Dyralist hauled me back to his office to talk. Well, he phrased it as a polite invitation, but there's really no turning down such a request, now is there?
"Mr. Webb," he said quietly, "this is the second time I have had cause to speak with you concerning your involvement with interplanar beings. Is this a new habit of yours?"
I shook my head nervously. "Not at all, sir. Believe me, any concern you might feel at all this, I feel twenty times over. I never wanted anything more in coming here than to be a part of building a good product. That Celestial, Terenaþ, came here and sought me out; I wasn't looking for him, nor did I have any desire to ever speak with him again." I had to be very careful to not say anything that wasn't actually true; he'd shown some disturbing levels of insight in our previous conversation.
"You have no interest in the business of other planes. But sadly, it would seem that they have taken an interest in you."
Well, crap. "I hope this isn't something that will put my job in danger?"
He gave me a warm, grandfatherly smile. "No, no, I would not punish you for that which is not your fault. But at the same time, I cannot ignore this." He held up one finger. "I am simply pondering, not reaching any final decisions yet, but I can't help but wonder if perhaps your responsibilities here are poorly aligned with your reality?"
It took a second to parse that. "You're... thinking of transferring me?"
"I am considering it."
"I like the team I'm currently with, and the work I'm doing."
"Noted. And I have no desire to do you wrong. At the same time, I also have responsibilities to my employees, and to my shareholders, to run a stable, profitable company. Getting called urgently out of important meetings because there is an interplanar crisis brewing in a branch office that somebody needs the might of a dragon to put down... that is not good for business.
"Do you know what it is like to be a dragon in an empire ruled by kith, Mr. Webb?"
I thought about it for a minute. "I've met you twice now, and seen you on FV a few times before that. Every time, you appeared as a man, not a dragon. And part of that is simply that our buildings are built for kith, not dragons, but... there's more to it than that, isn't there?"
"I hatched from my egg in the twilight years of the Fourth Age," he began. "I have few memories of those days, but I lived through the entirety of the Fifth. Dragons were great powers then. The chromatics, being more inclined towards Evil by their traditions, sought power and influence among kith, some of them becoming rulers or tyrants, others vicious monsters who terrorized whole populations until adventurers hunted them down. My metallic brethren largely kept to ourselves, seeking treasure, solitude, and peace. There were times when kith came to us for advice, trade, or seeking protection or favors, but such incidents were thankfully rare. That is the life I grew used to for the bulk of my existence.
"The Chaos War changed all of that. With survival on the line, existence itself, we could not remain neutral, passive participants in the world. We fought. Effectively, perhaps overly so. Many of my brethren died, but all of us killed, leaving deep memories that linger to this day. Where once we were respected, with some healthy level of fear mixed in, now we are subjected far more deeply to fear than to respect. And to be feared and mistrusted by powers that command armies of ætheric warriors is a tenuous position indeed, even to a great and powerful dragon. I bear malice towards none, and yet I must always be on my best behavior. If too many begin to see one of us as the dragons we are, rather than simply as a curiously wealthy and somewhat eccentric variant of kith, it tends to end poorly for us."
That was quite the description! "An apex predator, surrounded by well-armed folks who don't appreciate being reminded that they're your natural prey. I can see how that might be an uncomfortable position for everyone involved. And I'm sorry if I ended up poking at that sore spot."
"Do not be. You made the request, but I chose to respond, when I could have ignored it. Any consequences for that will be upon my own head, though in truth I doubt there will be any for this alone. I simply wanted you to be aware of my position, in the hopes that similar situations will not arise in the future."
"Thank you."
He waved a hand. "Go. Back to work. I have much to consider; expect a decision from me soon, but not today."
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
So I went back to work, about as happy to get out of a room as I'd ever been.
* * *
Every once in a while, the conscious mind focuses so deeply on one subject that the subconscious is left completely free to do its wild random thing, and suddenly intrudes upon you with some piece of insight out of nowhere. About two hours after my talk with Dyralist, a thought struck me, completely unrelated to my current work on the motor schema. I pulled out my phone and brought up the photos I had taken of the bookshelves in the "library of nonsense."
Mareleþ's own mind! How had I not seen it before?
I didn't bother checking every last one, but each book I looked at in the one photo, if I searched a bit I could find a counterpart for on the other bookshelf. Same color, same symbols on the binding, and the same size.
I texted Felicity right away.
I don't think there's an encryption
key like I mentioned to you guys.
Hmm?
Here, look at these two shelves.
Find any given book on one of them,
and look for an exact match on the
other.
All right, I see a few. What about
it?
Look up "one-time pad." It's an old
system of encryption, theoretically
the strongest you can possibly get in
terms of resistance to code-breaking.
The math's nice and simple too. The
drawback is, instead of a nice, short
key, the key is *exactly as long as
the text itself.*
So you think the library is a puzzle
that tests for the knowledge of one-
time pads? Not a very good puzzle
if so.
Who am I to understand the mind of a
dungeon core? All I know is, it
looks plausible.
You want to try going back there
Saturday?
Might as well. I could probably
write up a quick schema to decrypt
OTP data by then. See if it gets us
anywhere.
And with that, my ability to concentrate on work was completely shot for the rest of the day, my mind off chasing shiny encryption ideas instead. Luckily it wasn't too much longer before quitting time.
When I got home, I started researching. Turns out the math wasn't quite as simple as I had originally thought, as there were two different ways to implement the concept. One of them, it didn't matter which text was the message and which was the key; for the other it did. Not to mention that I could think of half a dozen different ways to convert between raw data and Universal Textual Foundation encoding. My schema needed to account for all of those possibilities, and combinations thereof... and then hope something worked and I wasn't completely making a fool of myself.
Just once, I'd like one of my ideas to go right, exactly as I imagined it, with no weird twists at the end or cosmic strings attached that just makes everything worse somehow.
I was able to focus a bit better on Thursday, and turned in my schema for review by Apogee and Torrin right after lunch.
"Not much difference here," Apogee said. "But those do look like distinct, if minor, improvements."
"Yeah, this was already a pretty solid design and it's had a few rounds of optimization run on it already. There wasn't much there for me to find, but keil scattering is a new technique that wasn't around a year ago. That should give a power savings of about 3% in cruising, 5 while accelerating, give or take half a percentage point."
"Well, it's not huge," Torrin mused, "but it doesn't need to be. Between this, Kelamek's tweaks to the body, and Ampha's work with Kade on the power crystals, a little here and a little there, we'll add about 20 miles of range to a full charge. That number sounds a lot better to consumers than 'a few percent in a few systems,' even if it all means the same thing."
"I have not heard of keil scattering before," Apogee said. "Is that the name of this pattern here?"
"Yeah, it was just developed a few months ago. I read an article on it over the weekend and thought it could be useful here."
"Here?" he asked. "If this works the way it looks like, it could give us thirty, thirty-two percent improvement on sense translation, with no need for larger rune plates."
"Are you sure?" Torrin asked, suddenly looking excited. "Didn't you say the threshold we need was..."
"Twenty-five. Brad, you may have just helped us crack the problem of efficient vehicle communication a year ahead of schedule." Then to Torrin, "I am not certain yet, but this feels right."
"Go then, take the rest of the week to test your theory. Make it your top priority. If this pans out, I'll treat the both of you to a steak dinner on Friday. A good one." He grinned and walked off.
Apogee and I looked at each other. "The rest of the week is a day and a half," I said. "Will that be enough time?"
"It will if we buckle down. Bring your chair and come to my desk; I have most of the work set up already."
It took a bit of effort, but we were able to confirm his theory and scribe off a proof-of-concept rune plate about half an hour before closing time on Friday.
The steak was delicious, the sense of accomplishment even more so. This was what I was here for, what I had wanted to be doing all along. I was finally starting to feel like I really fit in at Dyralight.