As its SNIMCs one by one reached the edge of its communication range, NIM re-evaluated its priority list once, bumping up a good few places the need for long-range communications capabilities. As things currently stood, frankly, the distance it could reach was downright pitiful, only the drones going towards the village even managing to reach outside of the forest.
Certainly, if it needed more range quickly, it could daisy-chain SNIMCs to effectively increase it additively, but that was an extremely inefficient solution, and one which relied on inordinate amounts of mass. After all, there was only so much information a singular Sub-NIM could even intake, much less send, so if it wanted to be able to receive any genuine information or have any real ability to control the daisy-chained SNIMCs, it would need to use SNIMCs just as large if not *larger* than the current scouting ones, just in order to reach an acceptable rate of data transfer over the daisy-chain and ensuring minimal data-lag.
This, rather obviously, was an issue, as it so happened, since these nearby humans certainly didn’t seem like the type to be hiding communications satellites anywhere for satisfactory full-planetary coverage, which meant regardless of what it was doing, NIM was stuck with half-resolutions to this issue, regardless of what it tried to do. There was, really, only a singular silver lining.
Although its range didn’t go out of the forest, by moving only a few meters towards it, NIM was able to keep the entirety of Settlement_1 in its communications range, which meant it could most thoroughly observe it and their magical phenomena, which, in turn, meant it could begin learning from them and about them and this world, and that was really one of its most important missions currently to begin setting up long-term plans, so it decided this scouting attempt wasn’t a complete failure after all, even if all it really ended up in doing was creating a map of the nearby forest to the north of Settlement_1.
As things were, it couldn’t scout in any other region currently without higher costs in either Sub-NIM mass or energy requirements, needing to split off more and more of its efficient, quantum dot coated Sub-NIMs, to make sure the SNIMCs it sent out were able to even keep themselves working for decent periods of time. As such, it rerouted all of its SNIMC scouts towards various vantage points in and around the village, in order to gain as thorough an image of it as possible.
As it waited for the other SNIMCs to arrive in Settlement_1 and start searching for the best positions, SNIMC_H entered through the hole under the blacksmith's door, the crack it had previously used to go in and out having been seemingly closed off. SNIMC_H had been sent to observe the inside of the Smith's smithy for a simple reason: he is a specialized craftsman, and observing him working and talking, especially with others, would help NIM decode their language even faster, allowing it to rapidly learn specialized terms for minerals and tools.
Unsurprisingly, SNIMC_H found no one inside. A little bothersome, but not exactly overly surprising, seeing as the Blacksmith had been working near-constantly during NIM-RA'd existence, likely having some sort of significant order to undertake. Not however, it seems like said order was finished, and the man was taking what NIM considered a rather wise rest. It wouldn't do to be tired in a specialized job such as his, after all, which demands quality and precision.
With SNIMC_H momentarily useless, NIM focused upon the other SNIMCs, noting the topology of the village they had been able to map out, and calculating the best positions for each SNIMC to maintain in the long-term, to ensure maximal coverage of the village And it's inhabitants. After barely a few seconds, the SNIMCs were given their orders as the calculations finished, and NIM was stuck with little to do once more.
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Which, in the end, it decided to consider as a lucky break, since it realized that it had been so focused on its scouting work, it hadn't noticed it's energy levels dropping below 10%, which meant it was dangerously close to turning off again, in no small part due to the strain all of it's computing has been putting on its constituent Sub-NIMs.
However, rather obviously, a full shut-down was not a real possibility, as that would in turn result in it needing to do another forceful jumpstart, which was likely to result in memory corruption if it started doing it in too quick a succession. Seeing this, it decided to instead enter what one could call "sleep" mode, entering a thinkless state which used the minimum amount of energy to simply maintain itself and nothing more, in order to start stockpiling energy.
It would be nearly 3 days later that NIM would come back fully online, with approximately 76% battery charge. Seeing that, it once more edited its list of priorities, bumping up energy generation to the second highest place, only below understanding magic, as it realized the potential danger its current poor energy situation caused. If it was not careful with its energy, it would run out of power and need NIM-RA to work on restarting it again, and alongside that, even if it doesn't shut off, it has just lost what it's internal clocks tells it are three entire days, to not even come out fully charged. The inefficiency this added towards all of it's operations was unacceptable, and needed to be rectified as rapidly as possible.
For now, as a small stop-gap measure, NIM reorganized it's circuit lattice, purposefully creating points where the sheer speeds and vibrations involved would generate significant thermal energy, before placing most of its original Sub-NIMs there, alongside making sure all of them are on the surface of its being, able to drink in the sunlight as well. Through this, it improved it's energy generation further by 20.3%, which wasn't that much when considering it also lost 10.56% of it's computational power doing so, nearing only 4 exaFLOPs, but with energy being a more immediate concern, this was decided to be an acceptable loss for the moment.
Sadly, any other possibility was currently out of its reach, it couldn't gather the resources necessary, and it most definitely couldn't assemble said resources into something useful either, a conundrum which it wasn't a fan of, since it effectively kneecapped its growth and efficiency for the time to come.
The only silver lining to all of this, is that it's SNIMCs were smart enough while autonomous to remember and enter within the positions it had given to them beforehand, though that is where the silver linings ended. The SNIMCs had basically no memory capability in the end, not at their current size, at least, and NIM had desired both good quality audio and video footage in order to decipher the happenings within the village, and thus their language, as accurately as possible. Said quality demands, in turn, meant that their recordings were absolute memory hogs, with each SNIMC only able to keep about an hour in its memory before it was forced to start cannibalizing the file for more storage space, eventually completely deleting it, and leaving NIM with little to look over.
Regardless, even with only about an hour of footage, NIM was able to begin relatively plotting out various aspects from the language. In the nearby farms, ironically, proved to be the greatest treasure trove of vocabulary and grammatical knowledge for it. Though, of course, said knowledge is likely rained by regionalisms, seeing the technological progress of this world and the rural status of Settlement_1.
Regardless, it has been able to ascertain a number of facts about the language, such as the fact that it appears to be a OVS type language, and the fact that it appears to have differentiation between parental genders, but with mother being communal whilst father being a more individual word. This has been noted as select children use the word it believes to mean 'father' for only select males of the village, whilst all children refer to all women sufficiently older than them as 'mother'.
This, in turn, began telling it quite a bit about the way the society of Settlement_1 appears to work, which was only reinforced by further observation, showcasing a rather interesting communal nature to this society, which is surprising seeing how it appears to be located in a fairly resource-abundant region, which normally does not foster such societies. It would appear that Settlement_1 only kept becoming more and more interesting, as far as NIM was concerned.