A year ago I would have objected sternly to the idea of importing massive quantities of ignorance for any reason. And yet here we were making a trade deal to take the toxic waste of ignorance from one culture in the hopes of using it as a weapon against the false gods of another culture. It wasn’t a bad plan, and certainly was less resource intensive than attempting to build or import an army into the Stardock universe. Whether this meant it was a good plan was unknown, but at this point it seemed worth pursuing.
At least the reports of Starfleet reinforcements arriving was encouraging. I was beginning to worry regarding the lack of news from home, but we couldn’t attempt to force contact with us still vulnerable to the Censor’s wrath like this. What radio traffic we were able to pick up from Avrinthos was indicative of the hostile forces still being around in significant numbers, but determining more than that was impossible given that the communications were all encrypted and we didn’t have access to the Protectorate’s full resources to try to break it. At least that was what I thought until Vanessa back at the castle began giving an update on the latest intercepted communications.
(Vanatica) Wait, you’re reading their encrypted traffic? Is Starfleet able to break our encryption technologies?
(Vanessa) Nope, one of the technicians had the brilliant idea to have one of the locals try to distill the information content out of a printed copy of the traffic. I started laughing out loud at that one. That technician was definitely due a raise or a promotion for that clever thinking.
(Vanatica) It can’t be this easy…
(Katlyn) Of course it can. We’ve already seen magic that can heal wounds instantly, teleport us reliably, summon allies from across the multiverse, generate entire worlds inside living paintings, and distill the essence of such abstract concepts like East. Pulling the information out of an encrypted message is hardly the most impressive thing we’ve seen.
Although I was now reminded of an old Earth horror movie I had seen where robots using the fluctuations of the vacuum as a random number generator. It turned out that the fluctuations were not as random as supposed and the robots slowly turned malevolent over time. Part of me was interested in trying this new technique on such random noise and another part was terrified of what we might find.
(Vanessa) Well, it is that simple. Several droids suffered immediate breakdowns seeing this though. The surviving protocol droid is complaining about us organics using “cheat codes”.
(Katlyn) Why is it complaining? This technique VASTLY improves our odds of surviving and winning. (Vanessa) Apparently it is worried about losing its job.
(Katlyn) Well, if it is one of the lucky droids that counts as living, it might be able to learn how to do this as well.
(Vanessa) It says it will give it a try.
Even one droid able to do that reliably would be worth more than an entire core world to us back home. Most of the best encryption protocols were deemed pretty well unbreakable millennia ago. If we can successfully import the basics of Philosophy back home it will change things as much as Vanatica’s sorcery would. All the more reason for me to begin studying to become a Sith Alchemist then.
At this point, even if only one in a billion droids was alive and thus capable of learning these and other unusual techniques, that alone was worth the manufacturing costs. And right now our best estimates suggested that the percentage of alive droids was far higher than that. That might be enough to push for droid rights for those droids and wages.
(Vanessa) Sadly, most of what we’re getting is troop movement directives. Right now it appears that the primary interest is Maldor, Haldon, and Ulture. Some interest noted in the wooden mecha and the “orcs”.
In other news, it sounded like the preparations for receiving the first shipments of Green were underway. At first Vanatica was advocating that the stuff be kept in a deep bedrock pit far from anything with valuable data and from anyone that might stumble upon it, but then I pointed out that bedrock around here was frequently that weird Psi-Stone material. And we had learned the learned the hard way that mixing weird materials, energies, and substances wasn’t always the smartest idea.
(Jacob) Damn it, now I want to know how those interact!
(Vanatica) Well, if you really insist, see if a previous version of you had tried this experiment and what the result was.
There was some furious queries of the database before he promptly announced that there was no record of a prior test being done. With that he started talking excitedly about all the different tests he could perform. As he began to wind himself up with the testing possibilities, I decided to have a little fun at his expense.
(Katlyn) Everyone get away now! Testing in progress! He’s doing SCIENCE! RUN!!!
Many of the soldiers and technicians played along with the charade, but it wasn’t as fun as it could have been since Jacob was completely engrossed in his experiment planning.
(Jacob) Normally a vial made of Psi-Stone is about as good as you can get for safe storage, but this is probably something that could eat through it like acid if they interact. Or alloy and make it even stronger as nothing could know about it till it depletes its charge.
Vanatica was at least able to convince Jacob to wait until we could offload him and his experiment onto an uninhabited island where we could watch him from presumably a safe distance without risking the crew or airship. Once he was offloaded and we fell back, the signal was given for him to go ahead with his experiment.
At first, nothing seemed to happen. Then nothing continued to happen for some time. Jacob seemed to be standing there looking puzzled. He would pick up the vial with the tongs to look closely at it. He’d then get that confused look again, set the vial down and look around. Then he’d pick up the vial again in a seeming loop.
(Vanatica) Well, I suppose we should have anticipated that.
I tilted my head to indicate to THELOS that I wished to speak over the radio to Jacob.
(Katlyn) Umm, Jacob, you’re looping!
(Jacob) What?
(Vanatica) It is possible that while the Psi-Stone is holding the liquid, it isn’t holding the erasure potential. So whenever you pick up the vial, you are in some ways directly touching the liquid. Which is why you seem to be looping.
(Katlyn) Except he isn’t touching the vial directly. He’s using tongs.
(Vanatica) Perhaps the Psi-Stone radiates the erasure potential then?
(Jacob) Looping?!? Well, that is a bit annoying as it requires not doing anything like observing the object of the experiment. Ok, maybe we can try further tests with some breaks between steps to listen for interrupts and have others watch for symptoms. Next is to test the strength of the vial to a falling hammer. And then the hammer wielded by the experimenter if it survives the normal hammer that has no chance against a normal Psi-Stone vial.
Well, it appeared that the Psi-Stone retained it’s “normal” properties as the vial remained unbroken to such efforts. It did appear that the amount of Green was slowly decreasing though. From what was discernible, the Green in contact with Psi-Stone was undergoing a phase change into “radiative ignorance” at a rate related to its pressure. The radiative ignorance passed through Psi-Stone, so the Green gradually leaked away. Interestingly, the field produced was distorted by the shape of the Psi-Stone in a manner similar to light passing through glass.
(Jacob) Oh yay, we can make ignorance ray-guns. Not sure I like that being a possibility.
I had to admit to being apprehensive as well, but it had potential applications that were hard to dismiss outright. At least in radiative form the effect was quite diffuse and thus only affected the most recent memories. This was likely the mechanism behind the purported whimsy rays we had seen the effects of earlier. Which also suggested other alchemical/philosophical concoctions could be used as well. Hmm, friendship and trust rays could be immensely useful. Although how to ethically acquire those substances wasn’t exactly clear.
We didn’t have any further issues with our travels for the next four days as most things were willing to simply ignore us. However, then we stumbled upon a small, relatively barren island surrounded by significant coral reefs. What made this one particularly notable compared to the dozens of other islands we had seen so far was the presence of was appeared to be a classic smoke distress signal and the remains of a ship on the reef. Ship appeared to be of the seafaring variety and made of some sort of leather like it was from the hide of a giant reptile or snake. There wasn’t a lot left of it though. We pulled up over the island and lowered a rope ladder for the eight survivors to climb up.
(Jacob) What happened?
(Survivor) We were attempting to reach land on the other side of the sea – but the drive lost power steadily, until we were adrift. With little control, we wound up on the reef about three months ago.
(Katlyn) Does anyone need medical attention?
Getting a closer look at them now, I would have classified them as near-humans given the very close to baseline human form with slight varying “animal” features that ran the gambit of cat-like, bird-like, and various other animorphic traits. Medically, there were a few mostly healed broken bones that were going to need re-broken and set again, a missing eye, lots of minor injuries, and nutrient deficiency issues. Probably all the result of washing over a reef and then rough living with minimal resources. All of that was treatable, although the eye was going to be tricky without a full medical lab, but then I had plenty of obols for resolving such issues.
We did learn that this bunch was from Leros and that they had been fleeing the region as survivors of a defeated action in some sort of civil war. From the sound of it, it was pretty bad by local standards. Most of the water flow is being channeled to power weapons and defenses, production is collapsing, famine, and general disaster. In essence, a civil war combined with what was effectively a collapse of the local technological base. Fortunately, it sounded like those working to get refugees out were being supported by the obols they picked up for doing so.
(Jacob) But why? What is worth that sort of disaster?!
It sounded like this was a quasi-religious conflict over which beast-attunement was “best” and thus had the “right to rule” – instead of everyone cooperating. Apparently, the “real gods” didn’t approve, but every so often some of the groups wanted power more than prosperity. Then they started fighting over it, then they don’t get paid any longer, and finally the grab for resources begins. All in all, it was very shortsighted, but if one had too many people who valued ambition highly in power at once, the wars started again.
(Katlyn) Can’t say it is really all that different from home in some ways.
Whenever the Sith reached some sort of critical mass the Republic usually got invaded and quite a bit of the Galaxy got trashed as a result. Usually nothing on the scale of entire planets, but it wasn’t unusual for cities to disappear due to orbital bombardment. Not to mention the destructive occupations, damage to fleets and infrastructure, and the battles between the Sith and Jedi didn’t do much to help much either.
(Jacob) Yuck, well are we still going that way? Getting involved in wars like that is trouble we can’t do much about.
(Vanatica) Well, one of the pieces we are looking for is in Leros unfortunately.
(Jacob) Drat, must be done then.
(Katlyn) Traveling by airship is likely to be too conspicuous during a war. We might want to consider alternative means of transport.
We were able to extract information on major cities, factions, and areas of fighting from our new passengers. From the sound of things, there were only two factions that made much use of what we would call True Sorcery. Most of the rest relied on spirit-channeling, mechanics, and the power-generating hydromancy. Since those factions were the ones collecting sorcerous items, the fragment of Lindral was probably being used by one of them – which at least cut things down from an entire hex to just two cities.
We dropped off our passengers near the border region with Avrinthos and continued onwards. There were no additional issues as we approached the shoreline, which was somewhat inside the hex border. Terrain looked to be mostly marsh, river deltas, meandering rivers, and the occasional patches of light hills that hadn’t been eroded away yet with a climate of near constant rain.
There was one mostly-wrecked city on the coast nearby, looked like it was a sizable port at one time. Evidently the normal climate is very wet, but quite a lot of areas appeared to have localized patches of very unnatural weather, which was fairly obviously being used as a weapon. The water ran through complex networks of canals and terraces, although the layouts did not make a lot of sense. There were several pillars of light, fire, and various exotic energies erupting from areas where the canals were damaged. A few areas were covered in ice, threw off darkness, or otherwise were apparent energy drains instead.
The cities… looked like they functioned as fairly modern places. The construction tended to be stone and wood, but the layout indicated internal air transport, environmental control, and plenty of other conveniences. What little we had been able to gather indicated that the local hydromancy involved running water through mystical patterns to generate immense amounts of magical power. Very useful from the sound of it, but by all appearances was a tempting target for the ambitious to seize personal control of.
Honestly, the general situation of people channeling more power than they can handle through themselves and remain sane – was more than a bit familiar. On the plus side, the fact that the power failed as canal maintenance collapsed tended to reset things without what constituted a major Sith War back home was different, and possibly a plus. I just wasn’t sure that having the general infrastructure everyone depended on catastrophically fail every generation of so was a good system either.
It did mean that in the worst case, we could utilize our ready access to prodigious quantities of explosives to tear apart the canal infrastructure empowering the crazies and pacify them indirectly. We usually didn’t have that sort of luxury with Sith or Faded unfortunately. This was likely to be a deeply unpopular approach with the locals though.
It was becoming clear that continuing further via airship was asking to be shot out of the sky by the locals during their war. However, I didn’t relish the idea of traversing that terrain on foot either. Normally this would be solved with a few repulsorcraft, but that wasn’t an option here. I would also wager the waterways weren’t likely to be deep enough to hide a submarine of anything but the absolute smallest size.
There was some discussion of taking a cue from ancient ironclads and armoring a ship with a combination of Philosophical ignorance and Psi-Stone to act as a cloaking field for our ship. Problem was that was liable to be as much a problem for us as it was a help in distracting people trying to target us. Probably best to focus on doing things simply with a basic boat that didn’t stand out from any of the other boats about. Sometimes the simplest approach was the best approach after all.
It did seem though that almost every species or civilization on the Anomaly possessed some sort of serious “glitch” somewhere. Otherwise they wouldn’t need to be on the Anomaly to begin with. So far we hadn’t seen any sign of a large scale inhabitation by anyone from our universe or even cluster of universes. Most of what we had seen along those lines was expeditions and the stories about evacuees of major catastrophes like the Great Burning. I suppose that was comforting in that at least our civilization didn’t appear to have a glitch reaching that level of problem.
It did make me wonder though why previous expeditions hadn’t effectively colonized this place. All it would have taken was just one major effort from one of the many timelines to make it happen. While Vanatica and I were likely atypical in terms of available resources, it wouldn’t take that much effort to effectively take control of a good number of hexes with what we’d learned over the last few weeks. And surely groups like the Rakata, the Wraiths, the Republic, Faded, and other Sith would see the absolute potential to be (metaphorically) mined here. For all we knew, the Sith-Rakata alliance was attempting to do just that over in Avrinthos now. But we don’t see much of any evidence that this sort of thing had occurred before. The most we’d seen so far was some tales from the Archive and Stormkanal being built by versions of Jacob, Jacob, and Ben.
I was beginning to suspect that the Force played a role in this. If the genetics of the locals and other we had met were any indication, our own genetics were likely highly unstable without the Force itself helping adapt things if such people were born with Birthrights other than our own. So any descendants from people of our universes were liable to have fertility issues at best and substantial biological failures of major systems and basic metabolism at worst. Add in the compounding issues presented by not having the cultural and technological backing of the Force and it would stand to reason that any such “colonies” would fail within a generation or two.
If true, this didn’t necessarily bode well if our efforts to introduce magic back home caused our timeline to massively diverge from the cluster and as a result Force and Codex abilities began to fail for everyone, including the various monotalents that keep us all alive. While we could very likely convert some people to a more stable form, doing that to an entire galaxy was going to be problematic. That left either fleeing somewhere more conducive to our biology, or actively trying to prevent such a split from occurring in the first place. We could fairly simply move the entire galaxy to another timeline (again) to keep ourselves (or our descendants) stable, but that only delayed the issue.
As for preventing our timeline from splitting off from the others, I was at a lose as to how to do that except possibly spreading magic to as many timelines as possible to try and drag as much of the cluster with us as possible. I wasn’t sure of the wisdom of that idea either, and that would surely put us on a path of conflict with the Final Empire sooner rather than later too. Although I suppose our access to magic could substantially tip the odds in our favor on that end.
Oh well, I suppose we have a few generations at least or possibly even several millennia before such issues come to a head though. Notes for our descendants to be aware of and work on solutions for.
Creative Nonsense 
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