Chapter 102: Distribution

  CROWN

  I left the flark with Sena after making a few adjustments to it. She’d been quite helpful, so after we returned to Chall, I let her keep it as a reward. Arguably, an Admin giving a material reward to a mortal like that was a bad idea, but I couldn’t actually find any restrictions against it, and Duck seemed to think it wouldn’t cause any energy problems to speak of.

  That did leave me wondering if Sena’s suggestion – and me following it, in my own way – would generate a lot of RP from her. Did mortals making decisions that the Admin carried out give more or less energy? This whole system could be a little obtuse to me. Just when I thought I’d figured it out, a new wrinkle shows itself.

  “Welcome back,” Duck said in a peppy voice. “Bummer about the dragons, I was watching that. But you probably needed the vacation.”

  I had to chuckle at that. “This job doesn’t leave a lot of time to relax, does it? Always ‘on call’ as it were.” Technically I could slow down time so much that I could dither around, but just sitting in my room with myself and Duck didn’t seem like a great way to spend an extended vacation. “I wonder if I can visit someone else’s world? That would be wild.”

  Duck hopped up onto an end table next to her usual chair, an act of casual bad manners that told me she was in a good mood. “Maybe, but I doubt it would be a good idea. You’d be poking around in someone else’s soul, basically. Sounds a little… intimate.”

  The face I made must have said everything, because she snickered lightly before swinging her legs and getting back to business. “Did you get an idea for how to handle the Downside Quest issue? Because I sure don’t have any.”

  I chuckled and flung my interface up to the display, replacing a part of the world view for now. I’d dilated time to give me a lot more time to work, this time, even if a few days, weeks, or months wouldn’t matter. No point in wasting that time, though.

  “I have one, but it’s a bit more work than I’m used to. Want to make a species fresh?” I grinned at Duck, who gave me a puzzled tilt of her ears.

  This time, I wasn’t going to just uplift another species. I was making an intelligent species from scratch to handle my Quest-giving.

  Sort of.

  I’d gotten a lot better with my interface since I’d first started, so this wasn’t as daunting a task as it had seemed before. There were a lot of tricks I could use to simplify things, but this wasn’t going to be easy. I had to be careful.

  Duck peered over my shoulder as I put together an entirely new creature, loosely drawing upon my earlier experiments with making mana-based diseases. Instead of that, they were mana-based creatures. No physical form at all, just pure magic, with the flows and interactions between the aspected mana taking the place of organs and muscles for a living being.

  Not literally, since they didn’t need such things, but that was the best comparison I could think of.

  “What’s the trigger condition to make more of them?” Duck asked that after the ‘body’ started to come together, although these beings did not have a fully-defined shape. Before I could even answer her, she snapped her fingers. “Belief. I get it. The Downsiders believe that everything has a spirit and you’re providing those spirits. Is that it?”

  I nodded while I worked on the new beings. “Close, yes. It’s going to be a little more complicated than that, but belief matters. The trick here will be defining their limits without crippling them too much. I have an idea for that, but it’s a bit difficult to get in my head right now. That’s going to be the last step, I think.”

  The new beings would also need high mana to manifest. That was fine, though. They would be intelligent, so would have a lot more control over trips outside of high mana areas. The lack of cores and conduits also meant their magic use would be wildly different from the other beings, but I really didn’t want them to be edible so that was fine.

  This all took a lot more time than I wanted. Adjusting manifestations, how much they could grow, how they would die… without a physical body I had to do some learning on the fly to figure out problems. And that was just step one, and the easier bit compared to step two.

  Usually, when I made a new intelligent species, I based them on something else. Even the dwarves had at least a human baseline to modify when I made them, I just changed it so much they became wildly different. Others, like the elves and rooken, had existing species that I just made smarter and tuned from there.

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  Making an intelligence from scratch was a lot more work, obviously. I had to adjust numerous values like their emotional processing, learning rate, and so on. The only thing that made it easier was how heavily I crippled them in doing a lot of that.

  They would have emotions, but empathy was difficult for them. They had trouble learning, and a very bad memory for details. I made them somewhat flighty by default, but with the capacity to focus, just making it a rare trait. These were not meant to be competitors, but instead I designed them to be cohabitants of Downside, in tune with the belief structures of the vaskan.

  I paused long enough to make a note to handle Quests for the insectlike polyform colonies as well, since they’d need a different solution. For now, the vaskan would get these creatures.

  “Faeries?” After wandering off a few times and repeatedly checking on my work, my local Terminal did have a guess at last. “At least that’s what I think I’m looking at. Memories about them are a little fuzzy.”

  That comment made me glance back at Duck. At first I’d been surprised she had any memories of Earth at all. Then I’d presumed her memories of Earth were just like mine, and she simply didn’t default to them. The fact that she didn’t have all of them was interesting, to be sure.

  “Something like that,” I agreed. “I don’t want them to be incredibly powerful, but these should provide some ‘fun’ for the locals. And I’m going to let them hand out Quests, but I have an idea for that, too. Something a little different.”

  All the tuning I was doing did have a negative, though. I’d customized their behavior a lot more than that of the uplifted beings, and that meant they were much less capable of generating RP on their own. They could, but it was less than half of what most of the others could do. At least, directly.

  Indirectly they’d be handing out Quests, which was what I needed. In a way it would be better than what Upside had, since many of their Quests came from the gods, rather than dragons, and that didn’t give me all that much energy even when the god had a soul in it.

  Another annoying detail that I’d found out, but filed away.

  “How are you going to keep them from just messing around with mortals for the fun of it?” Duck asked. “Quest tokens?”

  I nodded again. “That, and something else.” Hooking up the Quest system to a being wasn’t trivial either, but I’d done it a few times now and was getting better at it. This gave me the confidence to alter it a little, as well.

  I’d limit them a lot to start with. The interface could simulate a lot of things, but Quests were outside of what it could guess at. This meant I couldn’t really test things until they were live, and it would be much easier to give them more leeway later than it would to limit them after they’d screwed up something big.

  So I limited the Quest scope, as well. Quests needed a small amount of energy to initialize, and usually this was well within the bounds of what the beings could handle. A dungeon, a dragon, a god… all of these had far more energy to spare than they had Quest tokens. These ‘fae’ would not. They could only give Quests for relatively simple tasks, at least by default.

  I set it up so that they could give more if they managed to find another fae to agree with the Quest. The more of a consensus the faeries reached, the more complex and long-reaching a Quest could be. With their limited attention span, this meant that only the most focused could create dragon-level Quests, but more minor ones would be much more common, especially since uniting with a fae on giving out a Quest wouldn’t expend any extra tokens.

  Duck was more silent now, watching what I was doing. She didn’t make a snarky remark or even ask a question… she looked remarkably thoughtful now that I’d gone this far.

  I put the finishing touches on the new species and nodded to myself. “There we go. A distributed Quest-giving system with built-in limiters. Hopefully the more minor Quests will be enough of a kick in the pants for vaskan to do interesting things.”

  “I mean, technically they did fight a war for you…”

  “Shush.”

  I still felt a little bad about the war thing, but as I juggled the multiple species and what they were doing, it was getting easier for me to accept those decisions. I’d seen firsthand what the results had been, but it had also succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.

  Briefly, I wondered what Sena would think if she knew exactly what I did when I was gone. That one was clever. I’d consider her for godhood if the vaskan had gods. She’d even weaseled a promise out of me to look her up the next time I was ‘around’ so she didn’t have to hunt me down.

  A shake of my head dismissed that thought. She was interesting, but just one mortal among many. I really needed to learn how to preserve memories through godhood without the help of Orpheus.

  “Everything look good to you, Duck?” I drew myself back to my task with that question, fully aware that my Terminal had been watching and reviewing everything. She’d suggested a few changes early on, but the last leg of the design she hadn’t said much of anything.

  As I had suspected, her role as a ‘duck’ this time was already completed with the earlier stages. She perked her ears up and wiggled her tail in a bit of an elven ‘thumbs up’ at me. “Ship it.”

  That, of course, was easier said than done. Unlike with other beings, I couldn’t just drop them in like hitting the copy and paste tool on a computer. Or to be more specific, I could do that but it wouldn’t result in a long term sustainable population. Their ‘reproduction’ was not like living beings.

  I spread a few about for a starter, and then spent some time adjusting the rules for mana nodes, giving them the ability to interact with vaskan belief to spawn faeries. I reasoned that would keep them largely contained to the Downside area, and if somehow eons from now, they managed to spread enough belief to spawn faeries in Upside…

  Well. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? And that was what I’d wanted my world to be.

  With a thought, I confirmed the changes.

  Territory Dispute