So... yeah. Apparently there's a real dungeon here in Sharliya. I spent a bunch of time looking it up on the æthernet after getting home from work. The local Adventurers' Guild rents it out to League teams who want to go in and pretend to be ancient heroes. And now they were going to rope me into it as well.

From what information I could find, it looked exactly as tame and commercialized as you'd expect. Just before we graduated, we'd all had our mana density measured. Like most students, I registered at third level; a handful at the top of the class had made fourth. With what I'd seen Kade do yesterday, research into Monk skills led me to imagine he was likely fifth level, which was actually pretty impressive! I may not be into power grinding, but I can appreciate the dedication that a lifetime of effort had yielded for him.

In the old stories, people would hit double-digit power levels all the time. While I have no doubt that great heroes did once exist, and possibly even a few true epic heroes at some points, this was before they had ætheric technology to measure such things precisely. And of course the mythologizing process has taken its toll, inflating every little thing twentyfold. Today... well, it was rumored that the recently-departed Emperor Charles III, arguably the most powerful man in the world back in his prime, was ninth level, and that was more than enough to bring an entire continent under his sway.

But I'm ranting, aren't I? The dungeon. It was advertised as providing "an entertaining and engaging challenge for adventurers of all ages, up to third level." In other words, we had an elderly office worker on our team who could probably solo it. None of this was helping me see the appeal. I just hoped they didn't expect me to dress up in robes or bring some elaborate-looking staff!

I eventually headed to bed. Next morning, it's the usual routine, and soon enough I'm on my way in to work again, hoping today wouldn't resemble yesterday! Of course, there was no music on the voxcast; everyone was talking about the Emperor again. The one thing that really stood out was a report of a rumor that was apparently circulating already, that he had been murdered. They had a denunciation of the rumors by Chancellor Rosocress, emphasizing the absurdity of the idea. "Most conspiracy theories at least make some degree of sense: somebody did something to get something. But this disrespect of our beloved Charles's final moments is truly beyond the pale. Where is the benefit? Who stands to gain from the murder of a man who was on his deathbed anyway?" He segued from this into a denunciation of the Restorationist faction, claiming the rumors were a desperate attempt by them to distract people from their own blah blah politics politics politics.

Chancellor's an idiot if you ask me. I'd never heard this rumor before he started denying it. I bet most people hadn't; it's been less than a day since the Emperor died afterall. That's not enough time for a rumor to even properly start spreading! So all he managed to do is call attention to it and ensure a lot more people would hear about it than would have otherwise.

Chancellor Rosocress was on every station. Thankfully it's not a particularly long drive to work!

Things were a lot calmer than they had been yesterday. Of course everyone was talking about the Emperor and the upcoming succession. Speculation was running wild, with some people even predicting we'd get a Restorationist as the new Emperor. Apparently it could happen if 80% of the Transformationist faction of the Council sided with the Restorationist candidate, rather than either joining with the Preservationists or putting forth their own candidate. Seemed absurd on the face of it — who ever heard of a Chaotic faction acting with such a high degree of unity? — but that didn't stop some people from insisting that it would bring about a fundamental transformation in the ways of the Empire, which would further Transformationist goals and therefore they necessarily had to do it.

I mostly just kept my opinions to myself. It seemed patently obvious that the Preservationists would win; that's just simple numbers. But if you go around telling people "basic arithmetic means it's obvious that you're wrong," they don't decide to get any less wrong; they just get mad at you.

Although with as wrong as we all turned out to be about the next few weeks, would it have made any difference in the long run?

Somehow, we still managed to actually get some work done in spite of all the current-events gossiping going on. We headed back to the lab, where Kayla explained why we wanted to do classifier testing locally: because the ætherics worked so quickly, and what we cared about was improving their speed further, delays such as network latency would introduce potentially-significant amounts of noise in the process.

We retrieved the original memory crystal from the crash and hooked it to one of the test cars, overriding the input from the car's oculus, and focused a micro-scrying rig on the rune plate. After replaying its classification work a few times, we put the original memory crystal away and took the one from the scry rig back to our desks to look at the data it had collected.

"Well that's interesting," Kayla said when the analysis came up.

"What? All this just looks like a bunch of lines to me."

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She sighed softly. "Lemme guess. Never used a micro-scry before?"

"It never came up."

So she started explaining to me how to interpret the data. At least it made sense once I knew what to look for. "So it's getting conflicting readings. The visual data makes it think it's open sky, and the mana signature says 'solid object ahead.'"

She nodded. "But that doesn't really look *that* much like sky. There's clearly a rear window leading into the interior of a car, for example. What happens if we tweak it a bit?"

So we did. We started playing around with parameters, trying to make it more clear that that was a car. Found half a dozen different ways to do so, too. Unfortunately, when we ran our designs against the pre-existing test corpus, every last one of them got noticeably worse at something else, either crashing into something that it wouldn't before, or stopping for false positives because the classifier now wanted to say everything was a car!

"This is getting really irritating," I grumbled after an hour and a half of getting nowhere. "We were told to improve the classifier, and we can't find any way to do it!"

Kayla shook her head, smiling a bit, the sort of smile that seems to be more to herself than at me. "We were told to look at improving the classifier. Torrin's well aware that it's not always possible to get everything you want out of a project. If his team comes back to him and says 'this can't be done,' and can back it up with solid reasoning, he'll accept that answer."

"Wait," I said as an idea came to me. "The problem here is that the spell doesn't have a mind. We just can't get it to see things the way we see them... so why not put something capable of actual sight in there?"

Her eyes widened slightly at those words. "No. Just no. It might sound like a good idea to try soulbinding here, but no."

"All right. Why?"

She sighed. "Well, broadly speaking, there are four types of souls: kith, beasts, monsters, and outsiders. Beasts and monsters don't think the way we do. Just imagine if we bound the soul of a dog in there, and it turned out it was a car-chaser! Outsiders don't even perceive the way we do. And obviously you can't use a kith soul; that's got all the icky parts of necromancy and slavery all bound up together into a big ball of messiness."

I frowned. She noticed. "What is it?"

I shrugged. "Hard to denounce slavery when we literally have one as a coworker."

She just rolled her eyes. "Ampha is a warlock, not a slave."

"Same difference. Forced to work for a master."

"If working for someone else is what makes a slave, does that make you one?"

"I get paid for it. Warlocks don't."

"You get paid in money; she gets paid in power, and her Patron provides for her basic needs. She doesn't need to find her own food and housing, for example, or pay off student loans. How much of your paycheck is left after taking out those three?"

"OK then. What, to you, makes someone a slave?"

"That's simple," Kayla said. "A slave can't leave. Ampha could renounce her Patron at any time, if she chose to."

"...and suddenly be homeless with no marketable skills because her power's all gone. Heck of an available choice she's got there."

She shrugged. "It's happened before. Warlocks have found someone to move in with — family, roommates, romantic partners, or whatever — and obtained non-magical employment. You don't think a big, strong orc could land a job as a laborer? Would a girl with her figure have trouble finding a boyfriend?"

"In all honesty, I wouldn't know. Wasn't checking out her 'figure.'"

Kayla snickered. "You reserve that for girls with succubus auras?" she teased.

I just groaned and mock-banged my head on the desk. "That one's not my fault!"

"Yeah," she said softly, the levity gone now. "Guess it's not. ...you seriously don't look at girls though?"

"Let's just say... not at the moment. Kinda coming off a bad breakup, so it's a sore subject right now."

"Ouch! What happened?"

I sighed. Why was she even asking? And yet I got the sense that saying I didn't want to talk about it would just make her even more curious. "Well... honestly I'm not sure. I thought she was the one. Thought we really had something, especially when I got this job and she landed one in Fort Steilan. That's less than 30 miles from Sharliya; we could have totally settled down together out here! It was fate, y'know? But after a year and a half together, she laughed in my face and said I was 'just a fling' and that we were through."

Her eyes went wide as I described what Vivian had done to me. "Wooooowwww... that's awful! Some people really suck!"

"Yeah, I guess. If I'd gotten a stab wound, or a broken arm, or a disease, I could see a healer about that. But for my heart... there's no magic for that. I think it's just gotta heal the slow way. Give it a few months and I'll probably be back on the market."

"Good to hear! I'll be here for you."

I gave her the side-eye. "You're not offering...?"

She snorted. I mean, a straight-up snort of a laugh. "Gods no! I don't date coworkers and you're too young for me anyway. But a bard makes a damn good wingman, if you need one?"

"What, that's not just something you play at on weekends?"

She narrowed her eyes at me, suddenly back in teasing mode. "I dare you to ask me that question again after you've seen me at karaoke night."

I held up my hands. "Okay, okay. So anyway... work?"

Kayla laughed. "Right, work. So... no good way to improve this without breaking anything else."

"Not unless we can come up with a soulbinding solution. Maybe talk with Apogee if he's back tomorrow?"

"It'll never wo~ork," she singsonged at me. Then, more seriously, "but even if it did, that's one of the few things we still can't automate and mass-produce. Extra labor and materials costs, you'd easily add 3,000 platinum to the purchase price of the car. The suits would never go for it."

Sigh. "You're probably right."

"Don't feel too bad about it," she said. "Failure is its own success. Now you've learned something new, so as long as you remember that and learn from it, it's good experience."

"Yeah, I guess. Still kinda sucks though."

At least they had music on the voxcast again on my way home. Tomorrow was going to be my first Thursday here, so I went online and looked up details on local church services. I hadn't been particularly religious at school — it's a good way to paint a target on your own back, especially when you profess a Good-aligned faith — but I figured it wouldn't hurt to at least check out the local congregation. Guess I'll see what it's like tomorrow night.