1 Soul Bound
1.2 Taking Control
1.2.4 An Artful Carnivale
1.2.4.17 T.M.I.
7:45 am, Thursday June 8th, 2045
5 bells of the afternoon watch
Lunday full, 8th day of the month of KrevinBelember, A2F1600
Bungo had looked down upon the Den from above, seeing the balconies in the nearest courtyard laid out neatly, far more visible than from below. It seemed to remind him of something, because a minute later he spoke up.
Bungo: {Tomsk, your Baths in The Burrow have become quite popular. Several corridors have grown out from them.}
Tomsk: {Not my doing. It was the Tomskettes who built them, designed on a Roman ideal that included nude bathing. The last laugh is upon them: Alderney added in a mutual-consent feature which means people only see and get seen by people matching criteria set by a bather.}
Wellington: {User created content is great, but I set up a peer review process to flag problems before anything gets approval to be included outside a clan-only area. Alderney is on the list of people registered as interested, and her suggested fix was the one that got upvoted.}
Alderney: {In effect, it shards the space into different versions of the baths populated by groups who share friendship or standards. Some will end up receiving massages and relaxing in bubbling hot pools in an area filled by lots of others; some will end up doing it by themselves or with a single partner.}
Bulgaria: {If architecture has such a big impact upon the strength of a community’s spirit, we should put some thought into the direction we want The Burrow’s design to head. Will letting the spaces become that fragmented support the social cohesion we want? We started off with a Womble burrow as our initial metaphor, but we don’t have to stick to that.}
Kafana: {Your outlook upon life, possibly even your personality, is shaped by the people you spend time hanging around with. But what if the way they shape you isn’t healthy for you or what you want?}
Wellington: {Then hang around with different people.}
Tomsk: {That happened to me when I was sixteen, and a good thing too. But I just fell into it; it wasn’t a positive decision. I think few people will accurately identify the problem and take the hard step of changing their patterns. Look how many people get hung up on wanting to spend time with someone who isn’t that interested in spending time with them.}
Alderney: {Maybe we could give a sense of the actions of the larger population by showing them like ghosts.}
Wellington: {What, as an orglife overlay whose transparency you can alter, and which is slightly blurred for anonymity? Or a statistical sampling of them?}
Bungo: {Perhaps more like vampires. You can see their shadows on the floor, or spot them in mirrors. The corridors use data on which spaces are frequently transitioned between to calculate proximity. We could add ‘windows’ on walls which look out upon nearby spaces, if we’re not limiting ourselves to the underground metaphor.}
Kafana: {I like the window idea. You could use the same concept to allow people in arlife to use a screen as a window into The Burrow, and a window in The Burrow to look out of a camera in arlife.}
Alderney: {Like the mirror in “Alice Through the Looking-Glass”, that you can only step through when wearing a tiara. Stepping in the other direction could allow you to take temporary possession of a Topsy.}
Kafana: {I’d settle for anything that made it easier for me to keep track of and participate in The Burrow while carrying out my normal daily activities. It’s a pity the awareness of other people’s intentions and feelings that you get when reading the forums doesn’t carry over into arlife.}
Alderney looked thoughtful, but before she could speak, Bulgaria pointed out a wide gap in the buildings ahead.
Bulgaria: “Honoured gentles, we have arrived at the Old Tiltyard, home of many wondrous performers and keeper of the spirit of Carnivale.” He gave an unctuous bow, fully back in the role of an ambitious stevedore hoping for a large tip.
Kafana put on the expression of an enthusiastic wide-eyed tourist that the scene seemed to call for. Back at UCL several of the Wombles had tried improving the skills required by some of their capers by going along to meetings of the university’s Improv Society. By the end of the term, even Wellington had got the hang of it.
Kafana: “Carnivale? What’s that?”
Bulgaria: “The nobles have traditionally frowned upon people walking about Centrale with their faces covered. What’s the point of being superior if you can’t recognise those who should grovel to you? Respectable merchants also like to know who they are dealing with. However, four times a year we celebrate the arrival of a new season and, by the grace of the deities, for the week of celebration and the two weeks preceding it, these expectations are lifted, letting everybody blow off a bit of steam, ignore the hierarchy, and be who they want to be.”
Kafana: “So they’re not so much putting on a mask as escaping from the face they have felt forced to present in public? An act of revealing rather than an act of hiding?”
Bulgaria: “In theory this is the Lammas carnival, when truces and peace treaties are concluded, freeing up people to bring in the harvest. The prevailing winds change and merchants start new ventures. In practice, for most people it is an excuse to dress up and have fun. At other times of the year, the masks and wild fun are restricted to the area around the Tiltyard and the Den, but during the celebration there are processions, private balls, and public feasting in the streets. Musicians, dancers and actors gather from far around, and find ready audiences.”
Tomsk sounded intrigued. “This Tiltyard, does it contain a fair, a festival, a circus, or something else?”
Bulgaria: “A bit of all of those, good Sir. This is the home base of the Lovari, who’ll try to persuade you into emptying your coin purse any way they can short of violence, leaving you only enough for a gondola ride home, poorer but wiser. Luckily you have me with you Sir, to point out all the fakes.”
Bungo: “Let’s share senses, before we enter. Kafana helped me gain a new one yesterday and I want to see if I can pick up the conceptual framework that Alderney uses to interpret architecture.”
Bulgaria: {Good idea. I’ll try to share out the skill I’ve acquired that lets me track slight of hand, how thieves indicate marks and how grifters manipulate the flow of people and information.}
Kafana: “I’ll add a learning buff and a prayer, but just a word of warning: you’re going to be stunned for a few seconds, from information overload. Don’t panic, just ask System to fade out the cues that aren’t relevant to your intent.”
The group moved to the shelter of a doorway while Kafana did her stealth casting, then held hands and invoked their group skill. She was used to it by now, and Bungo only sweated a little, but it hit the others hard. Tomsk went immobile as a rock. Bulgaria swore. Alderney had an expression of delight on her face. Wellington was a different matter. Even after the others had acclimatised and dropped their hands, his face looked blank and he stood there muttering under his breath, not turning or reacting to a hand waved in front of him.
She looked at Wellington, with an understanding of his mana flows and bodily health superimposed upon his outward merchant appearance. Each of the eight types of pure mana, tinged with a different colour in her sight, was spread through his flesh in proportions that varied from blood to bone and from organ to organ, at though his insides had been stained with dozens of dyes by a deranged doctor. Some parts were brighter than others and a sense of wonder crept over her as she realised that the brightest spots weren't just random points where unused reserves of mana had pooled; they were also part of something else, something so strange and complex she hadn't recognised it and so new to her that she didn't even have the words or concepts to deal with it until she drew on a view of the world shared by Wellington - they were nodes. Mana nodes!
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Alderney: “Wellington, are you ok?”
With growing excitement Kafana explored onwards. Each mana node she examined, from the splishing puddle in Wellington's little toe to the deep rippled lake that overlaid his solar plexus, had several flows of pure mana connecting them to some of their neighbouring nodes, whose pulses were repeatedly sent or received along the same efficient curving paths each time, keeping them clear and, over time, shaping them into a stable network of local channels of varying widths.
His voice came back, through gritted teeth. “I have to be able to handle this. I have to.”
Was there more? Drawing on her own healer's vision, she noted where Wellington's torso and limbs were divided by the boundaries where the local networks met, and compared that to the biological division of his body into areas served by different major nerves and blood vessels. They were similarities, but also several differences - the mana channels took their own paths inside his skin, unobstructed by bones but more reluctant to pass through volumes categorised by function, such as respiration or digestion. She gained a feel for the health of a local network when, she noticed that the total mana flow the network in his left leg could handle without straining was different to the capacity of his right arm, and that several of the channels in his right arm showed signs of recent growth that were similar to alterations she'd noticed in her own muscles after enduring a training session with Carlo. Had those channels become stronger because Wellington had repeatedly strained them while using his Athame to practice Runic magic? The network in his skull was so bright, she hadn't even tried to look closer. His fight to process everything offer by the shared skill was probably straining every channel in it but, as long as he took breaks, it wouldn't cause lasting harm and might even make that network strong once it healed.
Kafana: “Have you asked System to filter it down?”
Wellington: “Data is good. I might miss something. Kafana, boost me again. Harder.”
Bungo: “You’re a data-addict, Wellington. A junkie, trying to mainline for the first time who is near to overdosing. This isn’t good for you.”
First, do no harm. She might not be a proper doctor, but she'd at least try to act responsibly. She tried mentally directing Truesight to filter out some of the brightness and cautiously pressed her palm tatt to zoom in with her vision. The largest node in the skull was mainly filled with Lun's violet air mana used for Seeing, Illusion and Mind magic and, since it was sat above and just behind his eyes in the middle of his pre-frontal cortex, she nicknamed it his 'Third Eye'. Two nearby nodes, centered in his biological eyes, were each connected to it by eight short wide channels straining to feed the skills demand for every type of mana, sending it so fast a glowing nimbus bleed from them like an arcane version of Cherenkov radiation. Nearly as bright were four longer channels feeding gold, green, grey and violet mana to node a little higher than the Third Eye but situated right at the back of the brain in an area that felt unusually active to her Healer's sense. So, strained, but not abnormal or failing. She zoomed back out, noticing in passing that the The Third Eye itself was also being fed by the largest nodes of his body's other local networks, using the surface of his skin itself as a single ultra-wide channel, or perhaps a giant pool-less mana node, able to move all types at the same time, but store none of them? Did the body's magic zones correspond to the game's armour and jewellery slots? How did the limits on Reinforcement magic interact with the limits on other types such as potion use and the interactions of set and other magic items...?
Wellington: “Do it.”
Interrupted, Kafana saved the thoughts for later and concentrated on visualising Wellington's information processing capacity and speed, bringing him into her casting gestalt and pouring the passionate of his hunger into the heavy blues rhythm of a Bob Dylan song.
Through the shared sight her music looked beautiful, with coloured notes of mana threaded through concentric shells of air whose oscillating density carried the sound. Wellington had his head arched back, transfixed like a saint struck by a heavenly beam of brilliance in a painting of them receiving a religious revelation. His eyes were crackling visibly, worse than Alderney's had at the Triple Ring after receiving more buffs than her body could handle, so filled with bright actinic blue lines they were now arcing across his face, with each wave stronger and louder than the last, and each inching beyond the line of scorch marks showing the limits of the territory previously claimed.
No problem. She'd fixed this before. She sang her usual calming buff, turns to check on the others while waiting for Wellington's eyes to settle back into a steady blue glow.
It was a few moments later, while she was using her newly enhanced Truesight to examine Tomsk and Nothung, his mana-absorbing sword, when Bungo's voice, full of uncertainty, drew her back to Wellington: "Err, Kafana, is it meant to be doing that?"
The scorched territory was still spreading. Not as fast as before, but it had reached his chin and was working down his neck. Scheiße. How strong had Wellington's feeling been? They didn't affect his face or tone of voice much, so perhaps she'd underestimated how strong the buff would be. She looked at his mana flows again. The ones in his skull were stronger than before. Much stronger. Too strong for his channels, even after she'd visualised her buff reinforcing them - they'd broken free and were writhing like metal snakes, breaking the boundaries of organs and sparking and grinding as they banged against each other. A shallow film of mana had welled up across his skin, like electric charge atop a Van der Graaf generator, and every few seconds a lines spikes would rise, vibrate, then fade back into the film.
Kafana: "No, Bungo, it isn't." She quickly summarised what she knew about the situation then asked the important question. "Any ideas? At all? Right now I'm stuck and anything, even if it is weird, wrong or irrelevant, might be a help."
Bulgaria: "Let's experiment a bit. Follow me."
He had Tomsk carry Wellington down a side street and sit him under the portico of a bankrupt store whose display windows had been boarded closed, and then had Bungo stand so his cloak would block the view of any idle pedestrians.
Bulgaria: "Good. Kafana, you wondered if it was affected by him wearing magic items. Keep monitoring him. Tomsk, Alderney, please could remove as many of his equipped items that look like they contain mana, as you can in the next minute. Go!"
She did her best to ignore the resulting whirl, as Alderney laughed in delight and matched her greater dexterity against the longer reach of a suddenly competitive Tomsk. The items didn't seem to be drawing mana from Wellington's body and the problem with the channels inside it didn't decrease. In fact, it anything it got worse, spiking and sending out a new wave of arcs each time a person standing in front of him waved their prize after removing a particularly hard to remove artifact from Wellington's still rigid body. When Tomsk removed merchant's Athame that shielded Wellington from Mind magic, and displayed it to Alderney who'd also been reaching for it, every channel in his brain shuddered from the overload, inundating the neighbouring local mana network in his upper torso with unchanneled mana flows, causing it to buck then shudder back into place, raising a line of mana geysers along his skin so high that, before they had time to fade, vibrated so much they erupted.
Tomsk, focused on a different set of the shared senses, just saw an actinic arc shoot towards him from Wellington's throat with a snapping sound, followed by a rattling volley from all around his neck that left behind a necklace of ashen marks and the smell of scorched skin. He stepped back, no longer amused.
Alderney: "Not good. Can we drain the buffs of mana, like we did with that trapped door in the Necropolis?"
Tomsk: "I could touch him with my sword, try to drain his mana. Want me to try?"
Kafana: "It might put him into mana shock, which can also kill. Let's reserve that option for now." She briefed them on everything she'd seen during the experiment, even the bits that she could see any relevance to.
The tremors grew worse as they discussed it and his legs were the only regions left that weren't shuddering constantly. Wellington's health bar had dropped below half and she didn't dare try using healing magic or a potion, lest they make things worse by adding more magic - the film on his skin now looked more like a shallow sea and his arms were practically dry of mana, their vitality declining even faster than the rest.
Bulgaria: "Any last thoughts, before Tomsk tries Nothung?"
Bungo: "He needs a thinking hat!"
With a dramatic stage magician's wave, he produced from his stash a wide black headband with a golden dragon embroidered at the front, that he'd obtained for his monks as part of a uniform to match the colours planned for House Sincero. Stepping forwards, he carefully tied it across Wellington's eyes like a blindfold.
Bungo looked quite smug as he stepped back and finished with a bright "Tadaa!"
No, surely not. She examined Wellington carefully. The mana flows snaking towards the eyes settled back into their channels and started to dim, followed by the longer ones joining the Third Eye to Wellington's visual cortex. One by one his local networks stopped shuddering and the layer of mana flooding his skin grew shallowed as the Third Eye grew sated and ceased demanding the other networks feed it mana at any cost.
She gave Bungo a shaky thumbs up, too weary to speak, and realised he hadn't been as confident as he'd tried to seem when he dropped the act and wiped sweat from his brow.
Bungo: “That was too close, man.”
Wellington: “I’m… I’m ok. I couldn't move a muscle but I heard everything. “ He turned to face Bungo. “Thank you Bungo. And sorry for the scare. I’d never have forgiven myself if I had just given up.”
Tomsk: “I understand, my brother. Sometimes there are things one has to do, even if they are not on the path of wisdom or safety.”
Wellington gave a wry chuckle. “Well, that’s new to me. But yes, you are exactly correct.”
Bulgaria: “Are you able to move, master merchant, or have you been sampling the wines a bit too freely?”
Wellington looked relieved. “If you guys don’t mind, I think I’d like to look at things slowly, at my own pace. A crowd might be a bit too much to begin with. I promise I'll only lift the blindfold in short bursts until I acclimatise.”
Bungo turned to Alderney: “How about I stay with him, so I can pull the blindfold down for him if he freezes up again? You can pick us up again before heading onto the next stop.”
Alderney: “Should be safe in this area. But just in case: if a muscular woman with fiery red hair and a strong jaw comes up to you, don’t mistake her for a Scorpioni. Her name is Capponi, she’s one of the Chosen who’s keeping an eye out for us today. She’s seen more than her share of violence, so if she says there’s danger, take her seriously.”
System: [Skill “Stealth performance” has reached level 9.]
System: [Skill “Buff” has reached level 23.]
System: [Skill “Cure wounds” has reached level 16.]
Hmm, it looked like Bungo was right. Skill levels reflected recognition of underlying ability, rather than defining or limiting it. You could increase a skill level through repetitively practising the same thing every time, but trying new approaches and focusing your attention upon learning from your experiments was a lot more effective.
A moment later, Alderney disappeared into the crowd, and Kafana found herself walking into the Tiltyard on Tomsk’s arm, following a strutting Bulgaria.