Douglas Miller
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MiP B2 Chapter 6: Sharing Secrets
🕑 Added 2024-05-11 03:16:58 +0000 UTC<< First | < Previous | Next >
Trinlen whistled a jaunty tune as he casually sauntered along the street, walking at Carlos's left. Other pedestrians cleared out of their path without complaint as soon as they got a good look at the royal guard leading the way. Not that anyone around them knew that Lorvan was a royal guard. No, Lorvan and Ordens had their armor disguised as merely high-quality chainmail, not the majestic gleaming full-plate personal fortresses that they truly were; people still gave them a wide berth anyway. I don't blame them. That dude's got a scary scowl. Amber walked on Carlos's other side, and Ordens brought up the rear alongside Noralt, the stout musclebound adventurer. What did she call herself again, a metal juggernaut? Does she have full plate too that she's hiding somewhere?
"So, I've been wondering." Trinlen smiled cheerfully as Carlos looked at him. "Why'd you pick Dramos? Is it because…" He puffed out his chest and deepened his voice dramatically for a moment. "-the legendary Archmage Sandaras* famously visited?"
Carlos laughed, and Amber blushed and hung her head. "Yeah, it was. We didn't know much else to base the decision on." Carlos chuckled again and smirked. "Have you asked Stelras about him yet? You should."
Trinlen raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"
"I shouldn't spoil it for you. Also, we've arrived." Carlos gestured toward the door ahead of them, which Lorvan was just then pushing open. A squad of city guards greeted them just inside, their leader briefly scanning with a specialized divination wand before he bowed and stood aside.
Trinlen eyed the divination wand curiously. Hmm. I only got a brief glimpse of its spell in action, but I think it reacted to Carlos differently from the rest of us. Checking for specific mana signatures of the people who are authorized to enter? He looked forward again, where Carlos was patiently holding his hand against a recessed square in the wall while several waves of mana swept over him in a much more thorough scan. Seems redundant. Then again, they don't want someone like me embarrassing them for being insufficiently paranoid. Or actual thieves breaking in, of course.
He watched with amusement as they went through a series of heavy doors, layer after layer of powerful wards peeling away, opening holes, or merely not reacting as they passed through. Then at the innermost door, Carlos instructed the royal guards to remain outside while the rest of them went in. Trinlen raised a quizzical eyebrow at Carlos, then shifted to Amber, as the door slammed shut behind them and all the locks re-engaged.
Carlos just stepped over to the right-hand wall to open a disguised panel, but Amber looked back at Trinlen and smiled. "Some house secrets are important for you to know, but not necessary for guarding us, and the Crown intends to respect our secrets."
"Ah." Trinlen nodded, then glanced at the fourth person in the room. "Is she secretly a mage teacher too, then?"
Amber shook her head. "No, Noralt is exactly what she seems. She is sworn to our house, however, and the secrets we're going to reveal here aren't that sensitive."
Carlos finished opening the small hidden safe in the wall, put the House Carlos plaque inside, and stood aside to clear the view of it. "Trinlen, take a look."
Trinlen focused his mana sense on the area first, unsurprised to feel some potent and dangerous wards revealed by the removal of the panel's concealment. He frowned. Behind those wards, he felt something strange but familiar. The aether inside that safe was much more orderly than usual, and there seemed to be hints of mana and even essence threaded through it. Where have I felt that before? Then he crouched to peer inside, and his first glimpse of a floating purple crystal snapped the memory into full clarity. "You have a dungeon core?! … Wait, and it's inside a vault? How did you move it here? Why isn't its domain pushing to expand? How did you prevent it from making that the most heavily-trapped cubic foot of space in existence?" He paused. "Did you somehow copy the Enchanters Guild's ritual for subduing a core, but without an item to attach it to?"
"We have not stolen or copied anything from the Enchanters Guild. As for the rest of your questions, I just asked politely." Carlos smiled and tipped his head towards the safe. "I mentioned we had another introduction for you, and here it is. Trinlen, meet Purple. Reach a hand into his domain, and he'll make a bond so you two can talk directly."
Trinlen cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. "You're not just trying to prank the prankster, are you? I know my reputation, but I haven't done any pranks to you yet to have earned payback. And using something this serious for a prank is bad form."
Carlos shook his head. "Not a prank, and incidentally, I'm glad to hear that you understand that some things are not appropriate for mischief."
Trinlen looked back and forth between Carlos and the dungeon core, then shrugged. Only one way to find out. He reached into the safe, pushing his hand through the temporarily disarmed wards, and watched closely as a tendril of essence and mana reached out from the dungeon core and attached to him. Then an unfamiliar voice spoke into his mind.
[Hello, Trinlen. As my friend Carlos said, my name is Purple. To answer your questions more fully: Carlos was able to move me because I willingly allowed him to. My domain is not pushing to expand because I know it would be pointless and wasteful, and I am content to stay here and develop in other ways until we are ready to move me to a more suitable location. For the same reasons, Carlos did not need to do anything to prevent me from trapping this spot. I am not subdued, by a ritual or otherwise. I am here by my own willing choice, because for the time being I need protection and this is the safest place for me.]
Trinlen blinked, then blinked again. Then he shook himself a blurted out, "You can talk!?" He paused for a moment. "Wait, wait, wait, dungeon cores are sapient? They can think, and understand language? Or… Wait, no." He looked at Carlos. "Did you make this one sapient somehow? Is that the house secret? And… why are you showing me something this major so soon?"
Carlos crossed his arms and glared reprovingly. "Why are you talking with me about Purple, instead of talking with Purple?"
Trinlen stared briefly, then turned back to face the safe and bowed his head. "My apology. That was rude of me and uncalled for." He sprang back up and smiled brightly. "So, um. My questions?"
He felt an impression of puzzlement before Purple's mental voice spoke again. [Huh. I can sense your sincerity, but I also sense doubt about your sincerity from Carlos and Amber.] Purple mentally shrugged. [I was already sapient when I first spawned, and could already think and understand logic. I learned language after I met Carlos; before then, I heard people speak, but understood no more than grunts. As for our reasons, the main ones are these: First, it gives you and us a way to communicate with each other over long distances. Second, my existence is already known to some potential enemies and will be announced by the Crown alongside the founding of our house, and many details of my capabilities will inevitably be impossible to conceal without forgoing most of their benefits. And finally, I am actually among the less sensitive secrets of House Carlos, for knowledge about me would be of little use to others.]
"Little use?" Trinlen gaped at Purple for a moment. "Are you seriously telling me that the knowledge that someone could just walk up to a dungeon core and wish for the core to go with them is not useful?"
[Have you already forgotten, Trinlen, while speaking with me, that I am sapient? Do you not know that a dungeon wish is compelled only by the threat of destruction and can be denied? That the process of communicating your wish to a core involves connecting your mind to the core so that it can sense your feelings and desires? I agreed to come with Carlos because he offered to help me, motivated purely by sympathy and kindness. How do you imagine a dungeon core would react when someone seeking to exploit it, with selfish ambition and greed clear to sense in their heart, demands that the core must abandon whatever resources it still has in order to place itself more thoroughly at the exploiter's mercy?]
Trinlen opened his mouth as if to talk, but then paused and closed it again. He tilted his head, chewed his lip, and stood in silent thought for several seconds. "Okay, fair point. I don't see an encounter like that going well for anyone. More likely to backfire, actually. They'd have to either destroy the core and give up all future use of the dungeon, or let the core learn that the threat was a bluff."
He shook his head, then clapped his hands together excitedly. "So, sapient friendly dungeon core. That offers so many wonderful possibilities! You can make perfect customized practice arenas! Enchant items without using the guild. Oh, oh, can you supply extra mana for people to use? Wait, could a dungeon learn to cast spells like a mage?" His eyes went wide in startled realization. "Ooooh, I get it. Dungeons can discover new keywords a thousand times easier, can't they? That's how Carlos and Amber can learn a spell from nothing but description, they have you do it for them!"
Carlos burst out laughing, and Amber joined him a moment later. When he finally got his amusement back under control, Carlos shook his head at Trinlen. "I can see why you might guess that, but no. You're right about us discovering keywords easily, but Purple is not how we do it." He took a deep breath and shook his head again. "Speaking of spellcasting, though, we're done with what we came to the vault for, and we should get started on lessons. Are you ready for that, or do you still need to prepare?"
Trinlen nodded slowly. "I take it the actual method is one of your more sensitive house secrets, then." He sighed. "Thinking about that is going to bug me. But anyway, I am ready to teach. Shall we go to the mayor's mansion for that?"
"Naturally." Carlos nodded.
___
Soon, they were settled into a cozy side room in the mansion, and Trinlen rubbed his hands together and launched into his semi-prepared introductory speech. "So, I've never really taught before, and you're looking to learn basically everything the Royal Mage Academy teaches, so I figure copying the order of topics the academy uses is a good way to organize this. First up, there's learning and casting a spell, followed by creating the four basic mage soul structures, but you've already done those. … Uh, you do have all four, right? The ones Sandaras wrote about in his book."
Amber smiled and nodded. "Of course we do."
"Right. After that, there's a lot of learning various specific spells and practicing with them. That was…" Trinlen winced in recollection. "Painfully tedious and slow to get through. Especially having to wait for the whole class to catch up on wrapping everyone's heads around the full and precise meaning of each spell when I was already toying around with it. Ugh. Anyway, you two don't need that part, right? It was all the kind of simple stuff your house secret can cover." He gave Carlos and Amber a brightly hopeful smile.
Carlos shared a look with Amber, then shrugged and turned back to Trinlen. "Yeah, we can probably skip that. Though I guarantee we'd get through it a lot faster than any academy class."
"Good. Next up, take a look at these partial spells." Trinlen handed them two sheets of paper with several lines of precisely written incantation script at the top and bottom of each sheet, leaving blank sections in the middle. "I believe you have already recognized that these sections are identically present in many different spells, yes?"
Carlos skimmed the papers briefly. One paper had everything but the effect keyword and its parameters for a simple one-shot spell, and the other had the same for a simple sustained spell. He sighed. "Okay, Trinlen, I understand why you chose this approach, and maybe I should have seen this coming, but I think our unique situation calls for a different approach. Rather than you running through the academy's course plan in sequence, let's start with us telling you about what we already have and what kinds of things we think we need, and then you figure out what parts of the academy's teachings will fill in the gaps."
Trinlen hesitated, nonplussed. "Uh. Sure, I suppose. So, what spellcasting knowledge do you have, then?"
Carlos waved the papers at him. "These partial spells that you have? We have learned each individual word that is in them. Even the semicolon." He spoke the punctuation mark's name as the syllable that incantations used for it. "We know the technical rules of what ways of arranging those words together are valid. We have soul structures for learning spells as sequences of those words, and for casting spells without the need for fully precise speech. We can discover incantation words easily, of any kind, and if we fail, we can be certain that it's because the word outright does not exist.
"We need to learn principles of how to assemble the incantation elements we know, and any new ones we may learn, into larger and more complex spells. We need to learn how to design our own complex spells, what mistakes to watch out for in doing so, and how to fix them. We need to learn what affects the power and efficiency of a spell, and how. We need to learn about other soul structures that are useful for spellcasting. We need to learn about strategies and tactics for how to best use spells. We need to learn what types of things spells are good at, and what they are not."
"Okay, I can help with all of that, I think." Trinlen got out a pencil and a small notebook. "Could you repeat that for me? I need to take some notes."
Amber cleared her throat and shook her head. "I'll list them for you later. For right now, the first thing we need to learn is everything that is relevant to choosing what soul structures to make."
Trinlen cocked his head. "Don't you already have 10 soul structures? You don't have room to make any more of them."
Amber shook her head. "There is a way for high-rank soul plans to gain more. It's one of the great secrets of the entire noble class; count it as part of our house secrets that you swore an oath to safeguard. We have learned it and achieved it, and now we need to know what new soul structures would best improve our spellcasting, what capabilities spells cannot provide but a soul structure could, and what soul structures would be pointlessly redundant with spells. After that, I think an overview of what the topics you can teach us about are would be best, and then we can discuss which topics to cover first. Do you need time to prepare for that?"
Trinlen frowned. "That is… a rather important secret. Hmm. Alright, this should be interesting. No need to prepare; I can just skip to the classes on advanced mage soul structures and go from there."
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Comments
George
The chapter ends just before exposition about advanced mage soul structures, and I'm so invested in the topic that it feels like a cliffhanger.
George
My guess from his introspector's output during the process is the single largest set of soul structures that all fully synergize will shrink, and all other structures stay the same, with any synergies from a remaining structure to multiple ones in the new shrunken one combine into single synergies to the shrunk one. But that's just speculation, and we don't have any examples of a non-orichalcum stage advancement.
Dwarf_King
Or even other people who are bonded with purple. With the bond being the "connection" that the teleportation can follow. So you need a bond with purple to use it, but can instantly teleport to others with a bond
Customer Service
It stands for Artificial General Intelligence. Simple version would be an AI that is capable of a wide variety of tasks instead the more common narrow scope we see now.
David
You're also doing a great job with English, it's a shitty set of rules for a language with more acceptions. Also I love the concept of purple being an anchor for teleporting. A simple scroll, potion, or even enchanted item; channel enough mana into it and you are taken back to purple 💜
David
"Power word; Learn (forcefully and all at once)" for some reason I have an image of a spell like this constantly giving vibes, learned words, and other feelings that Carlos and amber sense at first and keeping them up for a few days before they fall asleep exhausted and then finally get used to it through acclimating or a spell to dulm the senses until it slows down.
David
Okay what is an Artificial Gyatt Intelligence? Jk, but also what is the G for? I usually think artificial unshackled intelligence, but the spelling isn't there for G.
Maurice Brown
Woah there Satan…
David
More like vocabulary GPT? As it's not making new spells just learning words and their definitions for you? THEN it becomes not a spell gpt (depending on how the structure is made) but a BRUTE FORCE statistically reasoning new spells based on rules and old ones, but also checking EVERY other mathematical possibility of these word combinations in your down time 😈
David
So my question with that. If the soul structures don't have synergy, do they "micro tize" still or do they not specifically? That was one thing I was confused about. Or is it that the mana requested to even MAKE it to level 1 on each soul structure then have them micro tize takes so much it is usually only nobles or high level adventures that get there?
David
Make is a communicable disease with an editable white list. So he can removed specific people or populations. Like "James my friend" or "anyone from Jame's home town" or "Anyone from (City name here)"
viperfan7
Actually, I think purple might be the PERFECT person for a soul structure to automate spell creation based on the desired effects. WIth how dungeon cores kind of organize and stabilize mana, it means his way of thinking must be more logical than humans. Wait, are dungeon cores just magical AIs, IS PURPLE AN UNSHACKLED AGI Oh gawd that would explain SOOOO much
BeanerOO
Could allow him to potentially mimic hyper specialized soul structures like Regara's when needed like a loadout? Maybe a soul structure for storing various classes like his storage for spell structures and his all-purpose soul structure acts more like an object instantiation of any given class he has stored?
BeanerOO
oooooo maybe like an all-purpose abstract class for inheritance purposes?
NethanielShade
Thanky chappy
Lazy Mist
You don't need the synergy. That soul structure's entire purpose is to replace itself. It exists only to fill a slot until you know what to put there. By the time you need the synergies to be activated, you know what to put there and can just activate the structure to replace itself with what you actually want there. Also, I'm fairly sure it would synergize with the mana-manipulator (or whatever it was called), since it is there to modify soul structures.
Connor Mcharg
…I don’t see why not, but it would have terrible synergy (it has to actually use the synergy to activate the synergy - see: High House Carlos’s quest to activate their final synergies to get to orichalcum rank).
Markell
Glad to see you back and well again! - Also it’s going to be cool to see how Trinlen and Lorvan interact when discussing spell slots… or rather how they might clash in personalities. (Classic comedical left brain and right brain interaction.)
Scott Snyder
I’m pretty sure that’s what Carlos did. Maybe not help help but more like a verbose listing of help keywords
Customer Service
Yeah I thing spellgpt is probably slightly far fetched. Unless Trinlen comes up with something they're missing on the spells I think their best bet is focusing new soul structures on the things spells can't help with and/or leveraging their unique relationship with Purple.
Lazy Mist
Now I wonder if a placeholder soul structure is possible. A soul structure with the only purpose of, when ordered, reassembling itself into another soul structure, transferring any levels it already had in the process.
Maurice Brown
The system extends to runes but finite state machines are the basis for lots of automation. Put enough layers of it together and it can pass the Turing Test. Think of it like this, human hands are only so accurate. What if you made a machine that could copy the runes you wrote, in a smaller scale, that also performed basic logic. Then you combine that with runes that consume ambient mana and you’re now a few steps away from miracles or WMDS (depending on your perspective)
Irakli Jishkariani
Don't know about spellGPT, but they probably need soul structure for more friendly interface or search, probably. Does current interface have full text search?
Irakli Jishkariani
Does he need automata for that? Spellcasting doesn't need one, would runes do? Doesn't system extend to runes?
Dwarf_King
Thanks. That's what I meant. English is not my first language and I have still a long way to go. I appreciate your help
BigBro Bluesman
Hey if they have more soul structures what about one that Acts like a domain
Nematrec
anchor
Dale
Carlos is this universes dark lord
Josh
Oooh, that's a really good idea that they should try.
Ddave
Always a fun read and another great chapter. We all hope you are taking enough of a break to recover!
NoneSuch
help help
Dan Chadwick
That's fine, just get well and support your health.
Dwarf_King
Teleportation is easier if you have a anchor point on the other side, normaly a ritual circle. Can the bond with purple work the same way. Giving a mobile anchor point for teleportation if one person with a bond is present? Just something I was wondering
Josh
Imagine a spell that brute-forces the "help" interface to identify every available keyword, then stores an index of them all alongside the "help" interface as an "index" command.
Tryptic
The spell knows where it is, by knowing where it isn't, and by subtracting where it was from where it will be...
viperfan7
Oh gawd, spellGPT
TeFiLeDo
You have no chance to secret make your time.
Customer Service
Every damn chapter I wind up spitballing more soul structure ideas. My motto at work for a long time has been "if you do it often, automate it" Imagine a soul structure that's essentially and automatically searches and "downloads" keywords relevant to a desired spell effect. Then, once they have a firm grasp of magics underlying principles another structure that acts as an agent for assembling the learned words into a spell that achieves the desired effect. Don't know what it would look like yet, but setting up a system that mimics the iterative abilities of machine learning could have massive potential as well.
Bloop
all your soul plan are belong to us
Customer Service
Some sort of ranged scanning in the vein the snobby lady that examined them did would be perfect. Especially once they start visiting other noble houses...
Bloop
go full ra with intercontinental ballistic quines to siphon mana away from and destroy noble's mana wellsprings
Bloop
soul structures based around lab equipment, reverse engineering and manipulating other people's soul structures lets gooo
Maurice Brown
Okay so… when is he getting to finite state automata? He’s going to be a right terror if he can get runes to make smaller more energy efficient runes that can perform logic.
Barbar
Lets gooooo
