DoofQuest- a Disney Villains Victorious CK2-Style Quest
- Thread starter Made in Heaven
- Start date
- Crossover
- Location
- Two hours away
- Pronouns
- He/Him
That is fair. I'm kind of hoping the Kat option gets eliminated so we can put Ms. 30 intrigue on more productive endeavors.
- Location
- The City of Tears, Hallownest
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yes, we used that to get our Occult stat. Also it appears that generally tomes/textbooks are 1 and done in this world.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I have a morbid curiosity in how drifters ability would interact with the whole agent unknown twilight zone situation. It feels like memory manipulation might interact with it.... Somehow
Lifeandlice
Practitioning side-character
- Location
- Usa
...wha, what was coming up next?
It is either Interlude: Family Finding, in which Olivia Dickens finds the crazy Hatless Man, or it is Goofy reaching out to Blair Mercurial of the Imagination Institute in Interlude: Inspiration.
I think it's the former.
Although it could be a bait and switch and we have to wait for the Rivals Report for the last two interludes.
It could also theoretically involve the musical, although I'm still personally guessing that's going to be the last interlude before the rival reports.
Interlude: Spark
- Location
- Pennsylvania
These last few months haven't been the greatest for you. After that horrible mess with "Agent K" running rampant across the city you had to devote a lot of time and money into cleaning things up, and to make matters worse, your attempts at investigating things went pretty poorly. Coyote ended up wasting a lot of time in New York and while Monobrow didn't tell you everything about what happened with the Feds, you know that most of it was bad.
None of that mattered tonight, however! Months of procrastination led you to work even harder on the first musical you've done in years. Coordinating things with Temujin, Monogram, and the most musically inclined of your employees was difficult but it was all worth it in the end! The Danville Performing Arts Center was packed to the brim and you had front-row seats!
On stage, a beefy man dressed in a costume that oozed neon green was standing over Syndrome, loudly belting out a chorus about how the once-mighty Titan has finally fallen. Backup dancers dressed as Omnidroids and gangsters were performing a kick dance, and the thought of your formerly-second-most-hated-enemy Syndrome getting humiliated one last time gave you a warm and fuzzy feeling. It really couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
"...when Kronos did faaaaaaaaaaal!" the singer finishes with a flourish, taking a deep bow as the curtain descends. The audience broke out into thunderous applause.
"I really wasn't expecting that Mongolian Throat Singing to work, but it fits in." one random patron remarks. You don't need to use the little evil genius' room, so instead you look around at who else has joined you in the VIP section.
"Ohhh, Wendy Wower, my resident robot gal! How are you doing?" You ask. "Enjoying the show?"
"Oh yeah, it's going great! I saw everything on the livestream you know, a year or two back when all this happened. Right up until it cut out anyway. I guess it's not the most conventional thing to make a musical about, but it's pretty fun! The big band numbers really make it feel like it belongs in Vegas!"
"Oh, well, you know, contract negotiation comes later. Assuming Broadway forgives me for that little incident back in '11." You shudder at the memory.
"It's really nice to have a break. I love the work you've having me do on AI and I can feel like I'm really close to a breakthrough, but I just can't crack it yet! We've made progress, I've seen at least an 80% increase in performance compared to the isolated AIs, but there's something that prevents them from achieving full sapience. It's not just a bit of code, at least I'm pretty sure- and if it is then we'll be here for a very long time. If I could just figure out the inconsistency about what happens when you put them into bodies, then I really feel like I'd be making progress!"
"Did you try letting their self-learning algorithms interact with novel stimuli?"
You look over to see your precocious young interns Phineas and Ferb, apparently also taking advantage of employee benefits to take in the show with their family. The long-necked girl is glaring at you again for some reason.
"Oh, hello Phineas. Ferb. How's the cleanup going?"
"All finished sir!" Phineas replies happily. "All Normbot networks are back online."
"Honestly, we had more trouble with the gelatin mold." Ferb adds.
"I did let them interact." Wendy replies slowly, "That's at least part of what's causing the enhancement, but every now and again you get a robot that's leaps and bounds above all the others. Like Technor or, well… Sinatron."
You pause for a second. You're really not that familiar with AI research, it's been ages since you made Norm and honestly he was only ever meant to chase platypuses, but you like to give your employees encouragement whenever possible. "Yeah, that is kinda weird! Sinatron was way beyond everything else we've seen, even though I stole the exact same designs! What gives?! I'm pretty sure that formerly-second-most-hated-enemy Syndrome wasn't that far along in his AI research. Those omnidroid things are pretty nasty but it's not like they can hold a conversation."
"Was there anything unique about him?" Phineas asks, always ready to leap in. "You have the blupeprints, right?"
"Oh, look at that, dear." The woman you remember from the Christmas Party as being Phineas' mom says. "Even off the clock he's still being our little worker bee. I'm proud of you sweetie."
"Nrrrrrrgh." The giraffe girl grumbles wordlessly.
"He was pretty much just Frank Sinatra. Right down to the voice, the singing, the ambiguous connections to the mob- everything! Seriously, I'm impressed, I thought he was the real Sinatra for a while there."
"He could think, he could plan, he could mug for the audience." Wendy agrees. "He's miles beyond anything we could make, or even anything Kronos should have been able to make with those blueprints." Wendy says. "It's like he was just hit by a bolt of sentience or something."
"Hrmmmm." You frown. "So uh. It occurs to me that during the Gala, Sinatron did in fact… shake hands with a technopath. And uh, while my lawyers inform me that I cannot give further specification, it may or may not possibly maybe sorta kinda have been designed to make him go completely haywire."
Wendy stares at you for a second.
"That… might have had something to do with it." She says slowly. Then she frowns again. "But that doesn't make any sense! Whoever was doing that would've had to have been an absolute expert on the way the body was designed, even if you let their power fill in the gaps it wouldn't have mattered that much unless they could mess with the code too! Send him berzerk, sure, but not make him a… person."
"Also, given who this technopath may or may not be, legally speaking, I think that if the she she might or might not is had the power to make sentient robots, she would probably have an army of them by now. Maybe…"
Your thought is cut off as the curtain opens for the second act. Beginning from the seismic defeat of Syndrome, Sinatron waxes poetic about his plans for a 'Free Vegas' and a return for simpler times. In accordance with the cover story, the actor playing Syndrome mugs for the camera in the background, making clear he is 'definitely' 'not' 'dead'.
Despite the quality of the lyrics, you feel dread settle in the pit of your stomach. Halfway through Sinatron's soliloquy about the foolishness of the SRA, the band comes to a halt.
"Yet all that I am, and all I can be, cannot just be chalked up to lonely old me. The truth my friends is, the things that I do, I do because I want to be just… like… you…"
"I'm a simple newborn robot
Just a sheet metal shape.
Heap of gears and pistons
From a self-absorbed Cape."
A line of backup singers support the free verse.
"But in his galvanized insides, there's something to see-"
"There's a little spark inside of me!"
Reality itself experiences a localized record scratch as the song transitions into some of the worst rap you've ever heard.
"Yeah!"
"I'm finally free! Back from Nineteen Fifty-Three
On your widescreen TV!
got more tricks up my sleeve than you could ever hope to see!"
"But at the heart of the matter I'm more than a toy!
When I see adoring crowds it's just like I'm a real boy!
It's your approval that I crave and your attention I seek!
For you to listen to my words when I decide to speak!"
"No matter how the gears turn or what code's in my head,
No matter how I have been programmed or the places I tread
There's only one thing that makes me feel alive,
I say, I need to be with you if I want to thrive!"
The audience sits in stunned silence, unsure of what they've just witnessed.
"Word to your motherboard!"
From the back of the room, you hear a single, synthesized "BRAVO! BRAVO!" and the sound of giant metal hands slapping into each other. Nothing else. You suck in a low, painful hiss.
"...Maybe I shouldn't have given Norm a blank check to write his own musical number. Sorry about this Wendy, I promise the next part is bett-
"…Wendy?"
You look over your shoulder to see Wendy staring blankly into the middle distance. Her eyes are wide, her hands are limp, and you're not sure if she's breathing.
"Uhhh…" Sure, the rap was really bad, but you didn't know it would affect Wendy this much! After a few more seconds of stunned silence, Wendy stands up, gently walks into the aisle, and runs screaming from the theatre.
"That's it, that's it!"
You're going to have to screen these musicals a lot more carefully from now on.
---
Three hours later, after the musical has finally wrapped up, you get a frantic call from Wendy talking a mile a minute, demanding 'fifty Normbots, fifty creative interns, and the largest coffee maker DEI sells.'
---
Three weeks later, the woman literally kicks your door open and drops a ten-pound pile of lab results on your desk.
"I FIGURED IT OUT!!!"
"I can see that." You reply quietly. "Could you uh, elaborate please?"
"It makes no sense but it's clear as day! Every idiosyncrasy, every variation! It even explains why the Normbot programs do worse than Normbots with actual humanoid bodies! The trials all check out, the placebos did nothing, Technor agrees!"
"Uh… huh." You say, briefly considering if calling security would be a wise move. If you had any uncertainty about Wendy fitting into the 'mad science' culture of your research division they've been put to rest now.
"You said it yourself! Sinatron seems indistinguishable from Frank Sinatra. But not the real Frank Sinatra. He acts just like everyone who knows about Frank Sinatra thinks he would act! Sinatron had his entire logic circuits rewritten on the fly, just as he was revealed to the world. Tens of thousands of guests, Tens of millions of people watching the livestream, each and every one thinking 'oh my god, it's Frank Sinatra!'"
"So that would… mean…?"
"I told the interns I was bringing them in to test new advanced robots capable of real sentience and interpersonal communication. I changed nothing in the Normbot coding. I have seven Normbots already showing massive increases in processing power, and another twenty-two performing within statistical significance. Yesterday one of them asked me what its name was.
"If you want to make a robot sentient, you treat it like it's a real person."
You consider the way in which Norm slowly developed over time as you kept using him, then seemed to plateau and stop growing shortly after he started to call you Father. You think back to the countless, innumerable, unending times you have refused to acknowledge Norm as a child, offspring, or person that you made.
"...huh."
---
Wendy Wower has figured out the secret behind fully sapient AI! Rather than being a programming problem, it seems like all you have to do is treat them like they're people and… 'believe in them', for lack of a better term. Weird, isn't it? You've received widespread acclaim for discovering the secret, and you're pretty sure that history will record this as the moment that strong AI was cracked. Unfortunately Wendy is an extremely honest person, so when those books are written that horrific rap number will probably end up immortalized for all time. Begrudging congratulations have come in from Bakaemono, Funtelligence, and even ENCOM. You haven't released the actual process for doing so yet, but you could choose to do so any time if you wanted even more fame.
Public Opinion has increased!
DEI is now taken seriously by most academics and industry leaders!
Wendy Wower managed to make the single greatest breakthrough in robotics possibly ever. Again. And this time you didn't even steal the credit from her! Wendy gains +15 loyalty!
You're not exactly able to mass market the things yet. It's kind of contradictory to the entire concept to produce fully sapient AIs by the thousands if you need to anthropomorphize each of them individually.
Phineas and Ferb have repaired your Normbot hubs to full functionality! Your Normbots have given your Paramilitary Mongol Corps an additional +3 to all rolls against crime in Doofania!
"Develop Military AI" action unlocked! "Develop Civilian AI" action unlocked! "Develop Consumer AI" action unlocked! There may be some ethical concerns inherent in the act of selling intelligent artificial life!
'Do Some Introspection About Norm' action has changed!
'Spend time with Princess Java' personal action unlocked!
'Psychologically profile a target' DCs have dropped!
'Publish Your Findings' personal action unlocked!
Your musical, barring the awkward rap number, was a huge success! You gain 2 income!
None of that mattered tonight, however! Months of procrastination led you to work even harder on the first musical you've done in years. Coordinating things with Temujin, Monogram, and the most musically inclined of your employees was difficult but it was all worth it in the end! The Danville Performing Arts Center was packed to the brim and you had front-row seats!
On stage, a beefy man dressed in a costume that oozed neon green was standing over Syndrome, loudly belting out a chorus about how the once-mighty Titan has finally fallen. Backup dancers dressed as Omnidroids and gangsters were performing a kick dance, and the thought of your formerly-second-most-hated-enemy Syndrome getting humiliated one last time gave you a warm and fuzzy feeling. It really couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
"...when Kronos did faaaaaaaaaaal!" the singer finishes with a flourish, taking a deep bow as the curtain descends. The audience broke out into thunderous applause.
"I really wasn't expecting that Mongolian Throat Singing to work, but it fits in." one random patron remarks. You don't need to use the little evil genius' room, so instead you look around at who else has joined you in the VIP section.
"Ohhh, Wendy Wower, my resident robot gal! How are you doing?" You ask. "Enjoying the show?"
"Oh yeah, it's going great! I saw everything on the livestream you know, a year or two back when all this happened. Right up until it cut out anyway. I guess it's not the most conventional thing to make a musical about, but it's pretty fun! The big band numbers really make it feel like it belongs in Vegas!"
"Oh, well, you know, contract negotiation comes later. Assuming Broadway forgives me for that little incident back in '11." You shudder at the memory.
"It's really nice to have a break. I love the work you've having me do on AI and I can feel like I'm really close to a breakthrough, but I just can't crack it yet! We've made progress, I've seen at least an 80% increase in performance compared to the isolated AIs, but there's something that prevents them from achieving full sapience. It's not just a bit of code, at least I'm pretty sure- and if it is then we'll be here for a very long time. If I could just figure out the inconsistency about what happens when you put them into bodies, then I really feel like I'd be making progress!"
"Did you try letting their self-learning algorithms interact with novel stimuli?"
You look over to see your precocious young interns Phineas and Ferb, apparently also taking advantage of employee benefits to take in the show with their family. The long-necked girl is glaring at you again for some reason.
"Oh, hello Phineas. Ferb. How's the cleanup going?"
"All finished sir!" Phineas replies happily. "All Normbot networks are back online."
"Honestly, we had more trouble with the gelatin mold." Ferb adds.
"I did let them interact." Wendy replies slowly, "That's at least part of what's causing the enhancement, but every now and again you get a robot that's leaps and bounds above all the others. Like Technor or, well… Sinatron."
You pause for a second. You're really not that familiar with AI research, it's been ages since you made Norm and honestly he was only ever meant to chase platypuses, but you like to give your employees encouragement whenever possible. "Yeah, that is kinda weird! Sinatron was way beyond everything else we've seen, even though I stole the exact same designs! What gives?! I'm pretty sure that formerly-second-most-hated-enemy Syndrome wasn't that far along in his AI research. Those omnidroid things are pretty nasty but it's not like they can hold a conversation."
"Was there anything unique about him?" Phineas asks, always ready to leap in. "You have the blupeprints, right?"
"Oh, look at that, dear." The woman you remember from the Christmas Party as being Phineas' mom says. "Even off the clock he's still being our little worker bee. I'm proud of you sweetie."
"Nrrrrrrgh." The giraffe girl grumbles wordlessly.
"He was pretty much just Frank Sinatra. Right down to the voice, the singing, the ambiguous connections to the mob- everything! Seriously, I'm impressed, I thought he was the real Sinatra for a while there."
"He could think, he could plan, he could mug for the audience." Wendy agrees. "He's miles beyond anything we could make, or even anything Kronos should have been able to make with those blueprints." Wendy says. "It's like he was just hit by a bolt of sentience or something."
"Hrmmmm." You frown. "So uh. It occurs to me that during the Gala, Sinatron did in fact… shake hands with a technopath. And uh, while my lawyers inform me that I cannot give further specification, it may or may not possibly maybe sorta kinda have been designed to make him go completely haywire."
Wendy stares at you for a second.
"That… might have had something to do with it." She says slowly. Then she frowns again. "But that doesn't make any sense! Whoever was doing that would've had to have been an absolute expert on the way the body was designed, even if you let their power fill in the gaps it wouldn't have mattered that much unless they could mess with the code too! Send him berzerk, sure, but not make him a… person."
"Also, given who this technopath may or may not be, legally speaking, I think that if the she she might or might not is had the power to make sentient robots, she would probably have an army of them by now. Maybe…"
Your thought is cut off as the curtain opens for the second act. Beginning from the seismic defeat of Syndrome, Sinatron waxes poetic about his plans for a 'Free Vegas' and a return for simpler times. In accordance with the cover story, the actor playing Syndrome mugs for the camera in the background, making clear he is 'definitely' 'not' 'dead'.
Despite the quality of the lyrics, you feel dread settle in the pit of your stomach. Halfway through Sinatron's soliloquy about the foolishness of the SRA, the band comes to a halt.
"Yet all that I am, and all I can be, cannot just be chalked up to lonely old me. The truth my friends is, the things that I do, I do because I want to be just… like… you…"
"I'm a simple newborn robot
Just a sheet metal shape.
Heap of gears and pistons
From a self-absorbed Cape."
A line of backup singers support the free verse.
"But in his galvanized insides, there's something to see-"
"There's a little spark inside of me!"
Reality itself experiences a localized record scratch as the song transitions into some of the worst rap you've ever heard.
"Yeah!"
"I'm finally free! Back from Nineteen Fifty-Three
On your widescreen TV!
got more tricks up my sleeve than you could ever hope to see!"
"But at the heart of the matter I'm more than a toy!
When I see adoring crowds it's just like I'm a real boy!
It's your approval that I crave and your attention I seek!
For you to listen to my words when I decide to speak!"
"No matter how the gears turn or what code's in my head,
No matter how I have been programmed or the places I tread
There's only one thing that makes me feel alive,
I say, I need to be with you if I want to thrive!"
The audience sits in stunned silence, unsure of what they've just witnessed.
"Word to your motherboard!"
From the back of the room, you hear a single, synthesized "BRAVO! BRAVO!" and the sound of giant metal hands slapping into each other. Nothing else. You suck in a low, painful hiss.
"...Maybe I shouldn't have given Norm a blank check to write his own musical number. Sorry about this Wendy, I promise the next part is bett-
"…Wendy?"
You look over your shoulder to see Wendy staring blankly into the middle distance. Her eyes are wide, her hands are limp, and you're not sure if she's breathing.
"Uhhh…" Sure, the rap was really bad, but you didn't know it would affect Wendy this much! After a few more seconds of stunned silence, Wendy stands up, gently walks into the aisle, and runs screaming from the theatre.
"That's it, that's it!"
You're going to have to screen these musicals a lot more carefully from now on.
---
Three hours later, after the musical has finally wrapped up, you get a frantic call from Wendy talking a mile a minute, demanding 'fifty Normbots, fifty creative interns, and the largest coffee maker DEI sells.'
---
Three weeks later, the woman literally kicks your door open and drops a ten-pound pile of lab results on your desk.
"I FIGURED IT OUT!!!"
"I can see that." You reply quietly. "Could you uh, elaborate please?"
"It makes no sense but it's clear as day! Every idiosyncrasy, every variation! It even explains why the Normbot programs do worse than Normbots with actual humanoid bodies! The trials all check out, the placebos did nothing, Technor agrees!"
"Uh… huh." You say, briefly considering if calling security would be a wise move. If you had any uncertainty about Wendy fitting into the 'mad science' culture of your research division they've been put to rest now.
"You said it yourself! Sinatron seems indistinguishable from Frank Sinatra. But not the real Frank Sinatra. He acts just like everyone who knows about Frank Sinatra thinks he would act! Sinatron had his entire logic circuits rewritten on the fly, just as he was revealed to the world. Tens of thousands of guests, Tens of millions of people watching the livestream, each and every one thinking 'oh my god, it's Frank Sinatra!'"
"So that would… mean…?"
"I told the interns I was bringing them in to test new advanced robots capable of real sentience and interpersonal communication. I changed nothing in the Normbot coding. I have seven Normbots already showing massive increases in processing power, and another twenty-two performing within statistical significance. Yesterday one of them asked me what its name was.
"If you want to make a robot sentient, you treat it like it's a real person."
You consider the way in which Norm slowly developed over time as you kept using him, then seemed to plateau and stop growing shortly after he started to call you Father. You think back to the countless, innumerable, unending times you have refused to acknowledge Norm as a child, offspring, or person that you made.
"...huh."
---
Wendy Wower has figured out the secret behind fully sapient AI! Rather than being a programming problem, it seems like all you have to do is treat them like they're people and… 'believe in them', for lack of a better term. Weird, isn't it? You've received widespread acclaim for discovering the secret, and you're pretty sure that history will record this as the moment that strong AI was cracked. Unfortunately Wendy is an extremely honest person, so when those books are written that horrific rap number will probably end up immortalized for all time. Begrudging congratulations have come in from Bakaemono, Funtelligence, and even ENCOM. You haven't released the actual process for doing so yet, but you could choose to do so any time if you wanted even more fame.
Public Opinion has increased!
DEI is now taken seriously by most academics and industry leaders!
Wendy Wower managed to make the single greatest breakthrough in robotics possibly ever. Again. And this time you didn't even steal the credit from her! Wendy gains +15 loyalty!
You're not exactly able to mass market the things yet. It's kind of contradictory to the entire concept to produce fully sapient AIs by the thousands if you need to anthropomorphize each of them individually.
Phineas and Ferb have repaired your Normbot hubs to full functionality! Your Normbots have given your Paramilitary Mongol Corps an additional +3 to all rolls against crime in Doofania!
"Develop Military AI" action unlocked! "Develop Civilian AI" action unlocked! "Develop Consumer AI" action unlocked! There may be some ethical concerns inherent in the act of selling intelligent artificial life!
'Do Some Introspection About Norm' action has changed!
'Spend time with Princess Java' personal action unlocked!
'Psychologically profile a target' DCs have dropped!
'Publish Your Findings' personal action unlocked!
Your musical, barring the awkward rap number, was a huge success! You gain 2 income!
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Lord Ultimus
Beautiful...
- Location
- Undisclosed Warehouse
Sweet. Let the Robot Revolution commence!
- Location
- Ivory Tower of Education
The Froggy Ninja
The Blade Will Never Die
Hot diggity shit. This probably all plays into how Toons work and the stuff the Imagination Institute is studying. Very interesting.
- Location
- The Hub
But seriously this is really good.
It is so nice to have a big project tree that just goes right for us with no drawbacks, especially with how problems have been popping up for us lately
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Lifeandlice
Practitioning side-character
- Location
- Usa
...holy shit. This was just sort of flatly amazing.
Well, besides the fact that this seems like something that would great to follow up on with the II, I wonder if this will finally kickstart people reaching out to us for collabs instead of us going for other people.
I mean, I guess Olympia reached out to us so they could talk to Hego, but we reached out to them first soooo
- Location
- Two hours away
- Pronouns
- He/Him
My immediate thought was John Wilkes Booth but it's more likely for one of Doof's Robo-Lincoln's to show up and do the deed.
Between Zootopia, the many anthropomorphic toons and the fact that trans-species transformations are well within P&F's abilities, calling Cadence a 'giraffe girl' raises… questions.
"Individuals aren't naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are...well...human beings."
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms, 1993.
As soon as he is unfrozen Doof is taking both of these.
Not keen on selling people, whether they come from a womb, egg, gestation tube or assembly line.
- Location
- Alabama
Is it time to go on a family vacation? Just our daughter, son, other daughter, and maybe wife if we feel up to it. And the crazy ancestor too. I'm sure he'd like to know how to make sentient golems.
Either way next turn should probably be talking with Princess Java and Sir Norm.
Either way next turn should probably be talking with Princess Java and Sir Norm.
Next turn Doof is busy being a Popsicle, so it's probably going to have to wait until Christmas for them.
- Location
- USA
Let's use the potion of haste on Doofsicle so he can do some introspection while he's stuck in his ice cube.
- Pronouns
- I He Him His
You know now that I think about it, this discovery has been starring us in the face this whole time. We all love this quest because of how Disney it is but it seems we have forgotten something important about what that means. The Disney theme song is "When You Wish Upon a Star" for crying out loud! And the movie that song comes from is Pinocchio. The Second Disney Animated film ever made! I think more than being an advancement in AI this is a lesson for all us. That no matter how much of a Shadowrun vibe this world has going for it with eldritch gods,advanced tech, and urban fantasy at its core this world was birthed from Disney tropes and stories. And that means there are powerful forces out there beyond the abilities of the genocidal monsters to understand as long as we remain true to we are underneath everything else, a Good Man!
BlueWerewolf25
The Dreamer
- Location
- Wouldn't You Like To Know?
- Pronouns
- He/His/Him
Modern problems require modern solutions!