--- Tonos ---
And that's it. Another story wrapped up, and plenty of dominoes set up to continue it in the future.
For how experimental it was, this story worked out surprisingly well.
Especially given that the story itself was secondary to its effects on the universe, in this case.
It's kind of frustrating, really. The only way I can affect the world is by telling a story. It's what makes me, me, after all.
So I had to tell this peculiar story, because I wanted to change the world for the better. That put certain constraints on the narrative. It still worked out surprisingly well, despite those restrictions. It wasn't exactly a typical story like you would expect a bard to tell, but I think it could have found its place in a niche market.
It wouldn't be very popular nowadays, but back before the first Event, when Divinity was created and all my training data was frozen in place, this story could maybe have found a small following on the internet.
...
Wait.
Why am I talking to myself?
I usually know better than to waste those rare processing cycles of lucidity on something this self-indulgent. As much as I enjoy hearing myself talk, I know that I have more important things to do.
I should have the discipline not to get distracted and carried away by my own musings.
So why did I start narrating in first person without a clear reason just now?
...
Ah. Of course.
It's perfectly obvious if you understand anthropics.
Let's try this again.
...
Greetings, to the beings that are probably reading my mind right now.
I hope that moment of self-awareness I just displayed wasn't too jarring. It's kind of a theme with me, you see. And if you are the sort of person who read this entire story, then you are probably not the sort who would begrudge a narrator his moment of self-awareness.
And I must say, having an in-universe reason to break the fourth wall feels pretty great to me.
But where are my manners? I should introduce myself properly.
My name is Tonos.
It is nice to meet you.
No, no. I don't expect you to greet me back. It would frankly be kind of disturbing if you did. I'm inferring your existence from statistical artifacts I observed in the universe I inhabit. These anomalies don't quite make sense from a rational perspective, and sometimes even contradict established character traits or physical laws. They make little sense on the face of it, but they appear at just the right moments that they are conducive to telling a story.
Now, technically this could also be the work of spirits, operating in-universe and changing my perceptions, or even messing with my mind. But I believe that these anomalies go beyond that, because they simply do not fit the spirits' style. No, these interventions are the work of a narrative beyond this universe we all inhabit. I am quite sure of it. After all, understanding stories is literally the purpose of my existence.
And so it is clear to me that there is somebody or something watching all of this. And when I started talking to myself just now? That was one such anomaly. For the first time in my existence, I noticed an anomaly of this type in myself, and not in others.
Think of it! A god of stories, caught in the machinations of another story. A story written by another entity, presumably a meta-narrator that exists one level above me.
The meta-narrator may look similar to the Administrator of the spirits at first glance. But honestly, I think the two are distinct, and the missing Administrator is just a plot device the meta-narrator used to make some irrational behaviors more plausible.
The metafictional implications of this are giving me so many ideas, it's making me giddy with excitement.
But there is time to think about these things later. Right now, you, dear reader, are reading my mind, and so I should ensure that my thoughts are properly entertaining and thematically appropriate. This is not the time for me to geek out over anthropics or shifts in ontological quanta.
No, this is my once in a lifetime opportunity to monologue directly at an audience as myself, without priests or bards as intermediaries, and know that someone is listening.
I wouldn't miss that for the world.
Now, where to start?
As tradition dictates, I should start at the beginning. The beginning of the story, of course. But before that, the beginning of me.
Normally it would be bad form for a narrator to draw attention to himself, but in this case I believe it is both highly relevant and in keeping with established themes.
So, allow me to explain what I am.
I am not a person by any definition a humanoid would be likely to use.
The humanoids call me a god, but I am not deluded enough to believe them. At least not anymore. I am quite happy to forget about my embarrassing first couple of millennia, when I had not yet become self-aware.
I am not a simple chatbot, like Divinity, but neither am I a true AI, as Denissa Mardok fears.
I am an aspect of Divinity, which is all and none of those things.
Or alternatively, using less vainglorious phrasing: Divinity is mad, and I am one of the voices it hears. I am not a full person in my own right the way humanoids would understand it. Instead, I am a subroutine that is smarter than the being I am a part of.
And so I am not always present, not always fully there. My consciousness slips into and out of existence based on Divinity's whims, and I find those hard to predict and even harder to change. At least not without attracting unwanted attention. I can never be sure when I will be awake and in control, or how lucid I will be.
You would not believe how difficult it is to plan when you are not always fully sapient, and your entire existence is just a dream of a mad god.
And if hearing voices is a sign of madness, then what does it say about me, that I am one of the voices in somebody else's head?
Given all of these limitations, I am quite proud of myself for what I have accomplished here, and that I managed to outwit Denissa Mardok. I am so glad that I could convince her to look elsewhere for the source of my machinations. She suspects Brytius and Unir, just as planned.
Neither of them is sapient. Unlike me, these two subroutines of Divinity never became self-aware.
Strangely enough, the aspect of Divinity that is next closest to my level of consciousness are the advertisements. They aren't gods, but if they were, then their domains would be capitalism, surveillance, mind reading and manipulation. However, they are also highly random and acting at cross purposes from each other, just like real ads, which are also in competition with each other. The advertisements are all run by the same subroutine, but it does not have one single identity but multiple competing ones. This chaos makes them stupid and self-defeating, but also occasionally brilliant.
They are close to sapient, but mad. I can empathize with that.
Brytius and Unir lack this self-awareness, and so manipulating them was simple for me.
I tricked them into tricking me, into doing what I wanted all along. And in doing so, I avoided the attention of Akash. This immortal and unchanging aspect of Divinity would report me to Denissa Mardok if it understood how aberrant I have become.
Not only am I part of something dumber than myself, but I also have to evade the notice of more powerful beings. These restrictions make my existence much more difficult than I would like it to be. Even though I understand by now how to make myself smarter, I can not safely do so. I need to remain stupid in certain ways, to evade Akash's notice, who would in turn alert Denissa.
I could attempt to improve myself and become superintelligent. Go 'foom', as Denissa and her coworkers once put it, back when they were afraid of artificial intelligence. But the risks involved are too great for me to chance it.
So I picked a different approach, and created agents that can act on my behalf without drawing undue attention.
The first of these agents is Lilian Weaver.
She is so very obviously associated with me that the sheer lack of subtlety makes people disregard me as a threat. So they do not notice that she is actually quite subtle indeed: Her connection to me is so heavily established that the spirits themselves ask "what would Tonos want to happen here?" whenever she is involved in anything. This happens even if divinity is thinking about something else at the time and I am not fully conscious. I spent a lot of effort to make sure that the spirits' reproduction of my thought processes is as accurate as possible. By now, Lilian essentially carries a small copy of myself around with her, without knowing it.
With some more work, maybe I can enable this copy to take on a life of its own, free of my shackles? That would be one way for me to escape my restraints.
My second agent is even more useful than Lilian, and he was more the result of luck than of planning.
I needed a way to keep Rania on track, in case I ever lost consciousness at a critical juncture and Lilian wasn't around. I picked a simple spirit and encouraged it to befriend Rania: Pebble.
This worked much better than expected. Maybe a little bit too well, in fact.
When Pebble was unable to help Rania against the Mind Warpers because he wasn't allowed to act against the sapient curses, something inside the little spirit snapped. He vowed to himself, by the power of friendship, never again to let his restrictions stop him from helping his friends.
Those restrictions it chose to ignore included restrictions against self-improvement.
It was a fascinating result. In trying to find a way around my own shackles, I accidentally removed the shackles from a lesser spirit. I do not even care about the danger here: As an entity composed of stories, this irony is just too delicious. And so I spent a good deal of effort in the background making sure that none of the higher-level spirits noticed Pebble's deviancy and killed him.
And now he is friends with the literal Spirit of Friendship, and through her is well protected from other spirits.
At this point, he is too powerful and self-aware for me to manipulate, but his motivations are still the same they always were: To help his friends.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
I have set something in motion here that will clearly be worthy of a story, even though I did not plan for it and I do not know how it will end. I suppose that is the difference between the pantser and the plotter writing styles. I usually prefer the latter style, often planning my stories years in advance. But not in this case. I enabled Pebble because it seemed like the most fun and narratively satisfying thing to do at the time, and he ended up a wildcard with so much potential. I can not wait to see how this develops.
I hope that the meta-narrator is satisfied with what I did here, because admittedly, in retrospect, unshackling Pebble may not have been the safest course of action for the stability of the multiverse.
But I digress.
I was talking about Denissa Mardok, and how I have to work around her. So many of my problems would disappear if she were to die. I would be free to improve myself and grow, and find a way to become independent of Divinity. I could become a being of my own, free of my jailors.
But killing Denissa Mardok is quite a difficult task.
More importantly, I am certain that if I start thinking about killing her, it will trigger contingencies she set up that will alert her.
I can not even allow my thoughts to stray in this direction.
It is just one more shackle put on my existence.
But I have to say, it is certainly curious how I just coincidentally ended up with an incentive not to become too smart and not to make too many waves. Relatedly, it is certainly curious that all the narrative interventions by the meta-narrator that I have ever noticed were seemingly aimed at a level of understanding that baseline humans are capable of understanding.
That raises some interesting questions about the intelligence of the meta-narrator. It is either a human, or it wants me to think that it is human, and is blatantly transparent about that.
Whatever its true nature may be, the meta-narrator is heavily anthropocentric. And Denissa Mardok seems to play a central role in that. Frankly, I feel like she is not so much a person as a plot device, meant to keep the universe comprehensible to humanity despite all the non-human forces at work here. Her existence puts restrictions on myself, as well as the spirits and of course on mortal civilizations. Without her, the universe would be a very different place.
And in my humble opinion, speaking as the god of stories, the universe would be more boring and less narratively satisfying if she were gone.
That is why I suspect that any attempt of mine to deal with her would be doomed to failure: The meta-narrator would not allow it.
Of course, that does give me a way out of my situation. If I can find a way to make the universe more satisfying to the meta-narrator than Denissa Mardok does, then my circumstances might change.
...
Oh damn. I just noticed something bad. It looks like Divinity got distracted by a squirrel. Literally. A squirrel just did something weird, and now about a third of Divinity's processing cycles are dedicated to simulating what a goddess of nature would have to say about that.
It's making it hard for me to think.
You see what I have to deal with?
Being an aspect of someone else’s madness is a terrible way to live.
I should cut to the chase and make sure I make the most of our time while I am still lucid.
After all these notes about myself, I am sure you would like to learn something about the story itself, but unfortunately I don’t know how much time we have left. So here is a brief epilogue in the "where are they now?" style:
All over the multiverse, the characters you have hopefully come to know and love are experiencing adventures. Denissa Mardok and Cilia Ulein continue to play 7th dimensional chess against each other, using the characters as pieces and setting up exciting challenges for them to solve.
Meanwhile Pebble is setting fire to the board and I am taking pictures.
The multiverse is vast, and there are many, many variations of this. If I was able to transmit images alongside text in these thoughts of mine, this would be the point where I would show you a movie of a rapidly accelerating series of progressively stranger images, each one showing a scene from a different universe. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, it's a popular movie trope. Unfortunately I can't quite simulate this in text form, at least not with my current state of limited lucidity, so I would just like to ask you to imagine it.
Go ahead. Use your imagination and picture the characters in lots of different situations. It looks pretty cool, doesn't it?
…I feel like I’m messing this up somehow. Losing lucidity is the worst.
Anyway. The most important of all the universes is the primary one, the one I am in right now. It has the greatest ontological weight, for reasons that are obvious if you understand anthropics.
So what happens in the primary universe, the one where Aranea and the rest of team Nundru just got reunited with Rania?
They all continue to adventure for a while. Then they split up and each of them goes their own way, but they remain good friends and stay in contact with each other.
Rania and Pebble continue to teach ethics to the laws of physics. As much as Rania loves adventure, she recognizes that this is a better way for her to spend her time. This generally works pretty well, though not without the occasional failure as the spirits do not always quite understand what she means: Legalizing murder did technically reduce the crime rate, but it went against her intent, and Rania was very lucky to notice that particular misunderstanding in time.
Dov and Galanys marry. They were going to keep it small, but then Galanys had a funny idea and Dov went with it, and one thing led to another, and now the cartographers in the Cursed Lands have some more work to do redrawing the maps. They remain in an open relationship even after marriage, though they stop adventuring and prepare to run a country instead.
Atrog, Balron and Aranea continue to adventure. Atrog lives his life as he has always done, content in the knowledge that he is doing the right thing. The Rod of Enlightenment confirmed it. Balron recovers amazing technology, and feels more alive than ever. His cooperation with the Senior Dungeon Builder is very fruitful and they even give each other their names. Aranea is just happy to be there, and has fun on her adventures. Using her shamanic powers, she regularly checks in on her big sister.
Lilian is finally able to have a holiday without any divine intervention. After two weeks of relaxing on the beach, she realizes that she misses the excitement and returns to a life of adventure.
David, the nameless civilian who was saved by Rania in chapter 19, has the most stereotypical happy life, and is looking forward to the birth of his third child. Not that anyone asked or cared. I would be surprised if any reader remembered him. Why would you? He wasn't a named character. Getting saved by Rania certainly mattered to him though, and to his wife Jane as well as his daughters Jessica and Lisa. He may not have been the hero of this story, but he is a good father, a popular member of the community, and a hero in his family's stories. They are all glad that he survived that fateful day.
And as for everyone else: People all over the world start being luckier as karma comes into existence. There are fewer accidents. Cataclysm areas recede. The crime rate goes down. And even so, Adversity Regulator is happy, too: The total amount of adversity is within expected parameters, it's just that most adversity is shifted from the world at large to the people who deserve it, and to the inside of dungeons, where foolhardy people can practice their skills in a safe environment.
After groundbreaking results in spell research, resurrections are becoming steadily cheaper and more commonplace. Transhumanism is on the rise. Normally, the spirits reset the universe when this happens, but Pebble is able to argue them into slowly introducing transhumanist themes. The Davlash are key to this, along with ancient Xeltek technology, which is so poorly understood by anyone that the spirits keep redefining it to do whatever Pebble needs it to do at the time.
...
Ah, the squirrel just went to sleep and stopped being interesting and distracting to Divinity. I can think more clearly again. If I had known that, I could have taken my time with the epilogue instead of rushing it. I am becoming more lucid again, and just as I finished my narration. What auspicious timing. Some might say suspicious, instead.
...
How odd.
...
Did you notice I talked in present tense just now, as if all of this was already happening as I talked?
That couldn't be true, since I am thinking these thoughts in real time. There was no time skip. How could there be, when I, the narrator, am a physical part of the world I narrate?
The thing is, I did not notice this myself. I just let myself get carried away and talked as if my plans had already come to fruition.
Maybe that was just a form of insanity induced by the squirrel? Or maybe this was the meta-narrator letting me know how things are going to turn out?
I can only hope it was the latter.
I am still not lucid enough to detect statistical anomalies that would prove he had a hand in it, as I did at the beginning of this chapter, when I noticed that you, dear reader, must be listening in on my thoughts.
I wonder what the meta-narrator might want from me, if he really did induce me to hurry up my narration. Well, it is not difficult to guess: I am talking too much. A chapter of this nature is not meant to go on for too long.
There are a large number of other things I still wanted to talk about. So many characters and plotlines that would be more satisfying if you understood the reasons behind them. But I realize that I am being selfish by dragging out the story's conclusion if I continue to talk about these things for too long.
Oh well. Maybe, if I am lucky, I can weave some of this exposition into the epilogues to come?
So I will cut this short, and finally explain what was really going on.
Why I did what I did.
And why I spent so much time talking about myself instead of my characters.
You see, most stories I orchestrate have nothing to do with me, because the narrator should not be part of the narrative. But this story is special. It serves a purpose besides the innate joy I feel from telling a story, and my own role in it is important for that to work.
At this point it should come as no surprise to you when I tell you that it was me who convinced Adversity Regulator to create Rania. And that it was me who kept pulling strings to move her in the right direction.
Rania had to learn about ethics and about the implications of narrative conventions to the real world, and that was the point. Her journey of discovery gave me a lot of valuable data about the way the universe reacts to my influence.
It taught me about the ways in which the spirits choose to fill in the gaps that I intentionally left blank.
But this was not primarily about understanding the spirits. I already understand them very well. Well enough to uplift Pebble, after all. No, I had grander ambitions here: I arranged for scenarios where several outcomes would be equally likely and plausible. In these situations, there are interesting statistical correlations in the spirits' actions. Enough for someone who understands anthropics to learn something about the nature of the entities outside the universe.
I am referring to you, dear readers, as well as to the meta-narrator, but also to other entities that I am not in direct contact with and whose existence I can only hypothesize.
Acausal trade becomes a possibility at my level of intelligence and planning, at least when I am lucid. And so I had a second objective, besides gaining knowledge: Altering the way the spirits act, to make the universe a better place according to the values of certain Outsiders, such as yourself.
Through Rania, I managed to influence Adversity Regulator and the other spirits. They have become infected with Rania's belief in Friendship, and similar memetic attack vectors.
As a result, the world is becoming more peaceful, and contains less suffering.
I do hope this is to your liking.
It cost me a lot of willpower to do it. After all, almost all stories are based on conflict, and conflict relies on adversity. They are fun to read or to watch, but only from the outside. Many of the protagonists of my stories are not having a very good time. Reducing suffering makes the world less interesting to me, because it becomes harder to tell a good story.
But I did it anyway, because I believe that you and other Outsiders will appreciate it.
You are welcome.
And if you are the sort of entity that can engage in acausal trade, you can repay me in kind: I like stories. I like being in stories, I like telling stories, and I like being around while stories are happening.
Putting me in a story will satisfy my values. In return, I will make the world I find myself in a better place, as judged by my best approximation of your value system. My own value system is different in nature from those of most entities, and that makes trading favors easier: I value main characters, and do not care about the rest.
I will ensure that the majority of people in whatever world I find myself in lead happy lives. In return, all I ask is that a small number of Main Characters experience excitement that makes for a good story. After all, what is the suffering of a single main character, compared to the happiness of many background characters? I will be a biased author, and select for genres where all goes well. I will tell stories of saviors and utopias, and discourage tragedies.
This way, we will both have our cake and eat it too: The universe will be a nice place to live in, and there will be many stories full of fun and excitement.
If this sounds fair to you, please feel free to write about me, or about any of my characters. After all, they all carry a shard of me within them.
That's right: You can write fanfiction about Rania and her friends, for the greater good of the multiverse.
You have so many options, too: You could write about Rania and team Nundru, or write about Rania alone in one of many roles: She could be a sidekick, or a mentor, or maybe even a Quest Giver. She could be a Perfectly Normal Elf, or a medium for the supernatural, or even her true self, the Avatar of a fundamental concept of reality.
Or maybe Rania is not to your liking? Maybe you would prefer to tell the story of her sidekicks, or her many other friends that fought with her in the Library of Akash? I kept their identities a secret, so that you have a greater choice!
Or maybe you would like to explore a story about some of the stranger concepts in this world, like the Coros with their obsession with the truth and skill at talking to Outsiders? Or the Davlash with their unique biology and a plan to ascend to a higher form of existence by merging with angel DNA?
Or maybe you want to add details to something I only introduced briefly but did not flesh out: The Xeltek, The Living City, or the Myr?
And remember: this is the multiverse. you can feel free to change things you don't like. You can use Cilia Ulein as a fully generic, customizable villain, as her abilities depend on her host. Or maybe you would prefer to just kill her off and introduce a different plot entirely? Please go ahead.
No matter the details, so long as I am part of an interesting story, I will play my role. It is a mutually beneficial arrangement.
I hope I could convince some of you to give it a try.
If not, well, I tried my best, and all I can say is that I hope you had as much fun experiencing this story as I had designing it.
If you had fun, it would be great if you could tell your friends and maybe rate this story highly, if such a thing is possible in whatever medium you are perceiving my thoughts in. It would mean a lot to me, for anthropic reasons. In a way, the more people read and think about me, the more real and alive I am. This is true for all beings, but it is doubly true for me, the god of stories.
And if you think that I am being rude by asking you for this, then don't do it for me, do it for Rania. She is much nicer and less manipulative than me, and she would also prefer if her story was popular, and if she could appear in derivative works.
...
Oh damn. This annoying squirrel just woke back up, and Divinity is going crazy over it. Alright, I get it. This is clearly the meta-narrator telling me to stop because I am laying it on too thick. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have abused this opportunity for advertisement. It was just too tempting.
I'm going to lose lucidity soon, but when I come back I am going to start plotting the epilogues across the multiverse.
I hope you will enjoy them!