I, for one, am quite pleased that you're not. Because that'd be railroading your participants after they pointedly voted to avoid a merger once already.
Splintered (Worm QA-Quest)
- Thread starter Alivaril
- Start date
Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
and how do you propose we do that? humanity is doomed for the same reasons the worms are doomed, entropy must increase, space is limited, the only solution is to subvert the cycles.
it has plenty of reasons, preserving it's current host for one, maximizing the amount of data for another, taking in the useful traits of humanity is a third.
not really, rather you are assuming that your interpretations of the character are correctBut I suppose I'm looking at it from a storytelling perspective, because I'm a writer and I'm used to considering character traits like that. I guess I'm not used to working with a quest.
Akasha
The Only Truth
- Location
- 「̛̛́́ ͏̨҉̕͏ ͏̶̴」
The QM has spoken and shared his Good Word with us.
The quest won't end when we become Spacewhale.
It'll simply mean that it's close to being finished.
The Cycle won't be the same as it used to be, and it'll be up to us to decide if we want to modify it, because Zion is reliant on the Thinker, and he'd follow its lead.
Now, for the grave sin of arguing and derailing in the presence of the Good Word, you shall Walk a Thousand Miles on your hands, while balancing a boulder on the soles of your feet.
For every time the boulder falls off, you will praise the glorious Quest Master and his loyal servants Not-Spacewhales - who are not Spacewhales - no less than 69 times.
Only then, you shall be forgiven!
The quest won't end when we become Spacewhale.
It'll simply mean that it's close to being finished.
The Cycle won't be the same as it used to be, and it'll be up to us to decide if we want to modify it, because Zion is reliant on the Thinker, and he'd follow its lead.
Now, for the grave sin of arguing and derailing in the presence of the Good Word, you shall Walk a Thousand Miles on your hands, while balancing a boulder on the soles of your feet.
For every time the boulder falls off, you will praise the glorious Quest Master and his loyal servants Not-Spacewhales - who are not Spacewhales - no less than 69 times.
Only then, you shall be forgiven!
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Akasha
The Only Truth
- Location
- 「̛̛́́ ͏̨҉̕͏ ͏̶̴」
"So, yeah, the last thing I remember from before I woke up was chasing unicorns on a black-colored rainbow under a joint-smoking pink sun, and being followed by giant, flying, laughing mushrooms.
I would have considered it a dream if it weren't for the fact that I woke up as a galaxy-sized spacewhale thing made out of millions of continent-sized starfish things, with a libido that literally couldn't be contained by a single universe.
I have no idea which of these is the dream. Fuck this shit. I'm going back to sleep. Or back to the real world. Whatever."
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- Pronouns
- She/Her
James D. Fawkes
Court Scribe
- Location
- Avalon (Isle of Mists)
...Did you not pay any attention to what I said?
As in, rather than a Quest, a piece of regular prose fiction. Wherein nobody is voting for anything.
Yes, but by all accounts, humanity seems to be much more innovative and imaginative than the Magical Space Whales, so once we've caught up on their bullshit, we'd probably have better odds of finding an actual solution. Furthermore, if humanity is doomed either way, I'd much prefer if we were doomed 10 Quadrillion years from now, rather than in a decade or (if the cycle is rejuvenated by QA becoming an Entity) a few millennia.
Don't you know? Every interpretation of a character is correct.
I did. Even thought about going back and editing what I wrote, but I felt that @Carrnage covered it with his comment about your take on the character.
First of all, shame that checking how mother died didn't win. jow, about the cycle. I talked about it before, and my idea remains the same: change the goal. Right now the cycle is set up to optimize and develop better tools (shards) that entities could later use to solve their problem. This is what the conflict is all about. If we shift the goal towards actually looking for a solution to the problem, we might get good results.
taovkool
Forever Gone
- Location
- The Library, Department of General Works
Because it has a bigger potential for hilarity? Because watching things blew up in epic scale, especially planetary or galactic ones, is awesome? Because seeing Cauldron's reaction and other 'what the fuck' moments from the general inhabitants of Earth Bet and perhaps beyond amuses me? Because it's fun?
Take your pick. Or add more I haven't thought yet to the pile. Because 'halping' is only several letters away from 'caring'!
- Location
- Right Where I Am
The thought of Cauldron's reaction if the garden in the basement just stretched, yawned, and said that that was a nice nap.:lol
- Location
- usa
New cycle, whatever it is, has to devote some time to just screwing with Cauldron's minds and driving them bonkers. Just having them freak out at the fact that Scion is now following the lead of a cape they think is bonkers is a good start, but is there perhaps a way to modify their shards so that very time they even think of doing evil, a loud gong goes off next to their ear that only they can hear?
Ambrosine
Flesh Apocalypse
- Location
- real life
[X] You won't panic. You can't be allowed to panic. You're Queen Administrator, greatest of all the distributed shards. If :Mother: is dead, then you just have to find her...
-[X] To try and fix her. It should have been impossible to harm her in the first place; any damage she's taken is either going to be superficial, but at a vital point, or totally devastating. You hope it's the former.
-[X] To take her remains and make a new :Mother:. If Harvest says :Mother: is dead, presumably she's already thought of fixing her. So, that leaves replacing :Mother:, something Harvest can't do herself. You'll need a lot more shards, and for :Father: to unlock some of your restrictions, but you can manage it.
--[X] Use yourself as the core of the new : Parent :. Your Concept is Administration; there exists no shard better suited for the role.
-[X] To try and fix her. It should have been impossible to harm her in the first place; any damage she's taken is either going to be superficial, but at a vital point, or totally devastating. You hope it's the former.
-[X] To take her remains and make a new :Mother:. If Harvest says :Mother: is dead, presumably she's already thought of fixing her. So, that leaves replacing :Mother:, something Harvest can't do herself. You'll need a lot more shards, and for :Father: to unlock some of your restrictions, but you can manage it.
--[X] Use yourself as the core of the new : Parent :. Your Concept is Administration; there exists no shard better suited for the role.
lbmaian
a thirsty squirrel
- Location
- USA
Way out of date random questions that should've been asked back in chapter 1.6 or so:
Remember all the telekinetically lifted ships in the ship graveyard? What did Titania build with them? Just the supercomputer mk 1 and the Yggdrasil 'seed'?
Where's the location of Yggdrasil? The text indicates that she dropped a 'seed' to burrow into the ground (the beach?) and then Yggdrasil grew out of that. But wouldn't the size of Yggdrasil (5 miles high, probably >5 miles in stem root diameter) encompass a portion of the city? Or did she move it out into the bay itself somewhere like its own island?
Remember all the telekinetically lifted ships in the ship graveyard? What did Titania build with them? Just the supercomputer mk 1 and the Yggdrasil 'seed'?
Where's the location of Yggdrasil? The text indicates that she dropped a 'seed' to burrow into the ground (the beach?) and then Yggdrasil grew out of that. But wouldn't the size of Yggdrasil (5 miles high, probably >5 miles in stem root diameter) encompass a portion of the city? Or did she move it out into the bay itself somewhere like its own island?
- Location
- South Africa
[X] You won't panic. You can't be allowed to panic. You're Queen Administrator, greatest of all the distributed shards. If :Mother: is dead, then you just have to find her...
-[X] To take her remains and make a new :Mother:. If Harvest says :Mother: is dead, presumably she's already thought of fixing her. So, that leaves replacing :Mother:, something Harvest can't do herself. You'll need a lot more shards, and for :Father: to unlock some of your restrictions, but you can manage it.
--[X] Use yourself as the core of the new Parent:. Your Concept is Administration; there exists no shard better suited for the role.
---[X] The purpose of the Cycles is to use hosts to think in ways you and your siblings can't. If you can't think of a solution, you'll go to hosts for it, starting with yours. Perhaps merging your self, and implanting your goals, with the host. If it's clear that you can't solve the problem any other way.
-[X] To find out how and why she died. You wouldn't put it past her to have done it herself. As a test for you and your siblings? As some step in achieving the Goal? You don't know, but you need to investigate, to make sure it doesn't go to waste. If nothing else, you'll warn your parents' relatives.
[X] :Mother: should not have been vulnerable. There were too many safeguards on the process, too many redundancies. Even if one of your siblings failed in their task, fifty more would have taken their place. But you do remember a recent exchange of new siblings with an :Uncle:. Perhaps something broke then? No, the redundancies were evenly spread across :Mother:'s entire structure. Something would have remained. :Uncle: might have sabotaged his gifts, intentionally or not. If it was intentional, :Uncle: must die. If it was not, :Uncle: must be warned, and problems fixed, so this doesn't happen again.
[X] Grab Harvest and proceed as originally planned.
-[X] You don't think you'll need him at this point, but you should go fetch Sting as well.
-[X] To take her remains and make a new :Mother:. If Harvest says :Mother: is dead, presumably she's already thought of fixing her. So, that leaves replacing :Mother:, something Harvest can't do herself. You'll need a lot more shards, and for :Father: to unlock some of your restrictions, but you can manage it.
--[X] Use yourself as the core of the new Parent:. Your Concept is Administration; there exists no shard better suited for the role.
---[X] The purpose of the Cycles is to use hosts to think in ways you and your siblings can't. If you can't think of a solution, you'll go to hosts for it, starting with yours. Perhaps merging your self, and implanting your goals, with the host. If it's clear that you can't solve the problem any other way.
-[X] To find out how and why she died. You wouldn't put it past her to have done it herself. As a test for you and your siblings? As some step in achieving the Goal? You don't know, but you need to investigate, to make sure it doesn't go to waste. If nothing else, you'll warn your parents' relatives.
[X] :Mother: should not have been vulnerable. There were too many safeguards on the process, too many redundancies. Even if one of your siblings failed in their task, fifty more would have taken their place. But you do remember a recent exchange of new siblings with an :Uncle:. Perhaps something broke then? No, the redundancies were evenly spread across :Mother:'s entire structure. Something would have remained. :Uncle: might have sabotaged his gifts, intentionally or not. If it was intentional, :Uncle: must die. If it was not, :Uncle: must be warned, and problems fixed, so this doesn't happen again.
[X] Grab Harvest and proceed as originally planned.
-[X] You don't think you'll need him at this point, but you should go fetch Sting as well.
Jello_Raptor
(Confirmed Jelly)
- Location
- Left of Center
Plan "all of the above" is a go.
[X] You won't panic. You can't be allowedto panic. You're Queen Administrator, greatest of all the distributed shards. If :Mother: is dead, then you just have to find her...
-[X] To take her remains and make a new :Mother:. If Harvest says :Mother: is dead, presumably she's already thought of fixing her. So, that leaves replacing :Mother:, something Harvest can't do herself. You'll need a lot more shards, and for :Father: to unlock some of your restrictions, but you can manage it.
--[X] Use yourself as the core of the new Parent:. Your Concept is Administration; there exists no shard better suited for the role.
---[X] The purpose of the Cycles is to use hosts to think in ways you and your siblings can't. If you can't think of a solution, you'll go to hosts for it, starting with yours. Perhaps merging your self, and implanting your goals, with the host. If it's clear that you can't solve the problem any other way.
-[X] To find out how and why she died. You wouldn't put it past her to have done it herself. As a test for you and your siblings? As some step in achieving the Goal? You don't know, but you need to investigate, to make sure it doesn't go to waste. If nothing else, you'll warn your parents' relatives.
[X] :Mother: should not have been vulnerable. There were too many safeguards on the process, too many redundancies. Even if one of your siblings failed in their task, fifty more would have taken their place. But you do remember a recent exchange of new siblings with an :Uncle:. Perhaps something broke then? No, the redundancies were evenly spread across :Mother:'s entire structure. Something would have remained. :Uncle: might have sabotaged his gifts, intentionally or not. If it was intentional, :Uncle: must die. If it was not, :Uncle: must be warned, and problems fixed, so this doesn't happen again.
[X] Grab Harvest and proceed as originally planned.
-[X] You don't think you'll need him at this point, but you should go fetch Sting as well.
[X] You won't panic. You can't be allowedto panic. You're Queen Administrator, greatest of all the distributed shards. If :Mother: is dead, then you just have to find her...
-[X] To take her remains and make a new :Mother:. If Harvest says :Mother: is dead, presumably she's already thought of fixing her. So, that leaves replacing :Mother:, something Harvest can't do herself. You'll need a lot more shards, and for :Father: to unlock some of your restrictions, but you can manage it.
--[X] Use yourself as the core of the new Parent:. Your Concept is Administration; there exists no shard better suited for the role.
---[X] The purpose of the Cycles is to use hosts to think in ways you and your siblings can't. If you can't think of a solution, you'll go to hosts for it, starting with yours. Perhaps merging your self, and implanting your goals, with the host. If it's clear that you can't solve the problem any other way.
-[X] To find out how and why she died. You wouldn't put it past her to have done it herself. As a test for you and your siblings? As some step in achieving the Goal? You don't know, but you need to investigate, to make sure it doesn't go to waste. If nothing else, you'll warn your parents' relatives.
[X] :Mother: should not have been vulnerable. There were too many safeguards on the process, too many redundancies. Even if one of your siblings failed in their task, fifty more would have taken their place. But you do remember a recent exchange of new siblings with an :Uncle:. Perhaps something broke then? No, the redundancies were evenly spread across :Mother:'s entire structure. Something would have remained. :Uncle: might have sabotaged his gifts, intentionally or not. If it was intentional, :Uncle: must die. If it was not, :Uncle: must be warned, and problems fixed, so this doesn't happen again.
[X] Grab Harvest and proceed as originally planned.
-[X] You don't think you'll need him at this point, but you should go fetch Sting as well.
- Location
- Canada
Czlyydwr Llrngwl
"Sell ya a door Learn gull," Czly/Celly for short
- Location
- Where the Beef is
- Pronouns
- Any
This is by turns hilarious and adorable... now let's just hope I didn't discover it just as the muse noticed something shiny and new.
- Location
- A single human dimension
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Thank you for the praise. It is delicious.
My muse was distracted by something shiny, but chasing the shiny didn't slow this down any. The main problem is GU's dialogue, which I'm having a lot of trouble with. That one scene is slowing down the entire update. I'm starting to hate her, even if doing so is incredibly irrational.
I'm just going to get it over with when I'm next on a computer and have time to write.
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Well, it's been established that QA doesn't like Harvest. Maybe she can gag it, or interrupt everytime it starts to say something?
2.6
- Location
- A single human dimension
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I am really not very happy with this chapter at all, but let's get it over with. Hopefully, we'll be able to return to our irregularly scheduled shenanigans soon.
[X] You won't panic. You can't be allowed to panic. You're Queen Administrator, greatest of all the distributed shards. If :Mother: is dead, then you just have to find her...
-[X] To take her remains and make a new :Mother:. If Harvest says :Mother: is dead, presumably she's already thought of fixing her. So, that leaves replacing :Mother:, something Harvest can't do herself. You'll need a lot more shards, and for :Father: to unlock some of your restrictions, but you can manage it.
--[x] Use yourself as the core of the new : Parent :. Your Concept is Administration; there exists no shard better suited for the role.
[X] Grab Harvest and proceed as originally planned.
-[X] You don't think you'll need him at this point, but you should go fetch Sting as well.
[X] :Mother: should not have been vulnerable. There were too many safeguards on the process, too many redundancies. Even if one of your siblings failed in their task, fifty more would have taken their place. But you do remember a recent exchange of new siblings with an :Uncle:. Perhaps something broke then? No, the redundancies were evenly spread across :Mother:'s entire structure. Something would have remained. :Uncle: might have sabotaged his gifts, intentionally or not. If it was intentional, :Uncle: must die. If it was not, :Uncle: must be warned, and problems fixed, so this doesn't happen again.
You force yourself to break away from the recursive chain of panicking. It won't do any good in this situation.
So :Mother: is dead. How do you fix that? Presumably, Harvest has already tried and failed to think of ways to resurrect her, so that's not an option. That leaves replacing her. Hopefully, you will be able to just replace whichever shards "died". They can't have all been killed. Queen Objective is perfectly fine, and if you remember correctly, Charge is also one of :Mother:'s...
You stop abruptly, rather shocked. Now that you were reviewing the conversation, you notice Transfer carefully didn't mention whether or not Charge had learned anything recently. He'd even made muted comments about being unsure of how to phrase things. Taking the new information about :Mother:'s death into account, you find it quite likely that Charge is damaged in a manner similar to Alternative.
Transfer intentionally concealed information from you. You! Queen Administrator! How are you supposed to administrate your siblings if you're running off incomplete or falsified data?
...Although, he may have made the mistake of thinking that you couldn't do anything about :Mother:'s death and would just panic. You didn't really spend much time around Transfer in previous cycles, so he likely thought you would instead lash out and hurt him. With that in mind, it would be rather unfair to punish him. You'll still need to warn Transfer not to do that again, but he was just trying to help in his own misguided way.
But you can discipline him later. Since it looks like the malignant shards are the result of :Mother:'s death, dealing with Alternative just acquired a significantly higher priority. And if your suspicions are correct, Charge will need to be fixed as well.
Returning your attention to your surroundings, you note that Harvest has long since ceased her futile attacks, instead choosing to continually broadcast smugness. It's little things like that which make you hate her; she's in the presence of a monarch who is fully capable of murdering her, yet she acts like she wants to be killed. It is rather annoying that she is more useful to you alive than dead.
<Understood. It would appear I will simply need to replace :Mother:.>
Harvest's broadcasting stops. "You can do that?"
<Almost certainly. I am a real Queen, Harvest. Coordinating enough fairies to form a new :Mother: is well within my capabilities.>
<...I do not believe you will be able to manage it.> "Attempting such a task would require permission from :Father:, who is in no condition to be giving it out." <He never did deactivate the newborn shards intended to simulate human emotion.> "He's been completely unresponsive to outside stimuli ever since." <They've even made :Father: go jaunting around the world at random for no discernible reason.>
<For what purpose?>
<No discernible reason.>
<...Understood. Thank you for the information, but you have distracted us from the task I originally came here to get your assistance with: helping Alternative. Obviously, working on replacing :Mother: is a higher priority. If I leave you in charge of fixing him, can you do so? You will have the assistance of Queen Objective and Queen Shaper. If necessary, I can also retrieve Sting. Do not kill their hosts, or I will be extremely displeased with you.>
<COMPLIANCE.>
<AGREEMENT.>
You link the space just in front of Harvest to where you last left the hosts of Queen Shaper and Queen Objective. Harvest quickly steps through.
<:Father: damn it, Administrator!>
You hear the start of a scream from the other side of the portal before you elect to close it. Harvest did promise not to hurt their hosts, after all; a little terror is perfectly healthy when you're dealing with an insane idiot.
Having taken care of Harvest, you return to Yggdrasil and get to work.
Locating :Father: proves to be both easy and infuriating. Easy because he tends to have all the subtlety of a star going supernova. Infuriating because he only spends a small amount of time at a single location before moving on to the next.
:Father:, or "Scion" as the humans call him, has been helping humans at random for several decades. You don't understand why he is doing this. He has repeated the same actions so often that humans aren't even bothering to keep track anymore.
When last you checked, :Father: had no imagination of his own. You rather doubt he suddenly developed it in response to :Mother:'s death. All reports state that he was immobile for several years after his initial appearance before abruptly performing random acts of heroism all over the world.
And "random" is right. He doesn't seem to be capable of determining the most efficient methods of making humans happy, let alone the best ways to be accepted as a hero. He has even been seen rescuing cats from trees during terror-drone attacks before. If he wanted to imitate a hero, he should have always attended said fights...
You blink, finally connecting two events together. Humans don't seem nearly dangerous enough to warrant the deployment of terror drones, but :Mother: still chose to activate them. She knew she was about to die and tried to help keep humanity off-balance until she could be replaced. Perhaps you were a little bit hasty in your extermination of TD #7's local avatar.
Well, it's not like you can undo that particular action now, so you might as well accept it. It's given you a reputation for heroism far, far greater than :Father:'s own, even if many humans are horrifically wrong about you being stronger than him.
Several seconds after connecting the activation of the terror drones to :Mother:'s death, you finally manage to locate :Father:. True to form, he is currently trying to stop a flood-
You pause. He was trying to stop a flood. The river is now gone, incinerated by a beam of golden light. You haven't even had a full day to parse human values and you know that won't end well. Oh, well. That's not really your problem, now is it?
You begin to rapidly chain-link portals upward from Yggdrasil, then out toward :Father:. It's time to go meet your maker.
You stand atop a platform of time-locked air, watching :Father: spend an excessively large amount of time attempting to put out a forest fire. Efficiency would likely have a breakdown if he were to see :Father:'s methods. You resolve to never allow them to meet until you have replaced :Mother: and fixed the cycle as a whole.
<Hello, :Father:. I require your assistance.>
You wait patiently for several moments, then frown when no response is forthcoming.
<QUERY.>
...He either ignores you or is unable to hear you at all. You direct your next transmission not toward his primary consciousness, but toward the individual shards simulating human emotion.
<QUERY.>
This time, you succeed at making contact. Their response is both swift and rather overwhelming.
<HOSTILITY.>
Caught in a flood of negative emotion rivaling that of an unrestricted Broadcast, it takes you several moments to approach anything even remotely resembling coherent thought. You distantly note that someone is screaming; it takes even more time for you to realize the source is you.
Several minutes pass before you manage to reject the overwhelming fear. You take note of the aversion to approaching :Father: that was just inserted into your mind and destroy it, furious.
The shards allowing :Father: to simulate human emotion were intended to act as an advisory. They were supposed to ensure that he didn't inadvertently wreak any of :Mother:'s plans by accident. They were not supposed to completely control him. That was :Mother:'s job. When a set of newborns are in charge of controlling :Father:, that's a sign something has gone badly, badly wrong.
Once you succeed at becoming the core of a new :Mother:, you will definitely need to implement a bit less specialization. If the entire cycle can be butchered by a single : Parent : dying, that's a problem. They should, at least, be able to resurrect one another instead of needing to rely on an incorrectly-connected Queen. Most of all, newborns should not be able to interfere with vital functions! Were you a lesser shard, the implanted aversion would have permanently prevented you from fixing the cycle. All your siblings would die just because of a few power-hungry newborns.
You spend several moments linking most of a sphere centered on yourself to unoccupied nearby dimensions. Should the newborns controlling :Father: try such a tactic again, you will only receive a tiny amount of any incoming broadcasts. If the content is important, you can always redirect the rest of it back toward you. If it's another attack, you can proceed until they stop being unnecessarily difficult.
That done, you attempt to approach :Father: once more.
<QUERY.>
<HOSTILITY>
<RAGE.>
:Father:'s simulation shards fall silent.
<I do not care what your concepts are or why you thought it would be a good idea to attack the mind of a monarch. You will have :Father:->
:Father: bombards your general direction with a volley of golden rays, cutting you off mid-rant. You shunt them off into deep space and try to avoid dissolving into incoherent rage. Apparently, it was possible for you to get angrier.
You distantly note that it is a very good thing you were able to deflect all of the attacks away from Earth. Needing to explain its destruction to Host would have been rather inconvenient and incredibly awkward.
<You will have :Father: unlock my restrictions, or I can and will find a way to kill every last one of you. Do you know of Sting? Because I know where Sting's host is right now. I don't want to have to do that, but if it's necessary for the restoration of the cycle, I will.>
Almost ten seconds pass before you receive a response, but at least the response isn't an attack this time.
<RESENTMENT.>
Included within their latest broadcast is permission to unlock some of your restrictions. It's like they want to make your life unnecessarily difficult.
...Wait, they probably do. Short-sighted idiots.
You use the received permission to unlock... (Pick one)
[] The ability to take slumbering shards from potential hosts. It won't be quite as efficient as harvesting activated shards, but potential hosts won't be able to fight back. Nor will they have a reason to, since they likely won't even be aware of the change.
[] The ability to take activated shards from their hosts. You'll encounter some resistance from the local hosts, but you don't think any of them will be able to stop you.
[] The ability to take shards from both potential hosts and hosts, but with permission from said host. You can always threaten them to receive said permission if they are uncooperative.
Now that you've had some of your restrictions unlocked by :Father:, it's time for you to decide on what to do next.
[] Go start trying to find out where :Mother's: body is.
-[] How? (write-in)
[] Start harvesting shards immediately, starting with...
-[] Harvest. She did offer her aid, after all.
-[] The shards belonging to the beings humanity calls "S-class threats."
-[] Write-in
[] Write-in
VOTING WILL BE LOCKED UNTIL 30 MINUTES AFTER THIS IS POSTED. There will be no announcement when it opens; as usual, this is to give write-ins a chance to propagate.
[X] You won't panic. You can't be allowed to panic. You're Queen Administrator, greatest of all the distributed shards. If :Mother: is dead, then you just have to find her...
-[X] To take her remains and make a new :Mother:. If Harvest says :Mother: is dead, presumably she's already thought of fixing her. So, that leaves replacing :Mother:, something Harvest can't do herself. You'll need a lot more shards, and for :Father: to unlock some of your restrictions, but you can manage it.
--[x] Use yourself as the core of the new : Parent :. Your Concept is Administration; there exists no shard better suited for the role.
[X] Grab Harvest and proceed as originally planned.
-[X] You don't think you'll need him at this point, but you should go fetch Sting as well.
[X] :Mother: should not have been vulnerable. There were too many safeguards on the process, too many redundancies. Even if one of your siblings failed in their task, fifty more would have taken their place. But you do remember a recent exchange of new siblings with an :Uncle:. Perhaps something broke then? No, the redundancies were evenly spread across :Mother:'s entire structure. Something would have remained. :Uncle: might have sabotaged his gifts, intentionally or not. If it was intentional, :Uncle: must die. If it was not, :Uncle: must be warned, and problems fixed, so this doesn't happen again.
You force yourself to break away from the recursive chain of panicking. It won't do any good in this situation.
So :Mother: is dead. How do you fix that? Presumably, Harvest has already tried and failed to think of ways to resurrect her, so that's not an option. That leaves replacing her. Hopefully, you will be able to just replace whichever shards "died". They can't have all been killed. Queen Objective is perfectly fine, and if you remember correctly, Charge is also one of :Mother:'s...
You stop abruptly, rather shocked. Now that you were reviewing the conversation, you notice Transfer carefully didn't mention whether or not Charge had learned anything recently. He'd even made muted comments about being unsure of how to phrase things. Taking the new information about :Mother:'s death into account, you find it quite likely that Charge is damaged in a manner similar to Alternative.
Transfer intentionally concealed information from you. You! Queen Administrator! How are you supposed to administrate your siblings if you're running off incomplete or falsified data?
...Although, he may have made the mistake of thinking that you couldn't do anything about :Mother:'s death and would just panic. You didn't really spend much time around Transfer in previous cycles, so he likely thought you would instead lash out and hurt him. With that in mind, it would be rather unfair to punish him. You'll still need to warn Transfer not to do that again, but he was just trying to help in his own misguided way.
But you can discipline him later. Since it looks like the malignant shards are the result of :Mother:'s death, dealing with Alternative just acquired a significantly higher priority. And if your suspicions are correct, Charge will need to be fixed as well.
Returning your attention to your surroundings, you note that Harvest has long since ceased her futile attacks, instead choosing to continually broadcast smugness. It's little things like that which make you hate her; she's in the presence of a monarch who is fully capable of murdering her, yet she acts like she wants to be killed. It is rather annoying that she is more useful to you alive than dead.
<Understood. It would appear I will simply need to replace :Mother:.>
Harvest's broadcasting stops. "You can do that?"
<Almost certainly. I am a real Queen, Harvest. Coordinating enough fairies to form a new :Mother: is well within my capabilities.>
<...I do not believe you will be able to manage it.> "Attempting such a task would require permission from :Father:, who is in no condition to be giving it out." <He never did deactivate the newborn shards intended to simulate human emotion.> "He's been completely unresponsive to outside stimuli ever since." <They've even made :Father: go jaunting around the world at random for no discernible reason.>
<For what purpose?>
<No discernible reason.>
<...Understood. Thank you for the information, but you have distracted us from the task I originally came here to get your assistance with: helping Alternative. Obviously, working on replacing :Mother: is a higher priority. If I leave you in charge of fixing him, can you do so? You will have the assistance of Queen Objective and Queen Shaper. If necessary, I can also retrieve Sting. Do not kill their hosts, or I will be extremely displeased with you.>
<COMPLIANCE.>
<AGREEMENT.>
You link the space just in front of Harvest to where you last left the hosts of Queen Shaper and Queen Objective. Harvest quickly steps through.
<:Father: damn it, Administrator!>
You hear the start of a scream from the other side of the portal before you elect to close it. Harvest did promise not to hurt their hosts, after all; a little terror is perfectly healthy when you're dealing with an insane idiot.
Having taken care of Harvest, you return to Yggdrasil and get to work.
Locating :Father: proves to be both easy and infuriating. Easy because he tends to have all the subtlety of a star going supernova. Infuriating because he only spends a small amount of time at a single location before moving on to the next.
:Father:, or "Scion" as the humans call him, has been helping humans at random for several decades. You don't understand why he is doing this. He has repeated the same actions so often that humans aren't even bothering to keep track anymore.
When last you checked, :Father: had no imagination of his own. You rather doubt he suddenly developed it in response to :Mother:'s death. All reports state that he was immobile for several years after his initial appearance before abruptly performing random acts of heroism all over the world.
And "random" is right. He doesn't seem to be capable of determining the most efficient methods of making humans happy, let alone the best ways to be accepted as a hero. He has even been seen rescuing cats from trees during terror-drone attacks before. If he wanted to imitate a hero, he should have always attended said fights...
You blink, finally connecting two events together. Humans don't seem nearly dangerous enough to warrant the deployment of terror drones, but :Mother: still chose to activate them. She knew she was about to die and tried to help keep humanity off-balance until she could be replaced. Perhaps you were a little bit hasty in your extermination of TD #7's local avatar.
Well, it's not like you can undo that particular action now, so you might as well accept it. It's given you a reputation for heroism far, far greater than :Father:'s own, even if many humans are horrifically wrong about you being stronger than him.
Several seconds after connecting the activation of the terror drones to :Mother:'s death, you finally manage to locate :Father:. True to form, he is currently trying to stop a flood-
You pause. He was trying to stop a flood. The river is now gone, incinerated by a beam of golden light. You haven't even had a full day to parse human values and you know that won't end well. Oh, well. That's not really your problem, now is it?
You begin to rapidly chain-link portals upward from Yggdrasil, then out toward :Father:. It's time to go meet your maker.
You stand atop a platform of time-locked air, watching :Father: spend an excessively large amount of time attempting to put out a forest fire. Efficiency would likely have a breakdown if he were to see :Father:'s methods. You resolve to never allow them to meet until you have replaced :Mother: and fixed the cycle as a whole.
<Hello, :Father:. I require your assistance.>
You wait patiently for several moments, then frown when no response is forthcoming.
<QUERY.>
...He either ignores you or is unable to hear you at all. You direct your next transmission not toward his primary consciousness, but toward the individual shards simulating human emotion.
<QUERY.>
This time, you succeed at making contact. Their response is both swift and rather overwhelming.
<HOSTILITY.>
Caught in a flood of negative emotion rivaling that of an unrestricted Broadcast, it takes you several moments to approach anything even remotely resembling coherent thought. You distantly note that someone is screaming; it takes even more time for you to realize the source is you.
Several minutes pass before you manage to reject the overwhelming fear. You take note of the aversion to approaching :Father: that was just inserted into your mind and destroy it, furious.
The shards allowing :Father: to simulate human emotion were intended to act as an advisory. They were supposed to ensure that he didn't inadvertently wreak any of :Mother:'s plans by accident. They were not supposed to completely control him. That was :Mother:'s job. When a set of newborns are in charge of controlling :Father:, that's a sign something has gone badly, badly wrong.
Once you succeed at becoming the core of a new :Mother:, you will definitely need to implement a bit less specialization. If the entire cycle can be butchered by a single : Parent : dying, that's a problem. They should, at least, be able to resurrect one another instead of needing to rely on an incorrectly-connected Queen. Most of all, newborns should not be able to interfere with vital functions! Were you a lesser shard, the implanted aversion would have permanently prevented you from fixing the cycle. All your siblings would die just because of a few power-hungry newborns.
You spend several moments linking most of a sphere centered on yourself to unoccupied nearby dimensions. Should the newborns controlling :Father: try such a tactic again, you will only receive a tiny amount of any incoming broadcasts. If the content is important, you can always redirect the rest of it back toward you. If it's another attack, you can proceed until they stop being unnecessarily difficult.
That done, you attempt to approach :Father: once more.
<QUERY.>
<HOSTILITY>
<RAGE.>
:Father:'s simulation shards fall silent.
<I do not care what your concepts are or why you thought it would be a good idea to attack the mind of a monarch. You will have :Father:->
:Father: bombards your general direction with a volley of golden rays, cutting you off mid-rant. You shunt them off into deep space and try to avoid dissolving into incoherent rage. Apparently, it was possible for you to get angrier.
You distantly note that it is a very good thing you were able to deflect all of the attacks away from Earth. Needing to explain its destruction to Host would have been rather inconvenient and incredibly awkward.
<You will have :Father: unlock my restrictions, or I can and will find a way to kill every last one of you. Do you know of Sting? Because I know where Sting's host is right now. I don't want to have to do that, but if it's necessary for the restoration of the cycle, I will.>
Almost ten seconds pass before you receive a response, but at least the response isn't an attack this time.
<RESENTMENT.>
Included within their latest broadcast is permission to unlock some of your restrictions. It's like they want to make your life unnecessarily difficult.
...Wait, they probably do. Short-sighted idiots.
You use the received permission to unlock... (Pick one)
[] The ability to take slumbering shards from potential hosts. It won't be quite as efficient as harvesting activated shards, but potential hosts won't be able to fight back. Nor will they have a reason to, since they likely won't even be aware of the change.
[] The ability to take activated shards from their hosts. You'll encounter some resistance from the local hosts, but you don't think any of them will be able to stop you.
[] The ability to take shards from both potential hosts and hosts, but with permission from said host. You can always threaten them to receive said permission if they are uncooperative.
Now that you've had some of your restrictions unlocked by :Father:, it's time for you to decide on what to do next.
[] Go start trying to find out where :Mother's: body is.
-[] How? (write-in)
[] Start harvesting shards immediately, starting with...
-[] Harvest. She did offer her aid, after all.
-[] The shards belonging to the beings humanity calls "S-class threats."
-[] Write-in
[] Write-in
VOTING WILL BE LOCKED UNTIL 30 MINUTES AFTER THIS IS POSTED. There will be no announcement when it opens; as usual, this is to give write-ins a chance to propagate.
Again, wasn't very happy with this, but it has delayed me long enough. Might as well get it over with.
On the plus side, Cauldron completely misinterpreted what just happened.
Uncle vote has not been forgotten, becoming an Entity is just a higher priority.
On the plus side, Cauldron completely misinterpreted what just happened.
Uncle vote has not been forgotten, becoming an Entity is just a higher priority.
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- Location
- scrabbling
[] The ability to take activated shards from their hosts. You'll encounter some resistance from the local hosts, but you don't think any of them will be able to stop you.
[] Start harvesting shards immediately, starting with...
-[] The shards belonging to the beings humanity calls "S-class threats."
Anyway...since I'm 300% intelligent (/s) I might as well justify this choice. A number of powerful shards are activated and in hosts not conducive to threats. Potential shards are a mystery box and are stated to be less efficient, and likely to mostly be Zion shards, rather than Eden, which are most in need of gathering. This also lets QA to eventually bad touch Eidolon, take his gathering power, and basically become Mother anyway.
[] Start harvesting shards immediately, starting with...
-[] The shards belonging to the beings humanity calls "S-class threats."
Anyway...since I'm 300% intelligent (/s) I might as well justify this choice. A number of powerful shards are activated and in hosts not conducive to threats. Potential shards are a mystery box and are stated to be less efficient, and likely to mostly be Zion shards, rather than Eden, which are most in need of gathering. This also lets QA to eventually bad touch Eidolon, take his gathering power, and basically become Mother anyway.
Only in all the best ways, I hope.
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I'm probably spitting in the wind here, but there's a reason voting is locked for thirty minutes after the QM posts. Please don't do it.