[X] Throw himself back into finishing his work on the deep-contemplation engine - It's the whole reason he took that elixir. This is his last, best chance to put a stake in this godforsaken project. Additionally, this engine's prediction abilities have applications in safety validation, so it's possible that fixing it will help with the current situation. Even if it doesn't, if he just gets this done, all will be forgiven...
Tossing my vote at this one just to try to counterbalance the tendency of quests to just randomly jitter all over the place. Vote one, let's do thing A! Vote two, did you really want to do thing A? And then the viewpoint character ends up wandering all over the place like a cat chasing a laserpointer.
[X] Throw himself back into finishing his work on the deep-contemplation engine - It's the whole reason he took that elixir. This is his last, best chance to put a stake in this godforsaken project. Additionally, this engine's prediction abilities have applications in safety validation, so it's possible that fixing it will help with the current situation. Even if it doesn't, if he just gets this done, all will be forgiven...
Adhoc vote count started by Ralson on Jan 6, 2022 at 5:56 AM, finished with 14 posts and 14 votes.
[X] Throw himself back into finishing his work on the deep-contemplation engine - It's the whole reason he took that elixir. This is his last, best chance to put a stake in this godforsaken project. Additionally, this engine's prediction abilities have applications in safety validation, so it's possible that fixing it will help with the current situation. Even if it doesn't, if he just gets this done, all will be forgiven...
[X] Calm Down - This is starting to sound suspiciously like somebody else's problem. Just keep an eye on his messages. Eat at the dining hall. Do a little work on the engine. Work on his mech-golem. Argue on the internexus. Take a bath and commune with the five faces of God...
[X] Calm Down. Eat something. Somebody Else's problem. If they wanted to involve you, they would've. If it was a problem, they'd have sent out an alert.
[X] sorry if I look funny, been trying to finish a project by deadline and it's proving to be a rather large pain to the point where I have been loosing sleep just trying to meet said deadline. Almost got to the point of skipping meals as well before I remembered I need food so I came down here for subsistence as well as to clear my head before getting back into my work.
[X] Throw himself directly into figuring out what's happening... seems like other folks don't quite have a grasp on what's really going on either, so I might be cause for at least some alarm until the situation is understood or under control. Don't forget to blink!
We are already riding the lightning. We might as well ride it to our destination. God, did you feel that? See that? Something moved outside. Go get it, count how many wings it has. It might be important to finishing your deep-contemplation engi- no wait this is the drug talking
This isn't some tablet of amphetamines or a ball of hashish. It's industrial alchemy. It's altered the aspects of his body's mana, diverted the channels it runs through, and changed the character of his personal nexus.
Dragons are engines of magical energy, and this one's been sport-tuned.
Zalan hurries home to his lair and looks at himself in the mirror.
Hmm. That's new.
He's only resorted to alchemy this powerful on a few occasions, and never seen or felt its effects manifest quite like this. It's not an altogether pleasant experience, but none of this has been.
He feels like he's balanced on the edge of a sword. If he loses his balance for a moment, he'll be cut. But the more he maintains his focus, the stronger it becomes. Stronger, more pure, and better able to maintain itself. The process hungrily drains mana from his Core, but that's not a problem. His spirit is tapped into the arcology's power distribution.
He accesses the terminal module of his Crown node. This, too, feels different. Given the way the node is manifesting a burning black aura, that shouldn't surprise him, but if he can't commune with his development environment, this will all have been a waste of time.
He marches back to his workshop. He takes a meditative position, establishes synchronization with his equipment, and his fears evaporate. Soon, he forgets all about them. There's so much that doesn't matter. Zalan prunes it away, pouring more and more of that razor-sharp Focus into his project.
It's not quick. It takes time just to pick up the pieces where he left them. But he can do it.
In a trickle, and then all at once, Zalan gets it.
It's no wonder the answers would slide out between his claws every time he squeezed. Zalan had succombed to four-dimensional thinking in a system of at least six. The engine can't see the future, only glimpse at an array of possible futures to build a heuristic, and those futures were themselves influenced by interventions from planar space.
He might've still gotten it, under normal circumstances. But the "normal" readings he was using to calibrate were anything but. They already reflected second-order effects of events he didn't realize clouded the future. Events that are now unfolding, sitting inside the time horizon for the past month or more.
Perhaps some towering genius could touch the faces of God and unravel the entire tangle of error bars clouding the future, but Zalan is just a dragon with last minute panic so powerful it's manifested physically. Instead, he'll build his models based on archived information, and prune any from less than a month ago.
Excluding the present biases against the present, whispers a doubt.
"The present's abnormal," he says, hopefully not out loud but he isn't sure.
You don't actually understand what's happening.
"No. I don't think anyone does. But we soon will."
---
Spirits are magic constructs capable of independent response to stimuli. These can form naturally, gain sentience, even sapience. Or they can be manufactured and taught to think deeply in accordance with specific rules yet have no selfhood at all. The deep-contemplation engine Zalan's been working on is as far into the latter category as possible. A physical substrate of anchors, artifacts, and crystal latticework that can spring up a cluster of unfeeling spirits, to dutifully apply vast powers of analysis with neither curiosity nor doubt.
It's a fantastic tool as long as you never make a mistake.
In a way, his own thought process is feeling similar. He silenced his self-doubt to get this far. He has no room for it.
It approaches zen. Thought without thought...
---
A muffled alarm wakes Zalan up.
He fumbles to turn it off, but nothing works. His limb drifts slowly against resistance like he's still dreaming. His spirit's construct modules are like a limb that's fallen asleep, tasting like static. The non-construct parts of his spirit aren't faring much better.
"Buhhh...?"
He's floating in his tub. He doesn't remember anything about how he got here. Everything is wrong and far away.
With supreme effort, he attunes his thoughts with his personal attendant module...
[Autosummarization is active.]
{Kezey}: Oh, you retrained the engine. Nice! [...] Wait, are you sure you did this right? [...] I know we didn't have time for a full review but did you not pick any of this up during testing? {Kezey}: Zalan what did you dooooo?
{Zalan}: What? What's going on?
{Kezey}: As soon as it cycled up it started producing all sorts of weird reports... and these crazy predictions any time they'd run a [Monte Carlo]!
{Zalan}: Oh.
{Kezey}: I tried to explain it hadn't been properly tested but the Augury section freaked out and now they're trying to shut down the entire you-know-what project.
{Zalan}: Oh. {Zalan}: Actually, I don't know what because I didn't need to know, remember?
{Zalan}: Wait what do you mean "trying"?
{Kezey}: I mean! {Kezey}: There's a lot of energy to bleed off. {Kezey}: A LOT!
Zalan lifts his head enough for the water to drain from his ears.
"-significant possibility of significant Etheric flux. As a precautionary measure, all students proceed to shelters in a disciplined manner."
Perhaps we could better understand the situation before running for cover? There might be something we can do to help. Or rather, something we should do to help.
can you even move or are you to burned out to get out of the tub?
Because if you're stuck tell your friend you guess you're going to die and go back to sleep because fuck it, if everything is going to hell then you might as well be comfortable while everything burns around you.
[X] Sounds like you should also check if anything is wrong with your body, after that crazy coked up manic session. Chances are whatever you did that you don't remember is either going to turn out bad or good but you can't do much about it now.
It was always intended as a multi-purpose machine...
Most of the work Zalan did was interfacing a cauldron of spells and modules together which other people designed. It's certainly not impossible it was made to do things he doesn't understand in the slightest. Technically, it's guaranteed, since it includes individual components he doesn't understand. But he's a little skeptical that he was the unwitting lynchpin of some sinister plot.
It is possible. He can't rule it out. Perhaps he's about to be scapegoated with a black mark on his honor he won't escape for centuries. But simultaneously, he's faced with the equally terrifying possibility that it's performing exactly to spec, and the reason it keeps returning signs of some massive fuckup is that someone fucked up massively.
How humiliating to contemplate Tieran-Sha being there at the moment Zalan's towers crumbled down. Would his friend brave the impropriety of invading his lair? He would if he felt Zalan's life were in danger...
It's not that you ever should consume an energy field larger than your head. It's that sometimes you have to.
And anyway, he didn't consume that much. He'd have burst into flames...
(Wait. Is that what the tub is about? He sure hopes not!)
Regardless, he does regret the timing. If he'd overcharged himself earlier, while he had more time and while he was still rested...
Well, he didn't, and now his mana channels feel like a sewer.
Multiple Suggestions said:
[X] Check that engine. Your work can't have been wrong!
Shoving his face back into that is the last thing he wants to do right now. Fear of failure got him this far, but Zalan is growing more exhausted than he is scared. Telling himself that victory was at hand was how he kept pushing himself harder. Planting his flag, only to get right back to work, feels almost like a betrayal of the self. Tracking down faults in the logic of the engine's spirit might take hours. It might take days.
"hhhhh," he wheezes.
Fine. He will, at least, look at what the engine is doing.
Zalan shakily towels himself off, then drags himself once again to the workshop, leaving wet pawprints. He sips some lukewarm tea and feels it turn to ash in his mouth.
If the tea's purification effects were a person, they'd approach him with a clipboard and a hardhat, let out a sigh, and shake their head.
Embarrassingly, Zalan's having trouble interpreting the results of his own machine. It's making predictions, alright, and a lot of the graphs with extremely scary looking exponential growth curves, but aside from "not good," he has difficulty translating this into coherent physical events. And what he thinks he knows, he doesn't feel confident about. There's so much he lacks the expertise to process meaningfully.
He did a pile of research to understand this job, but that's not the same as what a specialist would know. He needs time to dig into the literature, and meanwhile the emergency alert un-silences itself every few minutes.
However, what he isn't seeing is any sign that he made a serious mistake. He can't be sure without a thorough audit, but if some module were spitting out garbage which poisoned the spirit machine's thought process, or otherwise failing to interface in some dramatic fashion, he should have seen it by now.
His work isn't wrong! Probably.
He rubs some of the sleep from his eyes, and finally notices that some of the reports that the Augury department generated using his engine are appended with comments.
-analysis broken impossible returns
-???
-Even if this engine is untrustworthy, it highlights that Portal Dynamics never should have proceeded without thorough analysis by a trustworthy one.
-look either this things busted or we should call the air guard
-Could COMPLETELY invert planar defense magick for [100 kilometers] approximate. Could lower <kQ> so far any street magician could open a worldgate. We could be dealing with a hyperspace incursion within an hour. Worse than the old days.
[x] now, zalan, i don't want to encourage you to panic about the status of your academic career, but uh
what are the likely ramifications of you being responsible for naughty extradimensional beings crashing the party like some kind of, i dunno, resonance cascade event of some kind
