[ORP] Splinters and Sparks, the home and shop of Alder

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Silence

Re: [ORP] The life of Alder (Alder's home)

Post by Silence »

One problem at a time... that was what he kept telling himself.

It didn't seem to work like that though. The order had kept the boy from safety and a normal way of life. Then there was a small problem of a glowing guy that he wanted to kick in the teeth... trying to stop Kiene from falling apart under his feet. Then there was the matter of Novajen and the other dark mage which he apparently was supposed to do something about... really, he was just waiting for something to happen on that front. It might be that Novajen had taken care of itself, but anyway...

And then there was his inability to remember the names of anybody he didn't respect.

It wasn't like he didn't try to, he just couldn't... there was no way he could remember the names of anybody who hadn't earned his respect. That meant that there was a fairly small group of people that he hadn't made up names for in order to label them something.

Reaver
Teide
Roger
Dway
Soul
Shin
TK


And the last one was more because the name was two letters than because he could remember it. Asked what it stood for, he had no idea. There were not any others that he respected enough to remember the names of.

If he'd understood himself better, he would have known that this was because the beetles didn't share every bit of information that they came across, only that which they considered important... thing was, since they weren't really sentient, they couldn't judge accurately what was and wasn't important, so they went on experience. The greater whole tended to ignore names while it was on the streets of Widu in favor of other things, so they stopped conveying the information unless there was a difference. That difference was respect.

Of course, Alder didn't know this. What he did know was that no reasonable person should ever have to fear for their life because of it... but since when was he a reasonable person? He knew full well that he was weird, enough people had told him so.

So really, he shouldn't have been all that surprised that the scary elf (Rieron) had given him a thinly veiled threat, backed up by a letter to confirm that it was important, that if he called anybody in his family by anything but their names... well, that last part wasn't worth thinking about when the time could be better spent thinking of how to avoid it.

So, there were two options. He could start calling all of them 'you', but he might slip once or twice and call them by his names for them... or the dark elf might not be satisfied with that.

So the only other alternative that he saw was to avoid them all together... but that wouldn't be enough. No, he had to make sure that every person in the elf's family, even when brought up in conversation, would not be named by him ever again... that was the only way to stop rumours from reaching the elf. There was only one way Alder saw of doing that. If the family had never existed, then there would be no chance of him mucking up. So to him, they had to have never existed. If somebody brought them up, he wouldn't hear them. If he saw a picture of them, or the person themselves, there would be nothing but an empty space.

The boy only really had two skills in the world. That was that he could bluff and that he could see through a bluff, but really, he was infinitely better at the first. Assuming that people were willing to believe him at all and could believe the truth from him, he could make them believe anything.

So he could make himself believe anything. It just would require tricking his subconscious, one person at a time.

If anybody had seen Alder sitting in the middle of the alley that he called home that day, they would have seen him with a discarded book from the library, eyes closed and muttering at speeds that few would be able to follow. One by one, the members of Rieron's family became non existent to him.

The first ones were easy.

Aishe, Missy, Danae, Hercie, Marion, Cassandra and Grazilda he hardly knew. It took him about an hour each to work himself into a logical paradox where their existence couldn't exist. In fact, he had only heard of some of them, some of them he knew only through business deals and some of them he knew only through Cork's dueling competition... he had had to fight three of them to win.

The others were difficult.

Serene was a borderline friend of his and he genuinely liked her and knew her well. That meant that he had to work quite hard for six hours before he realised that she couldn't exist and never had.

He had outstanding business deals with Katara and was suggesting some to Scarlet, so he had to make himself believe that they didn't exist even if he got a letter from them. That wouldn't exist either. Any items on the market from any of them, wouldn't be there. Of course, overall that was easier than Serene. It took him only two hours each to convince him that Cork's mayor was faceless and that he had no business with these people who didn't exist.

It was at Calysta and the queen that he genuinely had trouble. Both were members of the town council, and getting rid of them was difficult... hell, how was he supposed to make the queen of Kiene not exist.

None the less, four hours after the sun had set for the second time since he started to speak to himself, Alder rubbed his drooping eyes and stood up.

Rieron only had one family member and that was Teide... what luck that he already remembered her name and so wouldn't risk his wrath.

The rest... no longer existed to him... quite literally, his mind would no longer accept their existence, no matter what happened.

He also made a mental note to avoid Rieron... if he would issue an order like that, he clearly had it in for the boy anyway. Somebody like that would find an excuse to attack him regardless of what he did.

Now, he had work to do. After all, Reaver had still tasked him with carrying on his legacy, and while he had been sitting in an alley for two days for no reason, he hadn't been getting any stronger... Alder started to take a step, then collapsed.

Maybe he should sleep. For some reason, he felt like somebody had been purposefully confusing him and making him think things that weren't true for the past two days. Also, his eyes were closing of their own accord. Tommorow he could pick things up again.

Why had he done something stupid like that anyway?
Silence

Re: [ORP] The life of Alder (Alder's home)

Post by Silence »

Another experiment was required to see if he could do this. Yes, he was rapidly becoming more proficient with utilising his nature of the changeling, but he never knew whether or not something would work until he tried it. For example, he had tried to reinforce his hand by clustering beetles around it in a high concentration. That hadn't worked and he had ached for days due to the number of beetles he had killed when trying to break that block of wood.

If anything, that had had the opposite effect.

However, doing the opposite had made his hand crumble when he had hit the block. It seemed that he couldn't make his body stronger by utilising this nature.

Now the question was, could he do what he was currently thinking of?

Alder arrived at the training ground in the middle of the night, checked that nobody was around or watching and even left several beetles and his shadow scouting around to ensure that nobody would see what he was doing.

The preliminary experiments had been fairly promising, but... Alder drew his dagger. There was no point thinking about the risks when he had already decided that the potential rewards far outweighed them. The worst that could happen was that he would be about as beat up as he would be if he had lost a duel.

The first dagger hit the first target in the neck, three millimetres to the left of where Alder was aiming, which was an acceptable margin of error. Almost instantly, his beetles were bringing another to his hand as he charged a second wooden enemy. As he did so, the beetles which coated the hilt of the dagger he had thrown began to attack the target that the dagger had embedded itself in.

The next enemy, he didn't really aim for, it was just in the way of his target. Alder turned his body into a fluid, writhing mass of beetles moments before he reached the range at which he pictured the enemy would be able to attack from. Momentum carried them past the wooden figure, several latching onto it, but most simply hit it, crawled over it and jumped off again. It was almost like his body had turned to water. Yes, the figure found that quite a few beetles were left clinging to it, but mostly, Alder just moved himself around it, allowing it to pass through his body, then reformed himself on the other side with only a tiny bit of momentum lost. Even his clothes dissolved and reformed. What was left behind were his daggers, which he hadn't made from his beetles. However, most of them were carried past the target by the mass of beetles. One had embedded itself in the target's leg, and one was lying uselessly on the floor.

He tossed a dagger at a target on his right as he charged forward. That dagger wasn't coated in beetles, but he had ordered his beetles to coat it in venom while they passed it through his body to his hand. The other twelve that he had were passed through his body by the beetles until they were once again in their usual places. The dagger struck the target in the stomach and a green substance dripped from its blade... and a hundred beetles dropped to the ground, dead as they had been cut by the blade or poisoned by the venom they had been passing around.

Without hesitating, Alder launched himself at his primary target, originally, he looked like he was planning a frontal assault from above, but then his body became fluid again and he reformed himself, dagger still in hand, splayed on all fours and coming at the target from below. The change had been much quicker than he could have managed in any other way. His dagger took his target in the ankle, then he spat into the orifice made by his dagger cutting the wood. His beetles streamed into the wound and began widening it while Alder rolled away, turning his body into a mass of beetles once again to limit the effect of any counter attack.

Four daggers were left on the floor behind him.

Alder then went at another target, vaguely aware that the first target which he had thrown a dagger at had had its head detached from its body by the beetles and also no longer had any arms. Its head was barely even recognisable anymore, it had been so taken apart by the beetles. It looked more like a mass of splinters. The enemy who he had moved around was even worse since they had beetles all over them. In fact, 'wood shavings' would be a better way to describe them than 'enemy'.

Alder attacked another target, swinging his dagger at its neck, then, when that blow landed, reformed his body and passed the dagger through himself again, creating momentum for a strike where there should have been none. Straight after landing the first strike, he landed a second from the same direction, then a third from behind as he moved his arm around the target and reformed it so that it was holding the dagger in the target's back.

The next target was probably the least lucky. Alder dissolved his entire body with one order 'take it apart then reform'.

The swarm moved towards the target, crawling over itself in an attempt to obey the order. The enemy could have struggled, could have swung futilely at the swarm in an attempt to kill it, but it would have done no more damage than killing the beetles that it hit, and there were far more beetles than a person could hit just by swinging.

When Alder was done with that target, there was nothing left of it at all but a wooden finger which had been thrown away from the carnage. The rest of it had been turned into a pile of splinters as if a crazed carpenter had spent twenty four hours whittling it down.

Alder moved on to the next target...



By the time he was done, twenty targets had been reduced to dust and fifteen daggers lay around the training ground, which Alder was collecting. The downside was that he now had to hide three hundred dead beetles and had shrunk almost a foot because of this. Clearly he'd need to take it easy for a while while the hive created more beetles to replace the old ones. The other downside was that there were several weaknesses that this style had. The greatest was that Alder would never be able to use it, not without giving away his identity. Then, for those who knew how it worked, it was easy to counter... so he had to make sure that nobody ever found out.

Regardless, this experiment was definitely a success... now, where was he going to get a broom from to take care of these beetles?
Silence

Re: [ORP] The life of Alder (Alder's home)

Post by Silence »

Most who saw Alder that day wouldn't know that he was a changeling, although many had their suspicions. Most who saw him wouldn't know that he was in possession of an artefact from one of the fallen themselves, or that he was designing one of the most difficult non magical weapons to use that this world had seen.

Even fewer though would know that through the day, he was holding a set of forces within him which were attempting to blow him apart, or that he was willingly increasing these forces every so often.

However, few people saw him that day anyway. He was purposefully hidden away in a dark corner of Widu, making sure that he stabilised himself every time one of his beetles alerted him to a person passing nearby. The reason for that became apparent every few minutes when some part of his body would explode into a mess of various nasty things, then his whole body would break down into a mass of beetles, the force that he was holding in the gaps between the beetles would dissipate, and then he'd reform himself and try again with only a few casualties.

So it went for the next few days. He would sort out the university, then take some food and a book on government to his corner with him and start reading while he pulled in more and more force from his surroundings.

At first, he was just removing the force from a few coins and that was his limit. After that, one or two of the beetles would not be able to hold their place inside him and the whole structure would collapse.

It took him the first day to figure out how to link his beetles together in a way that they would take the strain instead of slipping while still maintaining his form. At that point, the amount of force he could hold more than quadrupled. He could now remove the force from most of the things that he carried with him on a daily basis (fifteen daggers, a bag of coins, food, some miscellaneous light things, and a table leg) still keep himself together. Much more than that was pushing things... but the purpose of this exercise was more than just learning to store more and so being able to take in and give out more power. Yes, that was part of it, and he certainly had here a very great limitation in how little he could do with magic, but there was more to it than that.

He had here an opportunity that few other changelings had had before. He was already starting (with Munay's help) to push the boundaries of what he should have been able to achieve with just manipulation of his avatars, but he was rapidly reaching another boundary. Physically, a changeling should never be able to get beyond a certain point. Training thousands of small creatures to all body build is near impossible. Changelings could usually at best show a strength equal to that of a slightly fitter than average and he had reached that limit ages ago. Since then, he had worked on his reflexes, stances and forms, but there was only so far that would take him before once again, he found himself just battered down in a fight, or completely out done because his enemy was stronger and faster than him. It had happened to him time and time again. He couldn't keep up with more physically fit enemies.

Well, here was his chance to get past that. By forcing his avatars to hold themselves together, he had the perfect way to get all of them to train themselves individually. The power that each could output would increase, and so the collective power of them would increase... even if it wasn't much, he could just keep doing it all of the time until he could match others. It was a bit like a human walking around with weighted clothes. They would, because they would have to, become stronger.

It took him a full week to get anywhere. However, by the end of that week, he had simultaneously increased his knowledge of economics and lowering corruption, and reached the point where he could actually hold himself together if he was stopping four chairs from being effected by the force that was gravity.

Half way through the second week, he found that he could remove all forces affecting himself from himself and store them inside his body without too much of a problem... and he could lift a similar weight with one hand if he wanted to. Yes, that wasn't actually all that much considering that he had been undernourished for most of his life and he was close to the build of a fifteen year old, but it was more than he had ever been able to do before. He had once lifted a peasant into the air by the throat, but then he had used his entire body to generate power, had had a bit of a run up and so used that, and his arm had shook afterwards with the strain that it had been under for those seconds. Now, he could probably do that again without too much of a problem... yes, it wasn't incredible, but it was more than he thought he would be able to do...

By the end of four weeks however, the effectiveness of this method was beginning to fade away. The beetles didn't slip anymore or have problems with their strength, instead, they just got pulled apart by the forces that he was holding inside him. Each beetle was ultimately only a beetle, and no matter how strong they were, there came a point where that limitation had to be realised... they could lock their legs together and share the stress between them. They could be the equivalent of beetle athletes, but they still sooner or later got pulled apart, legs from their bodies by the forces running through the hive.

He could hold a force equal to the weight of about three people inside himself and could lift the weight of one a half people with just the strength of one hand... his physical strength was better, but still below what most of those who were dealing with the sort of things he would have to deal with had. Well, it would have to do. Interestingly, he had noticed that he could actually do more if he released the force as he took it in... like if he stopped a punch from somebody really strong, that might be all he could do with his ability (the punch would lose all of its force and so cause no damage to what it hit)... but if he then pushed the force into the ground below him, he would be good to absorb the force of another.

The only problem there was that to absorb the power of a punch, he didn't nullify it... he only spread it over his body rather than letting it focus at one point. To push it out again, he had to be able to handle that force again, otherwise, for some reason, he would implode, and the least effect would be that his beetles might get bruised, battered and crushed. At worst, that could utterly incapacitate him if he let out force too quickly.

And then there was the problem that using this ability meant that he couldn't move properly. If his beetles were focussing on holding themselves together, he couldn't get them to move fluidly and dodge a blow or anything like that... it was a really quite weak ability... but it would do. It was all he had to work with to sort out magic things, so he would make it work. Somehow, he would make it strong enough to stand up against other magic users... somehow, he needed to find some way to use this that he hadn't thought of already.

((This is a prediction into the future... right now, Alder doesn't have anywhere like this kind of mastery over this power and he won't for a while))
Silence

Re: [ORP] The life of Alder (Alder's home)

Post by Silence »

((This is a cataloguing of events that happened over a long period of time. I can’t remember the dates, so assume each is an isolated event which took place, but not in any particular time line.))

“So... you’ve killed a guy?”

“Several in fact as it happens.”

“Just cause they were not holdin up some end of a bargain?”

“Well, you could put it like that. It was different for each person. For instance, one of them... well, the sixth, well if I steal from them or perform a duty inadequately, then I guess they have every right to punish me, but they punished without caring about whether I had done something or not, seemingly at random. They gave out bonuses at random too. They had no idea what they were doing, they just kept acting like that as if through carrot and stick applied at random, they would gain my loyalty, as if I was some kind of dog... Well, after six months, I got tired of it”

“Really? That was all it took?” Alder looked positively horrified at his steward.

“Oh don’t look like that... you’re the monster here, remember? We both have things in our past that would get us hung... at least I don’t spend all my days hiding behind the lie, at least I’m able to move on.”

“Oh sure... when you figure out a way for me teh actually move on from being a race that people hate, you let me know.”

Lamar paused and looked his master up and down. “No... I suppose that it quite a problem for you... was that the reason you have not angered me all this time? Because you knew you wouldn’t ever get another steward?”

“Well, that and the fact that until now, and that time yeh stole from me, I haven’t had any reason teh anger you... yeh’ve mostly done real good work.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment... may I request a pay rise?”

“No! Not right now... give me a moment teh take this all in.”

Lamar smiled and continued. “The first master I had forced me into it. I was hired as a steward and then for five days I worked for them. On the sixth, the beatings started... that master was sadistic... I later found out that they had ten or eleven people tied up in their cellar who they kept alive just so they could torment. Anyway, they were fairly close to throwing me down there. I don’t think by then I was much more than an animal, underfed and beaten until I could barely see straight... Then something fell in front of me. I think my master dropped it off of a table. It took me a moment to realise what it was, but it was a knife. So I reached out from my cage and hit it in the rags that he let me wear. When he next came to take me out and beat me, I stabbed him and ran.”

Alder gulped. Alright... that was pretty extreme, but he was talking to a killer here... a man who had killed a person because they had no idea how to manage a steward.

“The second one was because they tried to kill me. The master had a horrible temper. I was underpaid by him so tried to steal a loaf of bread to get me through the day. He caught me, flew into a rage and took up a blade. Alas though, he was an old man and frail. I easily overpowered him and killed my second master.”

“The third master was a drunk, and I caught him with a group of bandits mugging a group of peasants. The money I had been accepting had been stolen, brought about by blood... so I killed him and made off before anybody could link me to him.”

“By then I was getting used to killing. The fourth master paid me well, and was a good master, but one day I decided to take my leave of him. He was a little oppressive, you see. I thought that I could find more freedom elsewhere. However, he told me that if I left, he would tell all employers that I was a dishonest steward that had stolen from him. So his blood too is now spilt.”

“The fifth master came home one day in a cold sweat and asked me if I had killed every other master I knew before... apparently some rumours had begun to float around. There was no proof, and I told him this, but from then on, he never allowed me to perform any duty for him and started pushing me away... without work, I couldn’t get pay. And so I left him... I didn’t mean to kill him, but he hired some bounty hunters to go kill me. He thought I meant to kill him, so I did before they killed me. With their source of pay gone, they left me alone.”

“The sixth you know about already... it no longer affected me taking the life of somebody else.”

“However, my seventh master I had high hopes for. He paid me well, made sure I was living well, gave me something I could make a life from. Over that year, I found a wife and married, and we were aiming to have a child... then I found my wife in the arms of my master... and before I knew what had happened, both of them were dead... and I thought of it as nothing but what was right for those who wronged me.”

“The eighth master just annoyed me... he didn’t do anything wrong, but he always looked down his nose at me.”

“The ninth couldn’t even remember my name, and I considered killing him too, but I didn’t think I could. He spent most of his time fiddling with coins and I’d seen him do the same sorts of things with daggers. Plus, he was actually a person people would take notice of if he died. A rector of Kiene... but really, it was that he seemed to be very much like the seventh master, just younger, a street urchin, richer, didn’t seem to have any interest in women, and well... yes, he couldn’t remember my name, but it wasn’t personal. He didn’t remember anybody’s name... although when I learned you were doing it on purpose, I very nearly gutted you then and there.”

Alder checked the position of his dagger.

“As it turns out though, my new master is a monster, just like me. I’d finally found a master who society had turned into the same sort of thing they’d turned me into. I’ll be honest with you Youken, we’ve been through the same things. We’ve both been mistreated by society... isn’t that why you want to be rector and why you involve yourself? So that you can find a place from which you can tear it down?”

Alder didn’t even bat an eyelash, instead he started laughing.

“Yeah, sure... if that’s what yeh wanna think, that’s fine. The way I see it though, no matter what people do teh you, it’s your choice how you act back. Just cause people do something teh you and try teh break you, yeh ain’t gotta break cause they say so, and yeh don’t have teh mold inteh what they tell you to. I’m rector cause I wanna work up through the whole system, yeah, but yer wrong on why. Fact is, if people wanna think of me as a monster and attack me for it, that’s fine... but some day, I wanna show em they’re wrong... if I give in teh em and become like em, they win.”

Alder realised that he was no longer looking at the same point he had been a while ago. His eyes had followed Lamar as the steward had backed away and now had his back to the wall. Some kind of mental conflict was going on behind the larger man’s eyes.

“Oh, yeah, don’t call me Youken... it’s Alder... just cause I got another name, this is the one I use, and this is who I am... that’s who I choose teh be like. So go ahead, try teh kill me cause I ain’t like you, or turn and run, I ain’t gonna stop yeh... but if I hear you went and killed somebody else, I’ll hunt you down myself, not bother with bounty hunters.”

“I could take your story to the world and tell them what you are.”

“Go ahead... who are yeh? My steward? Got an eye witness account that I transformed in front of yer eyes? I got a knife and a confession, and then a way teh escape this place whenever I want... but that would be letting all these people win if I ran. I win only when there isn’t a person in this town who don't look at their boots in shame when they see me, or else looks all proud that they didn’t try teh hurt me in the first place...”

Lamar dropped to his knees before Alder and the street urchin jumped backwards warily.

“Then let me help you, if only to see the looks on everybody’s face... you want them to harm themselves for you when this is all over... I truly underestimated you again. You’re even more than I hoped you might be... you’ll not just tear them apart, but you’ll make them tear themselves apart with guilt and shame... master, please, let me assist you doing this.”

Alder looked down at his servant and resisted the urge to frown... the man didn’t get it at all. He was still out there for revenge... he’d already let them win. He’d let himself become what society had moulded him into. Still, this was a dangerous man to get on the wrong side of... and he could use a steward that devoted.

“Alright, so for now, all we need is money... there are two kinds of power in this world... money and strength... leave strength teh me, I’ve been spendin three to seven hours each day trainin just so I could start teh match the legends... I ain’t that good yet, but I will be in less than a year. We just need teh get as much money as possible other than that... so it’s the same as usual.”

“Yes... Alder.”

Lamar pushed himself to his feet and walked off. There was a field job to be posted that day.

--------------------------------

Somehow, he needed to be able to fight against people who were stronger than he was. He had already spent a good deal of time researching lesser known magics until he had been able to find a few interesting things that he could use that he doubted most people would be ready for if he threw them at most opponents. Plus, they didn’t use too much energy, which was a big bonus when you were an innate user with no real magical energy inside you.

But as for a way of physical fighting, there were only so many ways to use your body, and sooner or later, the standard bluffs, feints and tricks would just not catch somebody who had seen them before. He needed something that would leave them at first unsure how to react. Some kind of weapon that would make even a legend pause, if only just to consider why he was using something so ridiculous, and whether there was some trick up his sleeve that would genuinely catch them out.

That was the idea that had given birth to another idea. And that second idea had given birth to Flicker. The weapon would either make him or break him.

It was a simple idea. If there was one thing he understood in this world, it was the motion of disks. Coin shaped objects, he could picture exactly what would happen if even the smallest amount of force was applied to them... so why not try using a disk like shape for your weapon?

That was the easy part. The difficult part was picturing how a disk like weapon would work.

See, there was a reason why nobody created weapons in the shape of disks. They were unwieldy, lacked reach, felt weird to swing around, and didn't adjust quickly... but they did have a few advantages if you thought carefully about it.

Firstly, a disk was the same all of the way around. That might be self explanatory, but unlike a sword, which practically screamed 'this end is the one you want to avoid', a disk didn't have such obvious points that it would attack from... especially if he kept all of the things that he wanted to use inside the disk and had them only emerge the moment before he used them. It wasn't a big advantage, but it would make people pause and consider whether the weapon was levelled at them or whether they had worked their way past his defence.

The second advantage of a disk was that it flew better than a more orthodox weapon. If at the right angle, a disk would skin through the air, if at the wrong angle, it would do the opposite. Perhaps if he attached some wires to the disks, sort of like with those weapons Shin kept trying to make but that he never had the strength to use, he could get the disks to move even more unpredictably and... ah...

How on earth was he going to use this thing? He could picture it skimming through the air, manipulated by a wire, and since he had stolen one of the assassin's hidden blades, he figured he knew enough to make something that could fire out blades, hooks and whatever else he wanted through a system of springs, gears, wires and cogs, but operating it? Something like this would require him to stick his hand inside it, and then that defeated the point of it flying while in operation.

Hmm... maybe... if he stuck beetles in the design, he could have them operate it from the inside. They could also coordinate with each other and make linking the disks together with wires less difficult. Also, if he utilised his ability to manipulate the forces behind something a bit, he could quite nicely get these things to defy gravity and weigh nothing... or even use them as spring boards for himself as he took away his own weight.

And disks were big enough to double as shields when necessary, although if these things took too much of a hit, it would probably muck up the internal workings of them.

So, the idea was that he was to create these disks, which would link to each other and be controlled by him via the wires that linked them and by mucking around with how much momentum each one had at a given time... alright, he was going to need Munay's help for this. There was no way he could coordinate all of these things at once... that was why having a secretary was helpful when organising a business... or to put it another way, she could really really help him with this sort of thing.

Being a hive mind, his spacial awareness was good enough to make this thing work... so it was just a matter of making it and then trying it out.

It took a few months to create the first disk, an uninventive thing made of wood that had within it 50 knives, ten of which at any given time could be fired from it in one of ten directions, or just stick out of it to be used at closer range. It also had capability to form up to three links with other disks in future.

The second took only a week once he had figured out how to do it and was nothing but a more refined copy of the first, as was the third. After all, for all of their difficulty to use and for all of their ideas of making experienced fighters do a double take, these disks had to be capable of actually performing the same task as a blade.

It was after that that he got more inventive.

The fourth disk was filled with hooks and graspers, useful for either climbing or getting hold of anything he didn't want the network to let go of.

The fifth was more ambitious. It was left empty except for the core mechanisms. It did however have a whole bunch of things in it that would allow it to be quickly repurposed.

The sixth was sort of like a relay node. It didn't have any tools inside it, but it did have the capacity for 12 links.

And so it went on... each more ambitious than the last except when he ran out of ideas and just created another few like the first three, or else another repeated design that he thought the network could use more of.

Number ten had only five blades, but a much more powerful propulsion system attached to each and a wire attached to each which would then pull them back.

Number fifteen was capable of blowing itself up with enough force to send sparks, fire and splinters of metal everhwhere.

Number Sixteen could actually reshape itself into a crude approximation of a claw while in motion.

There was one more question to be answered about this weapon... how was he to power it? The answer was easy... the energy had to come from somewhere, but he had a source of energy already... his beetles. By breaking them down, the others could convert them into energy, and with the help of Munay, he could use this energy to power the weapon. Now he just had to learn how to use this idea... this was going to be a looooong process. Well, he'd been running out of things to practice in the training ground anyway.
Silence

Re: [ORP] The life of Alder (Alder's home)

Post by Silence »

It started out like any other of Alder's dreams did... he didn't know how he got there and why he was there, but somehow, he was standing in the rain, and it didn't hurt him... well, that tipped him off immediately that he was dreaming. It always started the same way, no idea how he got there or what he was meant to be doing... his brain would fill in the details as things went on... he'd miraculously remember things as the dream continued. That was when the pain around his neck started... faint at first as the scene changed.

He was back in hell, sitting on some kind of chair. Of course, it wasn't obvious that he was in hell, but he knew he was. The room around him was filled with his servants and he smiled at all of them, a cruel smile as he thought of how to please himself at the expense of the creatures before him... after all, he deserved to use them however he wished to... they were lesser than he was. He'd proved that when he'd taken the seat from it's previous owner.

No, it wasn't a seat, it was a throne. It was his throne, his seat. He'd taken it from the last tyrant to sit on it, and these people were lucky that he had. After all, he was a far more intelligent person than that idiot archdemon, far more worthy of playing god.

Over the next ten minutes, he simply played with his power, enjoying the fact that nobody could stop him from doing whatever he damn well wanted. There was some kind of revolt of some of the minor demons which he and a few guards had put down and then... then he'd remembered who he was.

Two guards raised their weapons to strike down the helpless peasants and he'd crushed one of his vials in his left hand, absorbing the force from the reaction of the compound within, then clapping his hands and utilising the force he'd just absorbed to amplify that wave and knock the guards off their feet.

He'd offered one demon a hand to help them back to his feet, an explanation starting to come to his lips, before a dagger had found his chest and all of the demons had fallen upon him and started ripping every beetle apart, limb from limb.

The pain in his neck flared up again, almost unbearably as the scene changed again.

He was once again standing in the rain.

“Wasn't that what you wanted? Power? The ability to force the strong to stop preying on the weak? Those creatures were the strong... you could have changed everything for yourself, truly been happy. I just want you to be happy, why don't you let-”

“Oh gosh, how the hell did the angel follow me here?”

The voice came from his neck.

“I'd never lie and deceive you like that Youken my child. I just... don't understand why you keep rejecting my attempts to help you.”

“Huh?”

“Even after I took away your weakness, brought your goals within your grasp, made you what you had to be, you still try to remake your old self.”

“I what?”

The scene changed again and Youken found himself looking at a massacred land, Archadeas and the denizens of the void standing over it... and he himself was feeding off some of the corpses. Well, that wasn't weird. He had nothing against taking from the dead. He watched himself come across a mangled body... that groaned at him.

Instantly, his pose changed and he'd drawn a bandage and a few other makeshift first aid tools from nowhere and started to heal the unidentifiable body.

“One creature, responsible for all this, and the old you still heals them.”

Youken looked closer and saw the creature, the small form he was healing... was that Eli?

He watched Eli drive a shadow through his neck... well that wouldn't kill him, he- the kid then followed up and killed all of his beetles, just clicked his fingers and they died.

The scene changed again. He was in the tavern, a single person facing him. Who was- oh, Aida. Her lips were moving, she was saying something... out of sync with her lips, a few words, spoken in a voice somewhere between hers and his own reached him.

“You want to make people change? Make people stop just looking on when others are hurt? Make them stop seeing that as normal? You're an idiot, a fool, an idealist that preaches about how flawed other people's dreams are without even thinking about your own... people aren't like that, and nobody can do anything about everything. You can't change every problem in a household, let alone a town or a VR. You can spend your life living for others, but you're just acting without information and thought. Why can't you just stay out of other people's problems?”

He was then facing the angel... Aniel, or was it TK... Teide? Karcier? A faceless person?

“Why don't you let me help you?”

The answer was the same, no matter who it was.

“Because you don't understand the problem, and you can't help with it, or you would've already... cause I don't trust you, and because I don't need another person around who can only muck things up.”

His neck flared up in pain again and Youken dropped to his knees.

“Shut up damn it! I'm an idiot, but I'm not as stupid as other people!”

“Then what have you actually been able to do when you got involved? What has this genius when compared to other people been able to do?”

The next five minutes, images flashed before him... an order of changeling hunters, slaughtered... the changelings that they hunted, killed in an instant... except those who embodied what they were really trying to hunt. Those, due to his intervention, were now unleashed upon the world.

Friends who he'd tried to help and who had still left, died, or just disappeared, never to be heard from again. Soul, Roger, Ciphas, Pilu, Chris, Michael, about half of the people that he'd allowed himself to get close to trusting, he'd been powerless to change the fate of, or had had to watch them disappear and never come back... usually without an explanation.

Surely he'd accomplished a few things... or he would do so when he finished the plan. He was going to trick the world... he'd-

“Seriously Alder, it's nothing.”

“None of your business.”

“I have no idea what you're on about.”

“Stop trying to get involved... this doesn't involve you.”

“Because you don't understand the problem, and you can't help with it, or you would've already... cause I don't trust you, and because I don't need another person around who can only muck things up.”

“Well done Alder... you've just allowed Etaine to get her hands on a perfect vessel.”

“Did you ever consider that you're wrong?”

“It's because you're not powerful, but you trick, bluff, and think your way around other people's power. That makes you far more dangerous.”

“Why are you putting your trust in a man driven by desperation?”

“Do you have a plan? Is it a good one?”

“There's nothing anybody can do anymore... one or two people have all the power.”

“Are you a Kienien or not? Are you with us or against us?”

Come on, there had to be something that he'd done that hadn't ended up mucked up... he'd always done the right things with the information he'd had... he'd usually won... but the outcome had always been a bad one because of things he hadn't been able to anticipate. That meant he was just unlucky, not wrong... right?

“You wouldn't last two minutes in our home. Leaving an assassin alive means that others should try and will get away with it.”

“Would you kill one to save the many? Or would you let them live, and let the blood of the many be on your hands?”

He'd done worse... he'd refused to kill, but he'd also healed evil creatures and just let them kill more.

“You did what?”

Oh yeah, that one... his methods had worked that time... a virus was sweeping throughout forest demons every second, turning them sterile. In two generations, no more would exist... he had saved thousands by doing that, hadn't he?

And he'd unleashed the changelings upon this world and inadvertantly helped the dark mages find a host body, healed one of Archadeas' servants, and despite making excuses to himself of not being ready, he hadn't once had the guts to challenge those who were the parasite of this land to death. No, that was stupid... if he couldn't win to severe injury, he couldn't win like that... he'd just die for nothing. And he wasn't going to kill them either even if he won.

Then what was he intending to do? How was he going to get the power necessary for step nine of the plan? That was step eight, and he hadn't even thought out that far... and for step nine, he'd have to do things far more terrible than the current government.

What the hell was he going to do?

“I helped you. I understand what you want, not like you trying to help others. I changed your mind so you could do this and you just rejected it.”

It was the necklace again.

“You're not worthy to be my child... you're weak. It's ok though, I'll help you anyway. Just, please, don't hurt yourself. You can abandon the world, it will be fine, but you're going to hurt yourself and everybody around you if you stay this way.”

Again, he was shown one more scene. It was similar to the massacred land, but this time, he could identify the bodies... every person he knew was dead before him, and he... he remembered that he'd tried to stop it, but in trying to save one thing, he'd had to give up something else. He'd tried to assist Aida and TK when the witches had come for them, had ended up over his head and brought down the place around himself to cut off the witches following the two so that they'd have time... and that had cut off their excape.

Karcier had been overcome by Etaine, and he probably could have helped, but he had chosen not to kill Rnushka when he'd had the chance, meaning that he'd had to pursue the changeling for longer than he'd meant to, and so hadn't gotten back in time.

And so it continued, with one painful memory after the next... his neck was giving him enough pain to leave him convulsing on the floor, but still one memory after the other flooded his mind.

“This is the fate of people like you. It never works. You're going about it wrong. You've invoking violent energies of the universe with your way of trying to gain power, but you aren't the sort of person who is meant to channel violence. I tried to change that, but no, you thrive in danger, but you refuse to kill others or take from them what they can't get back. You can't do this Youken. Please, stop burning yourself out like this.”

Once again, he was sitting before the demons.

“This is where you belong, the greatest of the strong, forcing them to feel what you once did, forcing equality on all by forcing them all beneath you.”

“Shut up Munay... if it's wrong, then I'm wrong. You think I haven't thought of all of this before? I'll figure out how to make myself a symbol for the hatred of all people when I get there.”

“I just want you to be happy Youken. Why can't you just let yourself enjoy life?”

“Because I could have been born somewhere else... and I'd never get that nagging suspicion out of my head. So I gotta at least try the help the people I could've been.”

“You're going to hurt them and yourself, and you know it.”

“No, I don't... I can't make things worse... for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction... I know that that doesn't work with society, but still, it's already moving in the wrong direction... I can only push it that way further.”

“What if the other yous don't think that it's going wrong?”

“I have to trust something... and I guess if nothing else, I gotta trust myself. If that's wrong, then, as you said, I'm bound to fail anyway.”

“Maybe that's what causes this mess, people just believing that they're right without listening to others.”

“Oh, I know it is. In case you haven't noticed, I make the wrong move time after time because I don't have the information, not because I haven't thought things through. Look, Munay... there are two kinds of people in this world... well, a whole lot, but yeh can categorise them in this way. There are people who watch things go wrong and do nothing, and then there are those who try to change the world... and I will not just be one of the first kind. That means I've gotta do something.”

“You're trying to force the world to accept your view as right. That's wrong by your own standards.”

“I'm not quite that bad... I don't convince myself I'm right without questioning it. I think about how to get the right outcome and I keep refining that. I'm still going to beat the world and win this stupid game.”

“Do you even know what it will mean when you win?”

“Most people go through this life with clear goals in mind, get more knowledge, become the strongest, make money as a blacksmith, enjoy myself... only in the long run, it just comes down to living. Now, this is going in circles. You done now?”

“You're wrong.”

“I know... and I don't care.”

“People like you aren't meant for this world... you'll only hurt it.”

“Maybe, but I have to try anyway.”

“You're an idiot.”

“Yeah, I know... if I wasn't, I'd have an idea that would work... right now, I've only got a guess.”

“Do you even know what you want Youken?”

“... good question. Not a hundred percent certain, but I think I do. Will you still stand by me?”

“That's a silly question, you know I will. I don't care about this so long as you are ok, as you know... but you care about it, so I thought I'd warn you where your path will lead.”

“I already knew that this might be a destination... but the world's headed that way anyway. That much I know, so I'll take the gamble of pushing it there faster if I have a chance to change things.”

“I see...”

Once more, the pain at his neck became unbearable and he saw all three possibilities before him again... that where he'd tried and failed to help, that where he'd stood aside and watched the world destroyed, and that where he'd become the creature that he now wished to remove from the world.

But there was a fourth option... and he had to cling to that, whatever Munay did to his head, he'd cling to his hope for people.

It was all he could do... and even in the dream, he'd-

His eyes opened and he found himself in the tavern once more. Oh yeah, he'd been that bored that he'd fallen asleep.

Apparently his subconscious was rather sadistic. No wonder he was paranoid at times.

((I've not been finding writing easy recently when I've had so much else to worry about, so I just thought I'd write this sort of internal monologue to himself at some point, basically do some exploring into Youken/Alder's character))
Silence

Re: [ORP] The life of Alder (Alder's home)

Post by Silence »

The changeling was gone.

There wasn't anything that he could do about that, Youken had run off to some distant corner of secfenia to deal with something or other and Alder was left to deal with things back home. That meant that he now had to do the work of two people and so something had to give somewhere. As it turned out, he could just about keep up with the workload by decreasing his trips to the tavern and increasing his dosage of caffeine, but within two weeks, he felt like he was losing both energy and progress.

Something somewhere had to change. Short term, he'd be ok, but he had no idea how long this would last, so long term, Alder, the human, needed something to help him.

It was just an experiment, but he tried pulling in some contacts and getting himself a home. It was something he had once dreamed of, having a place to call his own, but his time with the changeling had taught him that such thoughts were the kind of thoughts that would just lead to disappointment before any real joy. It was human nature to strive after what it couldn't have, and when it had it, it would never improve that person's life as much as they thought it would.

However, what he was really after was privacy. Yes, he'd grown very good at concealing things over the years and so hadn't needed that, but if he wanted to conceal something, it would save him some time if he could do it somewhere where people would knock before entering. That, and he knew that most people preferred to sleep under their own roof than in street conditions. Yes, it was something he'd have to get used to, but if it meant better quality of sleep in the end, then that meant that he'd maybe be able to add an extra hour onto his day that he would otherwise have had to sleep in. Also, the thought that there'd be somewhere where people would know where to find him and where he could permanently set up shop with his carpentry and tinkering tools was a nice idea.

All of this was why he had ended up owning the building. Of course, since he didn't really have the funds to pay for it right at that moment after bribing the guards in the legends hall stupid amounts of money to let him in, he'd had to... well, settle for whatever the widuan underworld no longer wanted.

Image

“So? What do yeh think?”

Patch Riveroi, Alder didn't know his real name, raised an eyebrow.

“Can yeh work out of this place Jiro?”

Alder considered for a few seconds. The place was a wreck to be sure. The door wasn't really staying on its hinges, what glass was left in what was left of the window panes was... well, non-existent and frankly, he was fairly sure that the flimsy supports were going to collapse under the building's weight, if this pile of wood could be called a building.

“Yeah, I can work with this.”

Alder found himself grinning despite himself. Yes, he had long ago abandoned his childish fantasy of his life improving tenfold when he owned a property. He'd grown quite happy on the streets. Yet, this was it. Similar to an adult being given a book they had always wanted as a child. Yes, they knew that now, it would seem childish and boring to them, but a small voice inside them still told them that 'this was it' and that for a while at least, their life would be happier.

Alright, first things first, make the place stable so that it isn't a hazard to anybody. After that, he kinda liked the falling down look, so there was no need to change it if he could make the place functional... maybe improve the insulation a bit by going over the windows and then find a sign.

“Splinters and sparks, the shop and home of Alder

Please knock before entering, or I take no responsibility for what happens to yeh.”

What was he selling? Well, pretty much anything that people wanted. Unstable compounds, drugs, traps, whatever he'd created, if it was just slightly worse than what he used himself and if he couldn't see it being used to kill somebody (or at least, there would be easier ways), he could sell it for profit.
Silence

Re: [ORP] Splinters and Sparks, the home and shop of Alder

Post by Silence »

Going to sleep caused two problems. Firstly was the obvious loss of time. Secondly, it gave Munay the perfect chance to show him what an idiot he was being, and being the mother figure that she was, she took every opportunity to do just that.

Youken looked at the creatures assembled before him. He'd done it. He'd become the most powerful creature around and put everything under his feet, then he'd let every one of them know what it was to be kicked for what they had control over, let every one of them know what it was to be powerless and beneath a person with power and disdain for those below them. A small part of him had enjoyed that part. After all, it was about time he got to kick the people who'd been kicking him all his life. A few people, he'd taken special pleasure in stripping of their power and putting them in the dirt.

This was the plan. This was what he wanted. Through the façade of the pacifist, he'd fooled them all while he slowly gained power. It had taken five years, which was longer than planned, but still acceptable, then the coup had come in one night. Widu had fallen to him with nobody any the wiser. Kiene had been next. Then he'd extended to Bravia, a nation without great warriors. Fenia had been last, and had posed the most challenge. He'd not been able to overcome it militarily as easily as Bravia or take it over from the inside as he had with Kiene. In the end though, he had put Kiene above the other two VRs, and himself above the rest of Kiene, and nobody had even noticed him do it. They were all convinced he was just a pawn of Rieron's ambition.

Oh how he'd proved them wrong. He'd made a spectacle of removing the dark elf, putting him in a dungeon. Of course, a few days later, he'd approached Rieron secretly and worked out a deal to avoid the elf escaping. A person that powerful could end his plans. However, a statement from the elf had his followers fall in line, and with the Dalakois, sunspears and Kiene military behind him, nobody could challenge him.

It was then making sure that everybody was put equally into the dirt that was challenging. Somehow, he had to keep all of them in line with fear, each believing that if they rose up, the others would take the side of the 'god king'. Of course, he'd exposed his changeling nature by now and basically dared people to make a point of it.

Now, today, he was going to make a spectacle of killing off his enemies, and a bunch of other people just because he felt like it. He'd chosen very carefully such that nobody in the whole of the land would be without somebody they knew scheduled for death. His personal circle of sorcerers were ready to trap the souls of those condemned to be sure that there would be no peace for them. They didn't deserve rest. They deserved to suffer for what they had done to each other, for what they had done to him, for what they had done to this world. This would not fix the world, but it would punish it. Maybe they'd learn from this. Maybe they wouldn't, but he was damn well going to be sure that every one of the evils they had performed against him was paid back a hundredfold to each one of them.

This was what he wanted. Wasn't it? This was the plan, what he'd strived towards for years. He'd fooled the world long enough to become what he was now. He'd won.

Munay pushed the point forward. This was what he was supposed to be. He didn't need to go trying to get involved with so much as he was doing. He didn't need to burn himself out. Surely he could see that.

No. She was wrong. There was a simple reason for that. This was only half of the plan.

Youken strode out towards the execution grounds. The streets all across Secfenia would be painted red with blood. If they thought that what some of the previous rulers had done was bad, they were totally unprepared for what Alder had done. His guards flanked him on either side of them. The best part of all this was that if any of them, his guards, his sorcerers, the peasants, anyone, thought that they had a chance of taking him down, they'd take it. But they were too worried for their lives, their friends, their families.

Executioners, bound by fear, biting back tears over what they were going to do, waited across Secfenia for the changeling's order.

Youken strode towards the place where he would make the declaration, just to find his road blocked.

A single figure stood, daggers drawn, seven crystals of compressed air floating around him, all angled towards Youken.

This... this was the end of the plan. One guard stepped forward, just to have his armour shatter around him and to find the hilt of a dagger colliding with the back of his head. The other ninety nine shifted uncomfortably as the first guard collapsed to the floor, but Youken held up his hand.

"No. Whoever this is, they stand against me, I'll deal with them myself."

He grinned cruelly and drew two ornately gemmed daggers from his side, pushing his guards roughly aside. Through their mental link, he communicated with the figure before him.

"You know what you have to do, right? This has to look real, and you have to actually be willing to do this."

The figure before him wiped the face that was hidden beneath the hood of a cloak, wiping away a tear, then both changeling and human accelerated themselves to several times the speed of sound and a battle far too fast for any human eye to follow took place. The changeling could only just follow what was happening, and Youken knew that the human would only be able to keep up because he had practised moving at these speeds before. That, and they'd rehearsed this dance a few times.

The two exchanged a few blows, then the changeling pinned the human to the floor and grinned, baring his teeth.

"A dynamicist among the humans... interesting, but your kind can never think fast enough to match me. You're far too slow."

"And you... are far too stupid... idiot."

The changeling had to resist the urge to smile as the crystals struck him in the back, tearing through the beetles that made up his skin, then exploding inside him. Within a fraction of a second, every beetle had been impaled by a carefully calculated shard of compressed air.

The changeling died. It was up to the human to take on the rest of the plan now. Across secfenia, executions were hurriedly called off and mothers embraced their children.

Nobody wept for the dead god king. Nobody but one person, who carefully buried a beetle in an unmarked grave while nobody watched him. Alder, the human, still had work to do, and it was incredibly important that nobody ever knew of the changeling's sacrifice, the one that he'd been cursed to make from the moment he'd been born.

They'd done it. They'd fooled the world.

---------------

Munay watched the dream with an air of disapproval. The two creatures sharing the dream laughed as the necklace realised the full scope of what they were attempting.
Silence

Re: [ORP] Splinters and Sparks, the home and shop of Alder

Post by Silence »

It had been... a long time.

Well, it had been a year. To many around here, that time was nothing... it seemed like everybody and their damn dog had a lifespan several times that of the average human. Somehow, it seemed appropriate that he'd be the one with only a few years left. Life had always thrown the worst it could muster up at him, why break the pattern now?

Nah, that wasn't quite true... there were a couple of blessings and turns of good luck that had come his way. There was the witcher, there was Youken... there was the fact that right now, he was alive and somehow, he'd been able to weave his way out of more situations than he could count by now. All of those were blessings, right?

Youken was dead, sure. They'd failed, sure. But they'd sure gone down in style if nothing else... fallen short of tricking the world, they'd tricked one of the seven dark mages. That had to be worth something, right? Besides, Youken had started to give in to his urges at the end... he'd killed. He'd messed up there.

So, the injuries he'd sustained from that mage left him with a few years to live in pain and then death. It was somewhat liberating not feeling like his life had meaning anymore, not having a reason to live so not fearing death.

Hell, he very nearly ended it himself anyway. It would have been pretty easy, to admit defeat, to simply bow out and leave these idiots to their petty problems, leave them to kill and hurt each other in a world without him in it. He'd nearly done it once before, after all. But, then again, if he did that, somebody would get upset, somebody would get angry and those emotions might lead to them doing something stupid... and besides, there were still a few things he could do simply for interest's sake in this world.

It wasn't like he was doing any real harm.

Of all the people to run into while wandering through the mysts though, the old crow, whatever his name was, wasn't the person that Alder expected to encounter.

At first, he simply started to turn around and walk away although Rnushka doubled his pace and caught up a few seconds later.

Alder very nearly blew his head off. It probably wouldn't have killed the other changeling anyway... but he resisted that urge and turned around instead with a scowl.

"What the bloody hell do you want?"
Silence

Re: [ORP] Splinters and Sparks, the home and shop of Alder

Post by Silence »

“Let’s be honest here. I’m… pretty much done for."

"Only so much time left and all that and only so much one person can do with it."

"This is probably a pointless waste of what I have left, but… I’ve done a lot with this life, all of it behind the backs of everybody else, in shadows, in whispers and in places that are hidden to most folks."

"Nobody… nobody needs to know about this stuff, but I’d like it to be somewhere. Who knows, maybe I’m getting sentimental. Scratch that, I am getting sentimental and this is a bloody waste of time, so it had better not take more than a few hours.”

Riksis nodded and the artificial changeling continued.

“Youken could link to that crystal of yours and drag things out of it, couldn’t he? He managed it for the last few hours of his life… well, I should be safe so long as I’m just putting things in, right?”

Again, a nod.

“To clarify, sir Skrilth, what you have requested is that the information be recorded and then passed on away from this place. Where to, you will have no control over. It may turn up in a history textbook, or a series of letters between so called friends in far away countries, neither of whom ever really knew the other. The information will find its place to somewhere and, at some point, somebody will find it. That is all I will give you. Then, I will owe you nothing.”

“Oh, you owe me your life… or at least your freedom. One or the other… Most of the world does, in case you’ve forgotten. Hell, I don’t think I’m asking for too much recognition here. Plus, I think that I did myself what your family has been preparing to do for generations.”

“Not quite yourself.”

“Irrelevant, the other guy’s dead. Nothing you can do for him now… well, except maybe this. This doesn’t even come close to making us even and don’t even pretend it does.”

“You did not do that for me… in fact, I do not know why either of you did what you did. You were both in the unique position of being able to walk away and not see consequences. Regardless, I did not play in to that decision, so I owe you nothing.”

“That’s for yer crystal to know, not you.”

“Very well… let’s begin.”

--------------------------------------

Alder’s mind snapped away from the present reality as Riksis, the tall man in the expensive looking suit, held up his recording crystal. Flow of knowledge… that was what that old relic controlled. Usually, it passed knowledge on to whoever was linked to it, but it could go the other way… or disperse information outwardly as well.

“You know, Alder… I’ve never met a human who could keep up with me on these kind of things. Like… never. Not even got close. Yet, here we are, talking as changelings, teaching each other how to use magic and trading information on the local crime gangs.”

The two were talking over each other, barely letting the other get two words in before they were already responding. Trading information was more efficient when you cut out the pauses where you were usually only listening or only responding. Yes, it took a great mental capacity to be able to take in one thing and say something else at once while also considering all arguments properly, but the time it saved was well worth the effort it had taken to learn to do this. The changeling race truly had streamlined conversation… well, that was what happened when you literally experienced 10 minutes for every few seconds that passed by in reality. Alright, Youken was one of the quicker ones for whom that number was higher than average, but still… Alder could see how changelings would learn to do it. Hell, it wasn’t that challenging once you got the hang of it.

He scrawled down a few sentences with both hands at once as he responded, passing information on every interaction he had had that day to the changeling with three methods at once while the changeling did the same back to him. Hell, it would be even quicker if he’d drop pointless comments like that and talk just a bit quicker. At their current rate, they were passing information back and forth at a rate 10 times more efficient than humans could manage with standard conversation, which was about 100 times more efficient than they usually did. At this rate, they could be done in the next hour.

Hmm, maybe this process could be sped up further if the efficiency of their writing could be increased. They already wrote in a language they had developed to be especially time efficient to write in, but…


Honestly, this was always a tiresome part of every day, but to maintain the bluff, it had to be done. 4 hours to relate to each other in copious detail every aspect of the other 16. The other 4 were so that the human could sleep. Both had been heavily reliant on substances to limit those hours for some time now, but Alder still had to give in to his body’s needs each day… it was humiliating, the fact that the changeling could always achieve and consider so much more than he could. He was always chasing after his friend’s tail, just trying to be worth maybe half as much as he was.

It was only later that he learned what it was like to have the mind of a changeling rather than a human and realised that he had been somewhat hard on himself. Trained as his human mind was to keep up with a changeling, he had become… bored.

As the crystal ripped memories from him, his entire life of 19 years flashing before him, each moment over the course of an hour, he honestly had spare capacity to properly streamline that language that he and the changeling had developed.
--------------------------------

“Sucks… don’t it kid?”

Oh… this one had been a low of his life. Another embarrassment, in hindsight. Not only was he so shaken up that he was trying to kill himself before he was stopped, but, in hindsight, he could see that he was actually going to fail to make a clean cut and would probably die slowly and painfully if he’d gone through with it.

He’d been painfully stupid at that age.

Yes, yes, he knew what happened here. 5 years old, he had tried to kill himself, the changeling had stopped him and given him a reason to live again. They could move on, nothing exciting here.

The crystal posed two questions… firstly, why had he tried to kill himself, secondly, what was this reason to live?

Oh, really? It didn’t have more questions than that. Damn, it was slow… well, here, it could see both at once if it could keep up.

Witte pulled the ring off of the dismembered finger and felt like he should be feeling something… rage, pain, sorrow, remorse, guilt, fear… something.

But, there was nothing.

His mind simply couldn’t comprehend it.

Sadly, that would never go away… emotion was always hard to process… better to ignore it and let your mind focus on other things. You could be so much more efficient without it.

“Alright, kid… here’s the deal. Those idiots up there… they don’t give a damn about me or you. Now, you’ve seen it first hand, haven’t you? That guy just went roaming free. Now… going after revenge or something like that is just plain stupid. Why would we? We’d die pointlessly… or we’d just hurt a guy who isn’t the cause of the problem. There’s nothing we can do to change what happened now… but I have a theory about these guys. I think that empathy is what they’re lacking.”

The crystal questioned and Alder clarified. It had asked for both memories, so he was providing them simultaneously… both the reason for his instability and the plan they had hatched.

There was a request for one thing at a time from the crystal, which was… rather incredulous that it was actually unable to process things quickly enough and Alder let out a long sigh, then agreed. Alright, first the reason, then the plan.

The 5 year old held the ring hard enough that the inside of his hand began to bleed as he finally came to a conclusion. Widu was the nearest town. He’d go there, tell them what happened… surely somebody could help him. Somebody would give a damn enough to, if not help him, at least come back to their village and investigate so that they could find out who did this and find a way to stop this happening again.

It would be a hard journey, but there were supplies here that nobody would need… he could take a horse and cart with him to carry food and travel slowly… so long as he met nobody on the road, he’d be fine.

It turned out that he needn’t have bothered. It wasn’t just that nobody cared enough to put the effort in to look… no, no, beyond that, there were people around who openly admitted to doing this kind of thing and nobody cared enough to even tell them it was wrong.

They were peasants… powerless… and as such, worth nothing to these people. There only to keep the markets flowing, provide entertainment and die.

The crystal took note of his investigations, ham fisted as they were at that age, his journey that had lasted several days and his failure to properly care for the horse he’d taken with him so that it died a day from his destination. In fairness, he had been young and never had had to do this sort of thing before.

It was when he saw the creature itself bragging about his conquest at his own home that Alder finally snapped. He was not stupid enough to believe that he was powerful enough to actually be able to do anything… so, he did all he could. He didn’t want to spend his days just waiting for one of them to make him his sport. At least he could take control of that, right?

“Sucks… don’t it, kid?”

And that brought them to there.

The changeling was 2 years older than him, orphaned 2 years ago as his adoptive parents had been hanged for their crimes and… well, he was better in every way. Ambitious, cunning, streetwise, had a sixth sense for survival on him as well… not to mention the fact that he was a mages damn changeling.

And after seeing the way the world worked, Youken had also decided to take control… but instead of taking control of his life, he wanted to take control of everybody else’s lives in return for control over his own.

It had been… inspiring.

Witte, as he had been there, had slowly put the knife down as he heard the changeling talk, his face contorting into some mockery of a gleeful grin. His muscles couldn’t quite make the face correctly at that moment, but… well, the emotion was real. Hope.

Ah, yes, the plan…

Well, for something that ended up being so complicated, the basic idea was remarkably simple. The green eyed changeling and he would assume the same identity… an identity that he had decided would have the name ‘Alder’. Over the next years, they would learn to be one another in more than just name, share experiences, learn to talk like each other, think like each other, act and breathe like each other. If they woke up and had had different dreams, they still had work to do.

The whole world had to believe that there was only one Alder.

The next step was to gain power… amass it in every possible way. Make it an obsession. Political, monetary, physical. In connections, in possessions, in favours, in skills and in reputation. If it contributed to their power, they seized it. Jiro Twitch was a moniker they took when dealing with criminals as advisors.

They studied the art of martial combat, weaponry, every martial art they could so much as find a whisper about, leaned the limits of their bodies and then broke those limits. They studied magic. They brokered deals with nobility, took on positions within the VR and town of moderate power from which they could build. They amassed wealth and learned skills of carpentry, artifice and alchemy. They kept going, taking every resource they could find and making it theirs, overcoming constant setbacks, from their need to constantly remain the same person to the fact that the changeling’s body reached certain physical limitations that it could not surpass to the fact that the human could not keep up with the changelings thoughts to the fact that the changeling found that their body simply didn’t generate enough magical energy to ever become a magic user. From tearing out their own bones and hollowing them out while keeping themselves alive with the hired help of a powerful healer to holding enough force within them to blow themselves up and kill themselves any moment they made a mistake just to train their muscles, the two became obsessed with power.

And still the bluff continued… When one was injured or scarred, the other painstakingly crafted the same damage into their own body.

The next stage had never quite happened. The plan was, once they were the most powerful around, to have the changeling take over their identity while the human hid from the world. Youken would become the worst individual the world had ever known with that power… torture, restrain and destroy, put everything under his feet. He would spread his influence as far as he could, taking painstaking care to remove from every person what mattered to them the most.

He would make sure that everybody knew what it was to be powerless, helpless, in constant fear and unable to do anything about it.

If all went to plan, it would be the darkest age that Secfenia had ever had.

Yes, it was a longshot, but they hadn’t ever expected to make it as far as they had.

Then… when all was lost, the human would kill the changeling in a large scale coup.

With the power that came from having gotten rid of such an individual, Alder would ensure that people remembered what it was to be in the shoes of the peasants of a ravaged village. And then he’d make sure that they never gave the world cause to need another person like Youken for as long as he lived. With any luck, they’d be able to ensure at least another few hundred or thousand years of it given how long some races lived, so long as they didn’t forget.

It was… never going to happen. The changeling knew that, the human knew that. However, the plan had been adjusted over time, the details becoming more practical until they had been convinced that they could pull off something on a smaller scale.

------------------------------------
And then, the mage had ruined it all.

Oh, it had been glorious how it had ended… Youken had gone out the way he would have wanted to, but still… they had gotten so far. Witte had almost dared to believe that they could go all the way.

Xellior, 7th of the Fallen, was it? Something or other about Aeroyn.

Turns out that when you wipe out an entire race on the mortal plane for your prejudices, those of them left on the demonic plane of existence get a bit angry. Push them far enough and they might just decide that the only way they’ll ever live in peace again is to wipe out everything on the mortal plane and leave it blank for them to start over…

Go figure. And, it turns out that of all the creatures in the world who could want to summon a dark mage, one of the last groups you want to be doing it are the ones who are meticulous and cunning enough to find out how to properly do it, desperate enough to be willing to pay the price and subtle enough to make sure that next to nobody else knows what they are doing until it is way too late. They actually pulled it off, too.

Well, anyway, Youken had approached Xellior and bound them into a pact with very specific wording. The gist of it had been as follows. Try to kill me… and I will prove to you that I am more powerful than you are. Throw everything you have at me, so much that only another mage could survive. Obliterate me, body, mind, soul. I don’t want to hurt you… so, I’ll use this deal to settle our battle now. If you ever come to realise that you failed to kill me, you have to leave here, be sealed away again. The word ‘ever’ was the important bit.

And that was how the changeling died.

There was no way that any changeling alive could have pulled off that bluff without years of preparation becoming somebody else… and even then, Xellior figured out the trick after a few seconds. Well, that was to be expected… she was a dark mage, after all and she was looking for something to explain the impossible.

But, for a moment, she had believed it, and that was enough.

And that was why the continent wasn’t enslaved to the changeling race.

That was also why Alder was dying. With her final words, Xellior cursed him to a slow and painful demise.

The power of a dark mage torturing his every living moment… and still, he wanted to live. He still had so much left to do. Without Youken, the plan couldn’t be finished, but… well, he stopped a minor ifrit from burning down somebody’s home. He talked down a dragon before they tore apart a village. He tracked down and ended the spree of a serial killer.

He couldn’t help everybody anymore… so it all felt rather pointless… but to those few people, it meant something.

He could at least do that with what time he had left, couldn’t he?

----------------------------------
It was around this point that the changeling truly became bored. The crystal had taken from his memories all that he wanted it to know for sure… the rest, well, he gave the rest to it in sporadic flashes, feeding it everything the moment he thought of it.

"The Amulet of A Mother's Love or it's formal name, the atrifact of Munay. I prefer to just call it Munay for short. She prefers it as well. The energy within Munay is alive similar to a true golem but unmoving. She will protect her master actively from the taint of all others and imbue him or her with heightened natural ability. If your talent is magic like mine...she will heighten your magical abilities or if it is more physical your senses as an example. Munay evolves and adapts to her master. She cannot be stolen or removed. She must be given or allow herself to be touched. She is poison to all others for her fang carries an ancient venom. Now I give her to you."

Ah, yes… Teide had given him that thing and he still carried it. Well, she had given it to Youken and on the changeling’s death, he had taken it. To be honest, he had fully expected him to kill him, but he couldn’t let something that powerful just lie there… so he hoped he’d have time to at least get it back to Teide first. As it turned out… well, it had not killed him. In fact, it had acknowledged him as its owner so long as it was actively seeking to return it to somebody who could actually use it, one of its real children.

Then, when he had finally returned it, a couple of months later, it had found its way back to him, this time with a different message.

It was formally adopting him as its child… from now on, he was it’s… her wielder if he wanted to be.

Well, how could a power hungry individual turn that offer down?


“What kind of monster are you?!”
“Get out of my sight, peasant!”
“Gutter rat!”
“Changeling!”

Ah yes… those calls. Yeah, the anger in their eyes never went away… just, as he grew stronger, from the street rat to a weaponmaster, well, their anger was overridden by fear and they kept their mouths shut.

Which was a shame… he would have liked to try and reason with them without the fear that they’d strike him down for daring to speak.


“If you’re waiting for my blessing, you’ll be a long time, boy!”

The witcher motioned towards the lad, his arms indicating that he was ready for an attack.

Alder noticed how Reaver has thrown away his weapons and did likewise with his butcher's knife, tossing it behind him slightly casually before balling his hands up into fists and circling Reaver, certain that he was inferior to him in every way on the battle field, and slightly reluctant to actually close in at all. After a few seconds, and not seeing any break in Reaver's manner, he reluctantly charged, making a clumsy swing with his right hand, but as he did so, the dagger which was hidden up his sleeve slid down into his palm, leaving a long cut down his arm, but that was inconsequential. The point was that maybe, just maybe the bluff had paid off, and Reaver would dodge not quite far enough. It was a shallow hope, since his swing was still clumsy, easily dodgeable and left himself entirely open to any counter attack. He was just hoping that Reaver wouldn't notice the extra length of the dagger, and that would make a slight change to whether or not the swing connected.

A moment later, his world was wrenched sideways as his arm was grasped and his whole body twisted harmlessly to the side, blade clattering harmlessly somewhere over in the other direction. Alder barely had time to register to the time gap between him being disarmed and restrained before something hit the back of his head and his body slumped.

Yeah… he had a long way to go.

Turns out that that was what happened when an untrained peasant tried to attack a weaponmaster… well, at least this was only for the sake of training.

Oh, those two memories, Teide giving him Munay and Reaver teaching him to fight… they were linked, by the way.

Jenova was the link there… a monster that had taken on the form of a young girl. Reaver had disagreed, calling her dangerous, but nothing but a girl. Alder had seen a killer that needed to be stopped.

Ok, context… Reaver disappeared after training the boy for maybe a month. Towards the end of that time, he and the witcher would find themselves clearing a tomb out of a bunch of corpses that were infected by some parasite, seeming to reanimate and control them… well, to be honest, the witcher had dealt with it and he had done his best to stay out of the way… he’d failed, of course and ended up with Reaver having to save him when the cell started to infect him, but… many months later, the changeling would meet that parasite again… and in facing it, would find its link to Teide. In approaching her, he’d receive that necklace and learn the truth of this world, the mages, the fallen, the lot of them. He’d start down the path that would one day take his life, just as Teide warned him it would.

Years after Reaver had left, he’d meet the witcher again one last time… at the moment that he was about to deal with Jenova, he’d meet the witcher who would stop him. Karcier and Jenova had their final showdown before one of the fallen mages, the one who had created both of them or something like that… Honestly, Alder had never managed to learn the details of that one. However, he found his role as he squared off with his once teacher before the portal that Jenova and Karcier had fled down and escaped with the witcher when yet more enemies followed them all.

In that moment, Alder realised something important… he didn’t need his teacher… he never really had. All that Reaver had ever given him was a push to learn to fight. The rest, he had done almost entirely himself. So, he’d been able to leave that behind him with no regrets.

Karcier had dealt with that dark mage… Alder’s role after everything had just been to get him to that final confrontation and then ensure that nobody else intervened.


The old crow… it was probably worth mentioning him. Rnushka or something, his name had actually been. Leader of the changeling movement that had tried to bring down the rest of the world, he had still taught Youken much of what he knew of his own race. Rnushka was a retriever… a changeling tasked with entering the societies of other races, finding changelings that had been exchanged for other races’ children, telling them what they were and bringing them home to changeling society… a tribe like society of scavengers that tried to make as little impact on the world around them as possible so as to avoid being noticed. Rnushka had also been the one to rope Youken into fighting against the order of the all seeing eye… a group of changeling hunters who had been the ones to finally wipe out most of their race in the blink of an eye when Shin and Youken had failed to stop them.

Shin… oh, a navigator. A creature created with the express purpose of killing changelings, they could see… things. They called it seeing ‘the truth’ or something similar. One way or another, the greatest weapons of a changeling, secrecy and deception, where useless against the navigators… well, unless you were a rare being known as an anomaly. Long story short, some people out there had messed with Fate’s plans enough that they were in a totally different place to where they were meant to be. Navigators could see the whole of the present, past and future. They could, to some degree, manipulate all three… but anomalies were beyond their sight and beyond their control.

Turned out that Youken was meant to die at the hands of an overzealous town guard when he lost control of his form in public… and so he would never have stopped Witte from killing himself. That made the changeling invaluable to Shin, a navigator who wanted to take all of the others down.

Yada yada, long story short, people died, like, lots of people… and all of those involved had engaged in their own little goose chases around different towns and different parts of the country. A whole war had been waged beneath the noses of most folks and few people even noticed.

Youken spent the entire ordeal being tossed around and generally being useless, no more than an accessory to somebody else’s story until right at the end. At the end though… well, the changeling more than accounted for himself. Alder wanted to believe that, anyway… it helped him cling to what shred of sanity he had left, to imagine that the changeling had managed to make some impact… that even if nobody even knew he’d died, the world would feel the effects of his life.


Ok, mercurial blade… that was an interesting one to share information on.

Mercurial… like mercury… meaning unpredictable, subject to sudden changes of mood and mind.

So, it turned out that changelings weren’t meant to fight… like, ever. In the same way as the most prodigious humans could rise to the levels where they could trade blows with dragons and arch demons and the like, so too could the most prodigious of changelings rise to the heights where, in a normal, fair fight, they could trade blows with a human.

This, of course, did not take into account how changelings never fought fair, but the point still stood. Changelings could hold their own with hit and run tactics and trickery, but their best way of fighting was simply not to fight.

Every 3 or 4 generations though, the changelings would produce a mercurial blade… a changeling, usually a swarm mind (for reference, a changeling whose smaller parts resembled creatures the size of small bugs, giving them the appearance of a swarm when changing shape) would learn to fight for some reason… and that changeling would go beyond the level of being able to pass up for a human doing mercenary work… they’d surpass the barriers that surrounded their kind, finding ways around their physical weakness, turning their inability to learn reflexes and lack of any sense of balance into a weapon. They’d master what magic they could, even though changelings generally found themselves unable to use more than one or two disciplines of magic totally impossible. A changeling might spend their whole life never finding the one magical trick that they are capable of… or they might stumble upon it.

His was stopping things… well, to be exact, he drained momentum from things and then put it back into other things… and it turned out that dimensional folding wasn’t that hard either.

Anyway, mercurial blades were rare… they were the one changeling in a generation (due to their low population, that meant that they were about a one in fifty thousand occurrence). Some changelings considered them harbringers of ill fortune… others believed that they existed as their race’s answer to terrible misfortunes that their race would not otherwise be able to deal with… either way, the pattern was there… in the darkest times of the changeling race, a mercurial blade would be somewhere around.

That was what the old crow had told him, anyway. The old crow also had some rather vocal opinions on what exactly his duties as mercurial blade were, but… well, he didn’t feel he needed to follow any of those. He was dead soon anyway and he didn’t feel he owed the changelings all that much now.

Huh… thinking about it, there had been 2 recorded dust skin mercurial blades (having smaller parts about the size of dust particles, the only type of changeling with a thought speed that dwarfs swarm minds, they often had short life spans due to becoming too bored with life to continue on… they were not common), 1 free wing (birds, like the old crow), 2 vermin tides (rats, mice, small creatures of that size) and a handful of gutter runners (animals the size of a small cat). All of them had managed to learn to fight as well… and not just be an assassin or somebody who could trick their way in to landing a blow with a poisoned blade and then running, but somebody who could more than match the most powerful of races. There was also one inanimate… but quite how a changeling made of marbles or flowers or something like that had become a mercurial blade was beyond Alder’s comprehension. Most though, had been swarm minds like Alder himself… the other 10 or 20 or so.

Right… he’d given it all he intended to, so if it could just-

Err… no, not do that.

No, it was not meant to go digging further and further into his memories, trying to find every connection he’d ever had with every person, learn about his hatred of angels and his fear of shadows and spiders (all of which were perfectly reasonable). It didn’t need to know about his fights with the void god or his political manipulations of the demons in the abyss… or how he had, for some time, played that rather sadistic game of torturing and being tortured in hell… even if it had failed to make him feel anything after he had been torn apart by Xellior. Hell’s best torturers couldn’t outdo that pain… but he had found he was able to teach them a thing or two about how to get into somebody’s head and hit them where it really hurt.

It didn’t need to know about the times he’d tricked himself into forgetting things… or the time he’d refused to acknowledge an entire family out of fear of the dark elf coming after him if he couldn’t remember their names.

It didn’t need to see his interactions with his old steward Lamar before they’d ‘parted ways’ (Lamar had tried to kill him)… or see how he used to be a Sunspear and his interactions with that family. Or see anything about that slaver that everybody had thought he’d been after for slavery when in actuality, all it was about for Alder was power and somebody who didn’t have enough of it to enforce their position was still trying to abuse what they had… and for once, he didn’t have everybody else against him to deal with… no, it didn’t need to worry about that. It had all that he wanted it to spread around.

Neither did it need to know about the twenty or so pledges he was bound to his current steward by… or how he’d become attached to that steward by beating up a powerful Fae for them in a series of events that had nearly cost him the entirety of his memories again.

Damn, his mind was going too quick… he was basically feeding it what it wanted without even meaning to. The same thing that made his mind usually unreadable by humans was making it such that information was being guzzled up by this object all the quicker once the link had been established.

Roger… Soul… those assassins… Bane… Rohanne… people who had come and gone, people he’d even gotten attached to in some cases. Hell, the list went on and on and on… eventually, he’d learned not to get too attached to people.

… Ciphas, Malcolm… Eudoxia… Casimir… Pilu…

Ok, enough!

A human might have been able to draw up some willpower by which to scream, force the crystal away… the person Alder once had been might have been able to do that… but his mind was fragmented as a changeling’s now… and as such, compared to the shove that a human could give the crystal away from his mind, all he could do was blow at it.

Ok, maybe in hindsight, this was… not the wisest of…

And then there was… her.

Alright, NO! THAT WAS OFF LIMITS!

Only one person got to mess with those memories and the crystal wasn’t that person.

For a moment, the changeling’s mind went blank as it struggled vainly against the overwhelming force of the crystal, then… then he focused… focused on every little mistake he’d ever made about how the world worked, blowing it up, letting those misconceptions and mistakes fill his whole existence. Of course the sky was actually purple and it was just his eyesight that was causing problems… why, of course this world had to be a simulation, by the laws of probability. People didn’t really exist, did they? But rocks… they had to be real, he’d proven it while high on pain killers.

The crystal originally started to absorb this information too, then what pseudo consciousness it had, more a drive towards the single goal of knowledge accumulation than a real sentience, began to realise what he was doing.

Was it worth it? Was learning about her, about things he knew that could hurt her, about things that she trusted him not to reveal? Was it worth corrupting every piece of information it had about the natural laws just to get at those memories? Because he’d drive himself insane convincing himself that the world really did work that way before he’d willingly let down that wall of erroneous information that those small details were mixed in with.

It could take his weaknesses… it could learn of his frailty to shocks, burns and other attacks encompassing the whole area on which he stood. It could learn of his weak mind, of his low ability to function in cold and how some liquids like water caused him pain to touch. It could learn of his deep seated fear of court rooms and how so much as a whisper of hanging made him uncomfortable and distracted. It could learn of the fact that, if separated from his cloak, he’d lose more than 90% of what magic he could wield… it could learn that he had a mage blessed dagger, one of the most powerful weapons around and as such, that disarming him when he wielded that weapon could reduce his peak fighting power. It could learn of his regular bouts of weakness that would mean that an enemy would only need to time their strikes. It could learn that his shapeshifted forms could not have different eye colours and that his worst injuries would always stay in some form. It could learn that he could only give the appearance of healing quickly while in actual fact, the damage remained… it could learn that approaching him with a slashing weapon was fairly useless.

It could tell some distant person how to take him apart piece by piece, emotionally, physically, mentally, but what she had entrusted to him… that was off limits.

And it could bloody well corrupt everything else it knew if it wanted to get at that… even if he had to corrupt everything he himself knew to protect it. When it came down to it, he only had to live with the erroneous information for another year or so… the crystal could spend hundreds of years correcting what he was going to give to it.

So… if it knew what it was good for it, it would-

Reality jerked itself back to the changeling… which was a weird sensation. He was not returned to it, it was as if reality itself had slapped him across the face and then grabbed his cheeks and turned his head towards itself, forcing him to gaze upon reality again.

“… we’re done here.”

Alder passed the crystal back to Riksis and walked away, wordlessly as he tried to figure out why the sky didn’t look purple enough today and remember what the (obviously correct) argument was for why rocks were the only universal constant.
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