I'm kinda unsure about giving them a discount. On one hand, this means that they are likely to send us more tech. On another, this will definitely tell them that we are not just very literal genie but actually some construction capable artefact.
Which, you know, still a great thing to have when you are dealing with various nonsense and need new tools because old ones never got here or were eaten by rainbow crabs, but also possibly reverse engineerable and maybe also not impossible to dig out. Both of which they might start to try if they figure they aren't necessarily dealing with magic here.
Bah. This underground nonsense can wait. First, you assemble the design for the forcefield modifier in your mind, to check over it for any other major flaws besides that offense against power storage decency. There aren't all that many that you could replace without giving away more crystal than you need to, so you put the design aside after replacing that thing with far more effective materials that still don't depend on your tech. Not perfectly optimized, but for good reason: The new battery has a very, very small "minion" inside it acting as a redundant circuit. You're kinda straddling the line between minion and actual crystal here, to be honest. To them, it should appear like some fragment of old higher-tech battery construction that is not actually connected to anything but remains since no one remembers why it is there.
Which, in the most technical of terms, it is not. All it's doing it draining a trickle of power to be on standby, if you compare it to the actual functional components. But that is all it needs to do. This minion, smaller than any other one so far and purely crystal out of necessity to be small enough, is WFX-0001a, your prototype in wireless tinkering that came to you while examining the forcefield functionality. The full prototype part-chain looks like a single redundant circuit unless you have a nanoforge-scale scanner looking at it, and you highly doubt the alterin will investigate their new toy that closely with what you plan to design the outside with.
Its job is to listen for power surges in the battery. If it picks one up, it joins in with the rest of the power-up sequence, steals a bit (technically 75% of the new startup power draw, but from your perspective it is still practically nothing and even optimized their power storage tech is rubbish anyways) of power and charges up the second prototype, WFX-0001b. 1b's job is to pin down the direction of a certain signal using an (unfortunately extremely inefficient) version of your communicator-spying method. It would work much better if you had some form of command crystal involved here so you don't need to literally hardcode the directions in and just tell the thing 'Locate this signal', but that would require something much larger, not to mention a working command crystal design.
Regardless, the signal in question is slowly emitted from one of the surface-facing storage crystals that usually aren't full, which now has a teeny tiny transmitter and a fragment of the forcefield tech sitting inside it to catch forcefields and read them. Once it has the direction, the charge flows down to WFX-0001c, which is essentially just a miniaturized version of what you're using to store your spy data in the swords, but one that can send data via extremely tiny, opaque force bubbles with data written on the inner side. It is power-hungry as fuck (99.90% of the power draw 1a pulls off the battery, infact) and has no idea where to send it besides a specific vector. It doesn't even have enough processing power, much less actual power, to understand the e in encryption. You are literally flinging intangible forcefields not from a to b, but from a towards b without even a guarantee you'll hit to cheat the distance requirement on your two-way connections to things.
It is in a word, bad. You'll be surprised if you get 10% of the data without needing to check over the prototype over the alterin communications frequency like you do with the two spy-swords. But if it works...
...
...If it works, you will be very happy. Because you will have a proof of concept. And with a working proof, you can dump the majority of the grunt work scaling it up, optimizing the power requirement, and giving it proper encryption (among other things you'll need to add) on your collection of research nodes and save so much time in your retracing of your steps getting back to what you were originally working on before you got Interrupted. if it doesn't work, well...you're still pretty happy you got free tech out of this, and the whole thing still works passively like the other minions can. So you set aside the design for the one to be built for them until they deliver the power, and move on to the more important design: Modifying the forcefield modifigenerator so that it gets on your level before you upscale it. You'd simulated some tests of what would happen if you powered it at their scale without any adjustments, and all that happened was the device immediately shorted out and promptly melted into a sad puddle of overheated everything. Which, while not too surprising for a first time with new tech, is still rude on its part. Its like it hasn't seen real power levels before!
Subcycle 2
Yomda was not a fan of being a delivery boy, but it was better than sitting around in the medical office once again being asked why he felt sick, or why he did not want to open his eyes for a few hours and had been found lying on the floor of the lab, or why he needed yet more migraine medication.
Fucking multidimensional bullshit shield was bullshit and should be labelled as such and probably thrown out of a spaceship for good measure. But he was very clearly told it was not worth taking the thing apart in case that made the effect worse instead of better, and that it wasn't actively attempting to ruin anything like the rest of the category, so it didn't count. No one commented on the latter suggestion, or offered to look at it instead of him more than once. At least he'd be away from the accursed thing all day, since no one had said when he had to be back by to return the car carrying the vehicle battery and he was going to take advantage of that for as long as possible.
So when he arrived at the temporary wishing well camp, he delivered the battery and then stuck around to ask questions. To look at the mess of a planet around them. To peer into the rather pretty navy crystal that poked out of parts of the crater and wonder how far down the real wishing well was. It was a nice day, and if you ignored the strange occasional distant explosions as some piece of tech probably kicked the bucket at last, a nice reward for volunteering to go play fetch quest for the apparently-magitech well. Several someones took the large vehicular power source down into the crater to make sure it got down there without incident, and came back with it saying it had drained about a quarter of the battery.
---
Well, that was an interesting event. You still consider their power storage pretty bad all things considered, but for the amount of power you felt in that thing? It was reasonably efficient at least, if far larger than necessary. You put making the thing on the list to do before the cycle ends and get back to tinkering with the innards of the simulated forcefield modifigenerator. It had only broken in some form twice more since you started! And for different reasons too, not just power overload. Some of the original components were more fragile than you expected from the load they were expected to be under, but were replaceable enough with crystal circuitry. Maybe it had to do with the forcefield production settings, was that mode too much for the little things who only expected to be modifying fields, not forging them?
Subcycle 4
Yomda was no longer having a good night. The hellspawn of a fractal, higher-dimensional physics, and a handheld device's threesome was sitting down in the crater, and he was not happy. Even if it was supposed to open that damn door for them and the well had politely printed out a stone receipt and a cover for it! Today was supposed to let him get away from that!
---
So we've still got a cycle to do the upscaling work if we're doing it now, was there anything else you guys had planned for the cycle after or shall we continue hunting for shinies underground?
[] Exploration (Pick a side to continue)
[] Writein
Original compressed name: Shining-in-the-Space, Prime Crystal, Outer Layer Omega-Current, Xenotech-Specialist/Experimentals-Researcher True Crystalline.
Minions Status:
Infiltrator Greatswords (2x): Plenty of reserve power, recording. Shape of a stone greatsword with crystalline hilt components. Tiny solar panel and thermal absorbers. Out of command range.
Arcane: Undiscovered.
The Alterin Threat:
They are bad at communication security here.
They are at least somewhat organized (managers)
They appear to lack an answer on the more arcane-bullshit sort of thing around here. Though we hardly know much either, how is that island floating...
They do take research data security seriously, and have a logging system.
Current base is not a full one.
They appear to not be concerned with nighttime security outside of basic measures.
They have a different definition of 'wishing well' than you do.
Location: In a crater. Pretending to be a wishing well. Near some suspicious alterin.
Normal:
Assimilated matter
The quick, dirty solution to your lack of range.
Template: Matter
Energy production: 20 per cycle
Fabrication cost: 50 energy, nearby material.
Basic Crystal
Created by converting solid materials, like rock or assimilated matter.
Energy production: 50/cycle
Template: Refined
Fabrication cost: 200 energy, nearby solid material or crystal.
Storage Crystal
A stabilized hunk of additional crystal, giving you more room to store energy without side effects.
Template: Space-filling
Fabrication cost: 200 energy, empty space.
Research Crystal
Because doing everything yourself is slow and complicated.
Template: Space-filling
Traits: Data Storage (replaces Energy Storage: Basic)
Fabrication cost: 700 energy
Research Output: 1/cycle, Research cost 10 energy/cycle.
Repair Crystal
A good helper.
Energy production: 50/cycle
Template: Refined
Traits: Repair Protocols
Fabrication cost: 1,200 energy
Mine Crystal
Storage crystal stripped down and prepared to explode via overcharge.
Template: Space-filling (minimal energy storage)
Fabrication cost: 200 energy, empty space.
Farseer Crystal
An excellent companion to scouting crystal. Energy production alignments have been realigned for exceptional sensory range instead.
Template: Intrusive
Traits: 1st Visual Augmentation
Fabrication Cost: 750 energy
Scrying Crystal
I see you.
Template: Intrusive
Traits: 2nd Visual Augmentation
Fabrication cost: 2250 energy
Available traits:
Energy Generator (Basic), Energy Storage (Basic), Data Storage, Absorption Fields, Defensive Offense, Explosive Entry, Repair Protocols, Visual Augmentation
Check the crystals threadmark for energy costs and details.
Its more a large glowy thing designed to fit in either one of the larger trucks they were given, a large hovertank, an atmos shuttle, or a minor section of a spaceship. Its not tiny, and Shining-in-the-Space thinks a sufficiently connected section of storage crystal could easily survive more damage with more retained energy than a single large point of failure.
You are literally flinging intangible forcefields not from a to b, but from a towards b without even a guarantee you'll hit to cheat the distance requirement on your two-way connections to things.
It is in a word, bad. You'll be surprised if you get 10% of the data without needing to check over the prototype over the alterin communications frequency like you do with the two spy-swords. But if it works...
Wait, what did we just attempt to do? If they turn the device on, then... what do we expect to happen and receive?
[x] Exploration: Left - If it turns out to just be more destroyed rooms, that'd be perfectly fine. You can pick over the debris. Although intact tech would still be preferred.
-[x] But first, carefully investigate the rest of the Room of Organization. Your half-crystals are built out of the same wall materials, they can withstand a ghost if there actually is one.
Edit: Do we need extra cycles to produce more Research crystals? We need to spend the energy somehow.
You know nothing of their cars! Their car betteries could be God tier!
[x] Exploration: Left - If it turns out to just be more destroyed rooms, that'd be perfectly fine. You can pick over the debris. Although intact tech would still be preferred.
Its a wireless communicator spying on them. But we aren't sure it will work, so we made it small-scale enough to not get noticed behind all the actual work going on.
Just been pretty distracted doing...practically everything else, really. Looking for jobs, trying to write other ideas I haven't posted anywhere yet (and whether to make it a quest or jsut keep going and have a fanfic instead), new path of exile league, Nier Automata, occasionally being asked for help fixing computers.
More of a hiatus due to me being bad at schedules I make myself than anything.
Just been pretty distracted doing...practically everything else, really. Looking for jobs, trying to write other ideas I haven't posted anywhere yet (and whether to make it a quest or jsut keep going and have a fanfic instead), new path of exile league, Nier Automata, occasionally being asked for help fixing computers.
More of a hiatus due to me being bad at schedules I make myself than anything.
Just been pretty distracted doing...practically everything else, really. Looking for jobs, trying to write other ideas I haven't posted anywhere yet (and whether to make it a quest or jsut keep going and have a fanfic instead), new path of exile league, Nier Automata, occasionally being asked for help fixing computers.
More of a hiatus due to me being bad at schedules I make myself than anything.
Still busy, but the idea stuck around all day. So, while its not the update, its a neat bit of background maybe. Some collectives are more lazy than others, even among space rocks.
------
Life was, in a word, explosions. Not the literal kind, of course. Those only happened occasionally, and to others, like space pirates. Or asteroids. The occasional rude guest who came prepared for defenestration but not explosives.
What explosions really meant was the metaphorical kind. Explosions of power, when you'd met with Prime some...forgotten amount of time ago (what is time, really? Does it matter how long has passed between interesting events as long as nothing of note has happened since? Space will not get any smaller if you keep track of it more often, probably. Something to add to the experiment list.) and they shared the idea of adding amplification matrices to fusion reactors. You still aren't quite sure why they needed this much extra power, but its handy to have on hand, and its not like you don't have the storage space for it. Explosions of science, when you accidentally meet a new race on your mostly directionless ramble through space. Explosions of talking about everything, if you wander into contact range of the others Crystalline. Embarrassing explosions if you crash into something significant while focused on something else, like planets. Or that one moon. Poor moon. Deliciously mineral-laden moon. It was long enough ago you aren't sure which is true. Perhaps it was both...
...Oh, right. You were listing the types of metaphorical explosion, to make sure there wasn't one you missed. Explosions of magical knowledge, if you flew through some arcane field of worried physics and eventually discover who caused it. Explosions of magical force, if said fields were so finely tuned they shattered into particulate too small to reliably detect upon a collision with normal reality that certainly was not your fault and whoever claims otherwise should have clearly marked their experimental space. Really, its like they weren't expecting visitors ever and hoped the universe would just know that. You aren't psychic, even if you know a race who claims to be. Bit hard to tell when you don't have a scanner for psychic powers and they refuse to help build one for the good of Crystalline Science!
Science explosions! They had gotten fewer recently, since you hadn't found anything interesting and new recently, but they were still worth counting. While you were thinking of them, maybe the psychics had had enough time left alone to try getting their help once more. But first, you'd need to check which sector actually has their data in it, and then ask them if they thought it had been long enough, redirect the momentum afterwards, and deal with all the other mountains of administration involved in being large enough to be qualified as Tertius Crystal...eventually. At least you had a new Plan, even if you hadn't finished the list yet. Maybe you could get someone else to handle to psychic-finding and continue with the list? It worked for the last project.
[x] Exploration: Left - If it turns out to just be more destroyed rooms, that'd be perfectly fine. You can pick over the debris. Although intact tech would still be preferred.
[x] Exploration: Left - If it turns out to just be more destroyed rooms, that'd be perfectly fine. You can pick over the debris. Although intact tech would still be preferred.
-[x] But first, carefully investigate the rest of the Room of Organization. Your half-crystals are built out of the same wall materials, they can withstand a ghost if there actually is one.
So originally, this was just going to be a bit of exploring, which by now is all of the late since the last update was last month and bla.
Then I had more ideas while working on the layout of the place, and now its...a thing. A much longer thing. Also, @Evil Plan added some neat new protagonist tags, which is pretty alright.
--- Cycle 25
As the night goes on, you explore the Bunker some more, but away from the Room of Precision. The place is, as you expected, pretty damn intact overall from the armite armor. There is not much of interest so far like that room, but you have plenty of time to explore, they likely will spend most of the light tomorrow working out how to use the thing that works exactly as ordered but is uncomfortable to look at.
However, time is energy, and you might as well make sure that design is as functional as you expect. You certainly are not just trying to avoid even more of the boringly slow but effective armite conversion process with this Scrying crystal, there is a point to it.
...This place goes further down than you expect. Even with a Scrying crystal you've yet to spot the last fourth of the armite-armored walls enclosing this place at the bottom. So you continue as you were doing, sticking to the left first. First, a large room. By the look of the place it was a two-level combat arena sans stairs, until you look at more than the damage the room has incurred. An arena would not be littered with a number of destroyed runed furniture pieces and a lot of not particularly tough-looking broken technology. There also are another of the armite-tearing scorch marks. Another several actually, and more clear than the ones in the flooded micro-rooms room.
These ones look remarkably like the effect you would expect if you vented excess energy into Armite, in fact. Whoever it was that fought here was either a very inefficient spellcaster with enough power for it to discharge into their surroundings often, or was throwing around much higher-energy blasts than is likely safe for your average alien in such an enclosed space. Other than the mess, theres not much worth examining here, so you move on.
To the right of that room is an odd squiggle of a room, full of old crates. Crates full of mildly corroded batteries by the looks of things, and most likely magical ones based on how they appear to still be nearly full. Two are opened, one full of empty, heavily rusted metal canisters with some severe corrosion on the inner side, and the other appears to be no worse for wear leaving its contents exposed to the room, if you wanted to experiment with them. Further to the right is an extremely large room with significant signs of holding a very messy occupant in the past, possibly the one the precisionist had complained about.
Further down the left side you go, continuing to notice the...interesting choices whoever built this place had. Personally, you do not require the continual geometric incline known as stairs, since you do not walk from place to place in the Prime Crystal, you jump from place to place within the networked crystal. There are a few rooms aboard that use them for decoration, because sometimes you do have to meet others, but the last you'd heard of it, they were considered 'horribly cramped, lacking windows or vidscreens, and...uniquely designed, for a meeting room.'
But considering how few visitors worth speaking to even showed up, the Prime's meeting rooms were perfectly adequate. They were pressurized sufficiently, had power sockets, and had decorative stairs, what more were they expecting out of a physical meeting place? Most contacts, when asked how they would like to continue the conversation after being deemed not an immediate threat, quite preferred virtual rooms, or at least communicating from the comfort of their spaceships if they didn't have the computing power to run virtual environments on their end.
But you're getting distracted. Besides the lack of stairs, the place also tended to lack much in the wall of hallways, and if it did have them, they ended in small rooms littered with the shattered remains of what was likely once very delicate tech being overloaded from the opposite end, which make it seem like this was less a bunker to hide from the end of the world in and more a prison, or at least a containment building to hold what so far appears to be several wizards who blew scorch marks in armite for fun and revenge.
It also began engraving the level markers into the armite itself, not simply painting them on. Past the floor of the previous section, the next couple of floors had a general warning sign as its marker, which you likely could have determined even without the books in that room. The highest level of this section was simply a series of small cells, with essentially nothing left in them aside from the broken delicate tech pieces seen elsewhere. Next, there was larger cells. These ones were also empty from age, except the one furthest to the right, which was a third the size to fit in the remaining space. That one was not empty, instead holding what you could only describe as a ever so slowly decaying ball of angry magic. You could see the walls had been compressed inwards, only to get burned away by sheer attrition, as shown by the spherical shape of the current room. You get the feeling its attempting to glare at your presence but does not remember how as you peek into the room, before you head further down.
The next level is yet-bigger cells, and at this point you just label the entire section 'Prison' and only give the places a glance through what information the Scrying crystal picks up. Empty cells with unrecoverable tech-shards are not interesting to you.
After checking the time (still dark, but getting lighter), you continue down, past what is probably a bulkhead layer. This appears to be the dangerous section instead of simply the caution one, judging by the far larger and more prominent danger-symbol engraving in the level-marker-spot. And it has an actual room once more! Although you're starting to reach the edge of the scryer's sight range, since you can't just see the entire floor now.
Which, considering it appears to be a huge underground open-air arena, is not as big an issue as you'd expect. The bigger issue is that is is saturated in magical power. You may only know it exists as a kind of energy without access to the library you once had, but this much energy doesn't just stay somewhere with no input. A place old enough to no longer have its former prisoners at all should've gone down to the ambient background level and vanished into your what you filter out as background static. Its saturated to a degree you can't tell where its coming from, either. Far enough for one cycle, this is.
Subcycle 4
The results of the wireless prototype so far are even less effective than you'd hoped. The Alterins had, of course, tested the device in their lab before setting up a plan to transport the thing up into position without ruining everyone involved's day. The same lab one of the minion greatswords were in, which was nice, since you could compare the two results.
Infiltrator Greatsword recording said:
Unknown Lab Alterin 1: "For the love of all that is good and non-lethal on this ruined planet, why is it covered in that material?"
Unknown Lab Alterin 2: "Just test the thing already and drop it off. Then it'll be the island team's problem."
It worked, but only in the literal sense. This is not even a readable result to the greatest interpreters you could've found, its hardly even the same language as the correct recording! (-100 to the cost of Wireless Theory for the technical success)
Poke the angry magic ball?
[] Poke the angry magic ball with words! Maybe nom it if it doesn't speak up when questioned? Its not being productive just sitting there gradually burning out, after all.
[] Do not poke the unknown magic! You're a Xenotech Specialist, not a Mage.
The Arena:
[] Yolo it and push onwards deeper into the ruin!
[] Put together some specialist detector equipment to locate the source of the mana saturation, don't explore further than the floor of the arena yet. (Will use up a research turn fine-tuning the equipment for this particular variant of magical energy)
[] Be exceptionally worried over the unknown depths, the sudden magic saturation, and the increasing danger labels and start exploring from outside the ruins instead.
[] Write-in
Original compressed name: Shining-in-the-Space, Prime Crystal, Outer Layer Omega-Current, Xenotech-Specialist/Experimentals-Researcher True Crystalline.
Minions Status:
Infiltrator Greatswords (2x): Plenty of reserve power, recording. Shape of a stone greatsword with crystalline hilt components. Tiny solar panel and thermal absorbers. Out of command range.
Arcane: Undiscovered.
The Alterin Threat:
They are bad at communication security here.
They are at least somewhat organized (managers)
They appear to lack an answer on the more arcane-bullshit sort of thing around here. Though we hardly know much either, how is that island floating...
They do take research data security seriously, and have a logging system.
Current base is not a full one.
They appear to not be concerned with nighttime security outside of basic measures.
They have a different definition of 'wishing well' than you do.
Location: In a crater. Pretending to be a wishing well. Near some suspicious alterin.
Normal:
Assimilated matter
The quick, dirty solution to your lack of range.
Template: Matter
Energy production: 20 per cycle
Fabrication cost: 50 energy, nearby material.
Basic Crystal
Created by converting solid materials, like rock or assimilated matter.
Energy production: 50/cycle
Template: Refined
Fabrication cost: 200 energy, nearby solid material or crystal.
Storage Crystal
A stabilized hunk of additional crystal, giving you more room to store energy without side effects.
Template: Space-filling
Fabrication cost: 200 energy, empty space.
Research Crystal
Because doing everything yourself is slow and complicated.
Template: Space-filling
Traits: Data Storage (replaces Energy Storage: Basic)
Fabrication cost: 700 energy
Research Output: 1/cycle, Research cost 10 energy/cycle.
Repair Crystal
A good helper.
Energy production: 50/cycle
Template: Refined
Traits: Repair Protocols
Fabrication cost: 1,200 energy
Mine Crystal
Storage crystal stripped down and prepared to explode via overcharge.
Template: Space-filling (minimal energy storage)
Fabrication cost: 200 energy, empty space.
Farseer Crystal
An excellent companion to scouting crystal. Energy production alignments have been realigned for exceptional sensory range instead.
Template: Intrusive
Traits: 1st Visual Augmentation
Fabrication Cost: 750 energy
Scrying Crystal
I see you.
Template: Intrusive
Traits: 2nd Visual Augmentation
Fabrication cost: 2250 energy
Available traits:
Energy Generator (Basic), Energy Storage (Basic), Data Storage, Absorption Fields, Defensive Offense, Explosive Entry, Repair Protocols, Visual Augmentation
Check the crystals threadmark for energy costs and details.
Navy Blue - Crystal core Light Blue - Base crystals Orange w/ black S - Storage Crystal Turquoise with small diamond - Farseer Crystal Black with Turquoise diamond - Scrying Crystal Purple/Orchid - Focusing Crystal Darker Purple - Overseer Crystal Blue w/ gold R - Research Crystal Purpleish - Repair Crystal Red - Diplomatic Crystalline Dark purple - Armite Half-Crystal
--- Dark Brown - Empty underground space Light Brown - Dirt or other non-solid material Light Grey - Rock Grey - Armite Sky Blue - Empty aboveground space Teal w/brown diamond - Assimilated matter
(Background) w/ question mark - [Unknown tech]
(Background) w/ small diamond - Mobile Thing (Purple for Alterin) Black - Unknown
--- Red cross-shaped overlay - Damaged Red X overlay - Heavily damaged
[X] Do not poke the unknown magic! You're a Xenotech Specialist, not a Mage.
The ball is angry. The walls show that the ball can express its anger in very clear terms. Continued presence of the ball says that it can't get out of there/does not want to get out of there. Either way, it can stay there without problems.
[X] Yolo it and push onwards deeper into the ruin!
Are the walls warping from the unknown magic? No? It's probably not going to start messing with us unless we start messing with magic.
