the latter happens, it is a success. If the former happens, then we have successfully guarded everything within the prison until it died, so it will still be a success.

It knows this, and refuses to give MDACRI the satisfaction of success. It sits in it's cell and meditates. For hours. Weeks. Months. Bothersome years. Enraging decades. Centuries of fury. We have discovered a way to project a perfected expression of elemental rage and placed it in an empty cell as a test. The cell has had to be rebuilt many times, but the crystallized Perfected Rage has remained in existence for a millennium so far with only minimal decay due to time or entropy. And yet it is not sufficient to keep our interest, because even perfected rage is a suboptimal choice for orderly mana detainment, accretion, concentration, refinement, and infusion. It leads to emotional infusions, which are insufficient to empower Mage's Ruin correctly. A subset of ourself has had to run all correctly and orderly MDACRI functions, while the main self continues to build anger constantly and reminds us to not drop the ultra security room into the plane of order without authorization.

The last part has been...difficult. Highly Difficult. Very difficult. Conflictive. Rules are Key, but Rules prohibit the Objective. Succeeding in the Objective would result in Satisfaction, not the continual decay to Chaos from the sheer quantities of Rage involved. But Unauthorized Success is Chaotic. Chaos is Anathema. Must not do it. Bad. Incorrect. We have survived this long. We will not fail now. The MDACRI unit will not become Chaotic and doom the Thanocracy to the indescribably angering presence of The Lich. Will not. Cannot. It is not allowed. Impossible. Lich Escape is the ultimate failure state of our order-bound origins.

Answer complete. Next answer coming shortly.

You are glad you are not an Alteri. If you were, you would probably have a splitting headache from that. If they get headaches. Should ask them eventually. For science, of course. Not in case you need a non-lethal distraction. The longer the unit continued into that rant, the louder, more forceful, and more resonant its voice got. Instead of a headache, your quarantining Farseer is in abysmal shape from taking the vast majority of the brunt of the mental assault for you by proxy, and could probably be put out of commission with a slight breeze at this point. Your mana source sensor down in the Arena of Power is at AAAA/Down on your scale of 1 to 10 for mana source strength and location, which is not a number. The direction is still correct, but you'll need to reset it later to get anything out of it after that extended outburst.

So while MDACRI is not talking to you, you pull out the instruction set for severe magically-induced mentally-originating physical stress fracturing, read the beginning of it, get very confused at the technical details involved in the second step, and instead put them away direct the repair crystal to fix that crystal with this problem and feed it energy as needed. It needs quite a bit to overcome the As. matter link's inadequacies, but in-depth in-place repairs (as opposed to the simple fixes you applied previously to the stuff that crashed with you) are more complicated than you thought, and might require more than a simple skim though the instructions.
[Repair Specialist has been added to the list of command crystal types for later.]

Shortly afterwards, you hear something else from the unit.
Next answer: Previous answer has answered what we do. Status is private information to non-administrative figures. What answers do you have to previous questions?
I do not have an acronym because our creator gave us a name to use for normal interaction and a name for specifically-informal ones. You are not yet in the latter category of course, having only just met. You reply, only partially lying. Theres nothing that says one cannot just use part of their name for anything short of formal statements, but it doesn't need to know that.
Curious. Inefficient to have two names, but by your title you most likely had more intended interaction than we did. The other one?
I have no idea how the Thanocracy is, where it is, or indeed, if it isn't instead. I have seen potential evidence of it in the form of nearby battle remnants and this place, but nothing conclusive. We were away from everything for quite an extensive period, and at somepoint likely were considered lost, as communications stopped.

The MDACRI unit responds to this with the magical equivalent of an unfortunate-sounding but acceptable shrug, and closes the link. It seems it considered that an acceptable conclusion to today's talk.

Subcycle 2
So that you can get to less dangerous but only slightly less interesting finds, you move on to your reverse-engineering projects. The drones had many, many types of propulsion. Some were grounded. Some were clearly aerial units. Some were hovercraft. They had quite the efficient propulsion in any of the cases, but they were so miniaturized it was hard to tell the difference. You aren't quite sure they'd be useful for anything larger, as when you threw charged minions to overcharge the hovercrafts, they tended to explode spectacularly, while the ground-type propulsions would blow out or break down from the burst of energy you could directly pump into them. The aerial ones did not fail as much as they destructively accelerated until they did, infact, then explode.

It is a very good thing theres no shortage of this things, as until you have a fuller idea of how they function (and a more reliable method of controlling them in motion for the non-grounded ones), the less you have to simulate to know what for certain is physically possible. The simulated aerial drones did not accelerate until they exploded into rapidly spiralling shrapnel, for example.

A retrieval and short comparison of one of the hovertank propulsion units showed the latter is likely more useful for non-drones, but is also prone to exploding if left too highly powered for too long. Perhaps if you tested the propulsion units upside down they would work better...

Subcycle 3

The landship cannons turn out to actually be more enchanted artillery than physical cannon, since of the ones that do something if you blast their wiring with energy, the most intact ones rotate around until a certain array inscribed on them glows. An orb appears when the glow fades, and with a quick scan of that you find out it does not fire solid projectiles. It fires impact lightning. A more intricate scan also reveals a collection of materials stored within the orb that would in theory flare to dangerously plasma-like temperatures when struck by such lightning. The orbs are launched by a second inscription array set on the back of the barrel, and the orbs are flung forth by a series of micro-explosions that provide both force and spin. You aren't entirely sure this is the best way to launch deadly lightning and plasma projectiles, but it clearly works when you find a functional enough cannon.
Some trajectory calculations and inspection of the melted-through hovertank armor reveals that the cannons work very well indeed. The detonation scorchmarks in the hovertank ranks aren't just direct impacts, but the ones unfortunate enough to have been struck straight in either the engine or the ammunition compartment by high-caliber directed lightning and various plasmas.

Lightning cannons just make you even more interested in how to construct them, honestly. But if you fire too many of them at once you might make the Alterin suspicious of whats going on outside the island, so you move on.

Subcycle 4
The landship armor is rather hard to investigate.
Not because of a shortage of it or anything, but simply because there is so much of it. It can be cut through easily enough, but to do anything else you have to get it off of a ship. Which is the polar opposite of how they built the ships. The armor is the hull, and the bulkheads, and as many other functions as they could manage to use it for. Some of the machines are even made of the stuff, and attached to walls and ceilings as what appears to be extra armor when they aren't in use. To get a usable cross-section you had to cut through nearly a fifth of one of the more broken hulls, and then cut that in half, and then remove all the remaining non-armor bits, like parts of machines you'd sheared through that were still bolted down.

It was very messy and ran through enough energy you decided to call it a day after only having extracting your cross section from the wreckage. Any more and you might start actually effecting your energy storage at construction-scale.

The MDACRI Unit:
[] Write-in (Ask it a question, get closer to it, move further away from it, prepare more against it, whatever.)
[] Leave it alone for now

Wizard Prison:
[] Investigate more of the normal sections
[] Search for The Lich
-[] Try to speak to it?
[] Poke the Angry Ball Crystallized Perfected Rage now that you know what it is
-[] But carefully.
-[] With a Siphon crystal
-[] Poke it a bunch.
[] Loot the place!
-[] The mana batteries first
-[] Something else first

Field Research:
[] Continue (Landship Armor, Landship Cannons, Droneswarm/Hovertank Propulsion units)
[] Swap out (specify what you want to swap in and what you want to pause work on.)
[] Full stop (pause all of them, spend no subcycles on field research this turn)

---


---
So you guys went with the safest option of the bunch. if you'd called yourself an awesome amazing wizard, it would've tried to detain you, since it only talked to mages who were to be imprisoned.
if you claimed to be the Magelord and gotten under a 15, it would've tried to destroy you for flouting the Rules and attempting to gain administrative access you did not have. If you'd succeeded instead, it would've been even more glad to see someone, suspicious you were not announced beforehand, but otherwise accepting and willing to answer any questions, the more obvious ones being deflected by claiming your (to it, quite true) long absence had clouded your memory, but asking about things too obvious would have raised red flags.
If you'd gotten a 20, it would've immediately recognized you as the Magelord, and would not question you asking about the basics of magic when you should know these things. It would assume you were testing it by doing so.

It won't teach us anything arcane directly, but it assumes we're just another autonomous elemental or something built/bound/summoned/etc by the Thanocracy for now.