CHAPTER 318: AYAMARI (2)

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SYSTEM ADDENDUM ADDED BY USER NAME: SC2

ADDENDUM NOTE: Continued from Ayamari infodump 798A.

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The leader of Fortune’s Folly did have one or two interesting things to say, although his attempts at humor were uninspired. The only redeeming quality to his ‘jokes’ was how willing he was to commit to them, and how often he considered the use of sensory skills beyond the ordinary.

The papers he held were obscured from normal sight due to the mana weaves on the podium he stood behind, but the weave only affected the visible light spectrum. The weave was meant to be a polite inconvenience and subtle admonishment to those who tried to peek. Everyone present had at least one way to bypass the weave, but no matter how one went about it, they wouldn’t find anything of note amongst the flamboyant Delver’s notes.

They emitted a slight heat signature. When observed through infrared, it showed a cartoon man directing a pair of rude gestures towards the viewer.

There were slightly greater and lesser densities to certain sections of each page. Echolocation mapping showed that they formed words. The content was a series of unlikely claims about the reader’s mother.

Then, of course, there was the normal text written onto the overbuilt parchment. When scryed, it was an entire romance novel. The sex scenes were creative enough, but the prose and plot were otherwise unimaginative. Ayamari rated it a two out of eight.

When viewed with True Sense, certain letters had been laid down with slightly different ink. That revealed a hidden message asserting that the snoop should “go and touch grass.”

The second set of notes created very slight vibrations. Motion sense revealed a caricature of King Xor’Drel explaining that he only had so much time to devise gags, and that he hoped the voyeur lacked any further supernatural perceptions.

Otherwise, they presented a more compelling novel than the first set, but only due to the relative skill of the author, which was high enough that the general depravity of its descriptions became moderately unusual. It was likely written under a pen name by someone well known within another genre. Three out of eight.

By contrast, the tome that King Xor’Drel paraded in front of Celeritia was real, containing the full technical details of the promised technology, and Ayamari absorbed its contents before it had landed on the king’s desk. This was the first point of actual interest, since she’d been unfamiliar with the process of creating the described crystalline mana.

The involvement of System entities and a Delve obelisk capable of at least primordial Creation procedures was undesirable. She spent a few milliseconds modeling alternative forms of deployment, finding that those elements were easily avoided. Ayamari could simply grow a modified mana structure that incorporated the crystalline mana, although it was, as King Xor’Drel had promised, expensive.

The base cost required seven diamond chips per Delver, meaning a full party would require thirty-five. Equivalent sums of lesser chips were useless, as were more highly concentrated chips. The formula was balanced around diamond chips, specifically, and nothing else would work without a complete overhaul.

Diamond chips began appearing in mid-level Gold Delves, meaning the majority of Delvers would never encounter one. The supply was, therefore, quite restricted. Simultaneously, diamond chips were in high demand by skilled mana weavers, and the products of those weavers in high demand by Delvers and their governments.

Thus, for thirty-five diamond chips, Ayamari could use the process described by King Xor’Drel to give five Delvers a healthy advantage throughout their careers, or she could trade them for enough imported food to feed all of Ayama for an entire year. Alternatively, she could use the mana contained within thirty-five diamond chips to feed all of Ayama for several decades. Such was the actual reason for their extraordinary value, that they could be used to perform feats of significant scale or potency.

Ayamari set the matter aside, finding it irrelevant to her needs, and waited for King Xor’Drel to surprise her once again. That he was now wearing a floppy pointed red hat trimmed in white fur with a puffball at its tip was not a surprise. She was aware of Folly’s habit of showing up to various functions in eclectic headwear. It was polite of King Xor’Drel to have sewn an explanation for the hat into its lining, though, where it was described as part of a set of traditional garb worn during the winter months on his home planet during a season of ‘giving’.

He called it a Santa hat, which he was wearing because he was “handing out gifts to all the good boys and girls of the world.” Two of his party members were also in the room, both of whom wore a similar hat, although theirs were red and green rather than red and white, and each had a pair of fake, pointy ears attached. These were called elf hats, which Etja and Nuralie wore because they were “Arlo’s little helpers.”

As King Xor’Drel’s explanation of the MIST (Mana-Injected Stat Training) method droned onward, Ayamari occupied a very small portion of her attention with unraveling the odd weaves on two pieces of the man’s equipment. His amulet was documented, and its effects generally understood. Ayamari had found it strange that the various contingencies Central and the Empire had on file for eliminating King Xor’Drel should he become too much of a global problem failed to account for it. Being in the presence of the amulet made it clear why.

The amulet was a cognitohazard. The idea of it was accompanied by, not a compulsion exactly, but a manipulation to make the person affected fail to consider the item. It was a much softer block than something like a Grey Man effect, which forced attention away from the wielder. No, the amulet affected all memories relating to it by gently associating the amulet’s recall with a mental blind spot.

Ayamari was intimately familiar with engineering such effects, and she immediately identified her affected blind spot as being the contemplation of her own death. She could bring the amulet to mind and even give it deep consideration, but there was an essential component of mortal psychology that wanted to avoid the observation of death’s inevitability.

Thus, there was an essential component of all knowledge relating to the amulet that caused those who knew about it to avoid its inspection. If Ayamari weren’t making at least the barest effort, the amulet slipped away into the background. It even appeared to affect King Xor’Drel himself.

Ayamari knew that the amulet had been given to Arlo by the avatar Fortune, which explained some of its more impressive qualities. Fortune had also reportedly given Arlo the humbly named Ring of Healing, a ring that doubled all sources of health regeneration for its wielder with no apparent limitations. However, Ayamari found that King Xor’Drel had one ring to increase the range of his teleports, and a second ring that didn’t do much of anything.

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The latter, a simple thing of gold and ruby, was dreamforged. It would appear and disappear at the whims of the wielder and was impossible to lose, the same as any other dreamforged item, but there were no other effects that Ayamari could discern from its structure or mana weaves. The avatar-gifted health regeneration ring of impossible quality did not appear to do anything at all for King Xor’Drel’s health regeneration.

Perhaps it was a dummy ring, something to keep prospective thieves from escaping with the true ring, but Ayamari didn’t think so. She could see Fortune’s fingerprints on the item the same as she could for the amulet. Not in a literal sense, but there were oh so many disparate factors that when taken together created a signature for the wily avatar. The impossible purity of materials, the absolute perfection of the item’s form, its quiet simplicity, and the most obvious–a core of bronze at the ring’s exact center with a precise composition of 89% copper to 11% tin.

It was a minor puzzle worth enjoying.

Another small portion of Ayamari’s attention was spent reexamining King Xor’Drel’s body. It was primarily composed of a type of omnicell that could manage any ordinary biological process, although it clearly did not do so via organic means. Such a super-cell would be unusably massive, and was arguably just a person. It was possible to have a generic cell that could transform into whatever type of specialized cell was needed at that moment, but there was a significant cost that had to be paid in either energy or time. That type of cell was also incapable of performing multiple roles simultaneously.

The cells within Arlo’s body did not suffer from those disadvantages because they were, in essence, tiny wizards.

Each one had a stripped-down version of a transmutation spell, a transformation spell, and a lightning spell. Their default operation proceeded according to ordinary physics and biochemistry, emulating a ‘normal’ humanoid body. It took very little for one of these cells to nudge itself away from utilizing glucose for cellular respiration to simply producing ATP directly via transmutation. From there, it wasn’t a large departure for that cell to ignore ATP altogether and simply use mana to stimulate King Xor’Drel’s muscle contractions.

As Ayamari watched, a newly-grown wizard cell encountered an enterocyte within the lining of Xor’Drel’s colon. The wizard cell consumed the enterocyte and subsequently sent out an electrochemical signal to all the other nearby wizard cells, informing them of the composition and function of the enterocyte. That signal was repeated, mingling with countless other similar signals from across his body. The wizard cells appeared to be automatically cataloging and replicating the behavior of existing cells, even as they replaced them.

There would be no functional difference between an enterocyte transporting protein and electrolytes as opposed to the wizard cell, but it raised serious questions about identity. Would Arlo continue to be the same person once all of his cells were replaced?

Ayamari had long ago answered this existential question for herself, given her own proclivities. The self was not a static entity. Any individual’s past was littered with deceased versions of themselves. The process King Xor’Drel was experiencing held little difference to the natural death and replacement of every other cell in the body over time.

Although this was slightly more aggressive.

“Now that you’re all up to speed on how the MIST process works, there is one final topic I’d like to address,” said King Xor’Drel.

The empress and King Celeritia both seemed to be taken by surprise that Arlo had something else to discuss after revealing his MIST technology. There’d been some degree of collaborative manipulation between the two in order to get King Xor’Drel in front of this very room, spilling his secrets. They’d likely been drip-feeding meticulously controlled influences and information to King Xor’Drel for so long that the dimensional traveler’s plans for breakfast had been preordained by the pair. Still, given Ayamari’s rapidly forming psychological profile for the leader of Fortune’s Folly, she would not have advocated for the use of their brand of subtlety and deception.

It assumed that King Xor’Drel was a rational actor.

He was. However, the basis of his rationality was at least partially determined by an alien cultural context.

In short, he was a wildcard. One did not expect a wildcard to conform to their plans; they planned around a wildcard inevitably cocking everything up.

“Fuck me sideways,” said Umi-Doo as he looked down at his slate.

“If you have slate technology, then I’ve just sent you a collection of documents,” said King Xor’Drel. “If you don’t, then one of my elves is coming around to hand everyone a physical copy, so you’ll get yours soon.”

Both Nuralie and Etja were making rounds, handing out stout stacks of paper that were held together with bindings made from thin steel spirals. Ayamari accepted one and deposited it into her inventory, although she’d already read and memorized it.

One of the Hiwardian aides had been nursing a glass of hot tea when he glanced down at the stack’s first page. He froze in place, then threw the tea aside and sprinted out of the room. His reaction was quickly proven ordinary as the room began to devolve into chaos.

King Xor’Drel raised his voice to be heard over the rising din of outrage. “These documents were submitted to us anonymously and contain records of misdeeds carried out by a number of government officials, nobility, clan leaders, and so on,” he said. He was about to go on, but was interrupted.

“How did you access my slate?!” shouted a Littan from the edge of the room. “This is a secured device!”

King Xor’Drel squinted at the man, as though he couldn’t make out the Littan’s features perfectly from where he stood. “Avario of Connas, right?” he said. “You should worry less about how I got access and worry more about what General Connatis will do when he finds out you’ve been fucking his adjutant’s wife.”

The Littan stood and stared dumbly at King Xor’Drel before looking down and beginning to furiously paw at his slate controls.

“Anyway,” said King Xor’Drel. “Slate tech piggybacks off the System’s networks, so anyone with administrative access to the System also has administrative access to all your shit. This is a polite call for everyone to firm up their infosec procedures. Who knows who else is reading your grocery lists and top secret daily reports from–” He looked up and away with the familiar far-off look of someone viewing a System screen. “–nine different black sites. Huh, two of those are illegal prisons. You’ll be hearing from our ethics committee.”

Three more people had rushed out of the room for one reason or another. Six were engaged in screaming matches. A fistfight broke out near the back. A small horde of Imperial guards came swarming in, followed by the security teams of each individual head of state. The Timans began arguing with their own personnel, who were trying to evacuate them, gesticulating fervently at King Xor’Drel. King Celeritia had a slate before him with the text on its surface flying past in a blur. He wore a frown that deepened with each passing second while he read.

The empress approached Closetland’s leader, flanked by a pair of Level 15 Littan guards who would stand virtually no chance against the man in a fight. She whispered a politically appropriate version of, “You should leave.” King Xor’Drel looked around, seeing that several of the security teams were eyeing him warily. The youngest of the Timan council members looked to be very close to ordering his guards to detain the man. That would go poorly for everyone involved.

With a shrug, King Xor’Drel casually breached seven different high-level mana weaves whose entire purpose was to stop him from opening the very portal that appeared beside him. Then the spell shrugged off the combined countermagic offensive of an entire squad of Imperial anti-mages who’d been monitoring the room. Nuralie was through the portal before most everyone else recognized that it existed, carrying their mage Etja along with her. King Xor’Drel then teleported through the portal, which further violated nine separate anti-movement weaves and three Dispel attempts.

The portal snapped closed an instant later, despite the efforts of four controllers trying to keep it open.