I'm still not entirely convinced the Incubators "invented" the contract; seems more likely to me that they cobbled it together from other sources, whether it be crazy coobies spontaneously developing raw magic or outside, arcane-using species/civilizations. The QB Hivemind noticed something in there that violated thermodynamics, then paperclip-maximized it until we have the modern contract.
Okay, so that is the Incubators inventing the contract, and I'm just being pedantic. My point is, I don't believe they came up with it all by themselves.
I think I'm finally achieving my dream of answering to any serious question anyone has in the thread with quotes of my shitposts:
Lol
Crazy tinfoil hat time
Kyubey Collective is a Meguca from the previous iteration of the multiverse
In the previous system, there were no Incubators to regulate the Contracts, so everyone was making Wishes to the universe itself
Only they didn't Witch Out, they became Soulless after exhausting the finite amount of emotions they possessed after the Contract
And then they hunted other humans and devoured their emotions
So a normie came up with a plan to create a system, where the process would be regulated
They Wished to create such a system, and then retroactively became Soulless with a drive to regulate it, but without any memories about it
Law of Hope and Despair, everyone
They still need emotions to subsist, so they drain them from Witches
I'm pretty sure that's exactly how the plot of Mass Effect 3 was written.
To be serious, I think Coobies didn't find magic, magic found them.
Okay, actually serious this time:
1) Emotions create magic
2) Coobies claim to not have emotions by and large
3) Insane Coobies are probably killed on sight for not conforming to the collective, though they also could be experimented on, I guess.
That leaves three most plausible scenarios:
1) Emotionless wasn't always their race's defining treat, they've developed it in process of their transcoobieist evolution, which means that they know what magic from the records of what
they could do, and now they socially engineer sentient species around the universe to conform to the earlier records of their own race in order to create the necessary conditions to a magic-wielding society. That would explain how they establish contracts and know about magic in the first place, they wielded it before, but now they can't, though they still can draw magic out in others via their own magic of
friendship scummery and lies by omission.
2) They met magic-wielding species and reverse-engineered their technology, otherwise, see 1.
3) Yeah, the shitpost above. Someone could have
created them for this explicit purpose: combat entropy by throwing magic at it. Could be a precursor race, could be someone on Madokami's level who despaired and fought against the heat death of the universe, could be Incubators are just enforcers of some kinda fascist intergalactic empire that powers it's engines of industry by literal manifestation of suffering and despair.
Like, the thing is, it doesn't look like a situation that has developed naturally: a space-faring race discovering a type of energy that they specifically cannot harness by themselves in any meaningful way. Like, how did they discover it in the first place, for starters?
