Mae busied herself with her preparations while her mistress was looking over the changes that had been made to them. While she loathed to break her rhythm for even a moment, there were still things to do, so it wasn’t a total waste of time. Her little leveling session had started with picking a Class and while she didn’t really want any of them but one, she took a few precious moments to obtain each class and then immediately reset it and grab another, just so her mistress would count as “the first” to have the Class if she ever wanted it. Once she had finished, she settled on the Mathematician Class. The overview given by King’s Knowledge showed some tantalizing Skills, and its secondary experience gain condition was simply to solve math problems, with more difficult problems granting more experience. That meant it would be simple and quick to level up, especially as she was able to skip straight to the really hard stuff with her Omniglot Skill.
Which brought her to the main point of her endeavor. She had found that her mistress was sorely underutilizing certain abilities, and she was going to remedy that. The first big area they could improve in was Omniglot. That was an absurd Skill, and it was being used as an automatic translator. She had to admit that was a valid use of the Skill, but that was like user a supercomputer just to perform the job of a handheld calculator – wasteful. People communicate with each other in a lot of different ways, and as such the Skill applied in a variety of ways that might not be immediately obvious.
For instance, as a code breaker. What’s the difference between a code and a language? Not much – they both communicate concepts in ways others can understand, it’s just that one has a lot fewer people who “know the language”. But even that is still just scratching the surface. Technical jargon is just another way of communicating a concept, so logically that information would somehow be “translated” as well, even if it’s just making it so that she understood whatever was being expressed to her.
And those were the “concrete” uses of the Skill. Music, math, body language, anything a person could use to communicate concepts is caught by the skill, making it quite the asset if used correctly.
And while it may be unassuming, math was probably the most valuable of the aforementioned ways of communicating – most scientific disciplines trace back to math in one form or the other, and the basic way the world operates can be broken down into simple math. If she was right, that could be used and abused to a ridiculous extent, if she had the proper hardware for it.
She didn’t. Yet. She’d look into fixing that later, but she was saving that for when she had the Skills and knowledge to make that work. So, for now she had just focused on getting Mathematician leveled up. Calculus and experience from Siph had skyrocketed the Class level, at least until she unlocked the Skills. The Skills were quite handy, as training them would also train the Class if she did it manually. Aside from Computation, the Skills would result in a slight drop of experience to the Class level as she wouldn’t be solving as difficult of problems, but that was fine.
When training the Skills, she didn’t bother actually using any of them (once again excluding Computation), as they were simply too slow and wouldn’t contribute to leveling Mathematician at all. So, instead she just mentally asked Omniglot for a way of expressing the angle/speed/force applied to an object, and dutifully received a formula for that, which she would proceed to solve. Rinse, repeat, level up. Soon, she maxed out Mathematician, and decided to hold off on picking a new Class to let experience pile up in her storage while she leveled her Skills.
For the Skills themselves, speed was her priority. There was no point in using a Skill that was slower than doing it normally, and while she couldn’t get the time down to instantaneous with just the Skills, she could get them pretty close. That was really just a side benefit, though. The main benefit was the Skill King’s Knowledge was telling her it’d give her if she would hold off on evolving them right away and got the Savant series of Skills all maxed out. Namely, it would fuse the Savant Skills and Computation, and tie the efficiency of the Savant Skills to how much faster Computation was making them.
It was called Eye of Laplace, and Mae was practically salivating over the possibilities. She was fast now, but give it some time for her to get the proper hardware? The Skill would live up to its name, that was for sure. Still, that was a way off, right now she was waiting.
Kali was busy getting some equipment for her, and she had sent her mother off on a killing spree to get a feel for just how much experience she would be getting from that. After she had a good enough idea of what the experience rate would be like, she would be comparing it to her current rates to decide whether or not to switch to the next Class straight away or store up experience in Mathematician and just blast through the Class in one go.
She was leaning towards switching sooner rather than later, though. She already had a decent amount of experience stored up, and even if she would take a slight dip to her Class experience, the Skill experience would more than make up for it.
Her reverie was interrupted by her mistress calling for Kali. She gathered up the instruments Kali had left behind and took over the spare avatar, moving it over to a table and placing it there before returning to her body. She went over to the door and opened it slightly, putting Kali within visual range of her telepathy. May I resume work now?
“Yeah, go ahead.” Her mistress said, and she shut the door, smiling. She selected a scalpel from the tools gathered and advanced on the spare avatar, slicing it open without a trace of hesitation. She poked around inside for a few moments, identifying bones, sections of muscle, organs, and other viscera until she got a notification telling her that she had unlocked the Biologist Class.
Class: Biologist Rank: Uncommon Bonuses: 20% chance to increase HP, 20% chance to increase MP, 50% chance to increase Magic Power. EXP Scaling: 1% Alternate experience gain conditions: Make observations about living or formerly living things. Unlocks: Level 50: Arcanobiologist, Botanist, Entomologist, Herpetologist, Ichthyologist, Mammologist, Ornithologist, Parasitologist Skills: Level 1: Species Identification Level 25: Behavior Analysis Level 50: Dietary Advisor Level 75: Organ Identification Level 100: Diagnosis (Minor) A Class for those who study life. |
The Skills were nothing special, but that wasn’t what she was aiming to get from this Class. Well, at least not in the short term. Perhaps they could become something better later down the line, but that wasn’t the point. What she was aiming for was Arcanobiologist and Parasitologist. Mostly Arcanobiologist, but if she was right Parasitologist would prove itself invaluable as well.
She quickly reset Mathematician and picked Biologist, her stored experience enough to catapult her level into the mid-thirties. She instantly dismissed the messages she received upon doing so; none of them were worth the time it would take to look through them, and she had a good enough idea of what they were anyway. Species Identification would give her the species name of whatever organism she was looking at. It was pretty useless, although she was guessing somewhere in its evolutions it would let her look into the organisms Racial Classes as well, which she had to admit was tempting. Still, not a priority. Behavior Analysis allowed her to better intuit the lifestyles of organisms – how they hunt, sleep, mate, anything in that vein was fair game. Another Skill that had potential in its evolutions but was pretty useless to her now.
Dietary Advisor would just let her figure out what foods would be good for the thing she’s looking at. Barely worth consideration. The only Skills that actually held some immediate promise were Organ Identification and Diagnosis (Minor). Organ Identification would let her figure out what an organ is and what it does and could probably be used as a sort of weak-point targeting given a little practice and an evolution or two. Diagnosis (Minor) was the big one, giving her a ballpark impression of the current HP of what she was looking at. It was horribly inaccurate at low levels, but it was certainly better than nothing.
After taking her new Class, she resumed the dissection of her own…corpse? It was still alive, she had made sure of that. It would be frustrating to have to get her mistress to make a new avatar after every single autopsy, and she had a lot of autopsies to go. Fortunately, Eldritch Abomination provided a lot of ways for her to keep that body alive, and it barely took any effort to use if she knew what she was doing.
A few levels later, she was satisfied in her progress, and transferred herself into the avatar. She had disabled the pain receptors in it during her first shift, allowing her to transfer her consciousness into it whenever she wished. It wasn’t something she would do to the main body of any of the Parallels, pain being too important of an indicator for her to safely ignore, but in a situation where she knew exactly what was going on it was little more than an annoyance. She quickly transformed the avatar into a rabbit before once again exiting and resuming her dissection.
Her mother…her thought process derailed for a moment. “Mother” was now too much of an ambiguous term for her. She needed a way to specify which mother she was talking about if there was ever doubt. Birth mother and adoptive mother? No, that didn’t seem to fit their relationship closely enough. Human mother and dragon mother? It had potential. She’d go with it for now, but she’d need to broach the subject with her mistress soon.
Anyway, her mother had made her Assimilate every single creature they had come across while hunting, and it was paying dividends now. She had a veritable zoo of animals for her to experiment on for this Class, and her experience gain would only be supplemented by Siph’s hunting.
She methodically worked her way through the autopsies, not even pausing once she hit level 100. She let the experience accumulate as she worked, keeping an eye on the total. She wanted to jump straight to maximum level in Arcanobiologist, grab the extra experience for analyzing her few forms that had some sort of inherent magic, and then jump straight to the next Class. She’d need roughly thirty thousand experience to do so once she reset Biologist, so it was going to take a few minutes.
But that came soon enough. Constant work on learning about the animals she could turn into and the steady trickle of experience from her mother saw to that. Well, in fairness, it was her experience enhancers that were doing most of the heavy lifting there, but that was just a multiplier, not the underlying cause of the experience. She gave Arcanobiologist a quick once-over before resetting and picking the Class up.
Class: Arcanobiologist Rank: Rare Bonuses: 80% chance to increase MP, 150% chance to increase Magic Power, 50% chance to increase Magic Defense. EXP Scaling: 2% Alternate experience gain conditions: Make observations about living or formerly living things. Gains extra experience from observations made on organisms with magical properties. Unlocks: Level 100: Eldritch Biologist Skills: Level 25: Affinity Identification Level 75: Resistance Identification Level 100: Mana Diagnosis (Minor) A Class for those who study the magical properties of life. |
The Skills for this Class, though few, were far more enticing than those from Biologist. Being able to see what any given thing resisted and had extra bonuses to was huge and being able to see an opponent’s Mana was nearly as important as being able to see their HP. Something to put on the ever-growing list of things to level up, for sure.
After the messages came in, she got back to dissecting herself. She only had a few forms that had some sort of built-in magic, so it didn’t take too long to work her way through all of them. When she was done roughly fifteen minutes later, she had only built up around ten thousand experience, most of which had come from her mother. She would have had more, but unfortunately Siph was between hunting grounds at the moment, and she wasn’t willing to wait for her next experience drop to get started on her next line of research. This one promised to take quite a bit longer than her previous endeavors, but the return on investment would be absolutely massive if it panned out like she hoped it would.
She took a breather to size up the Class as she opened up a word processor on a nearby computer, readying it to take notes on her findings.
Class: Eldritch Biologist Rank: Epic Bonuses: 150% chance to increase MP, 150% chance to increase Magic Power, 150% chance to increase Magic Defense. EXP Scaling: 3% Alternate experience gain conditions: Make observations about eldritch beings. Skills: Level 1: Eldritch Understanding Level 25: Behavior Analysis (Eldritch) Level 50: Organ Identification (Eldritch) Level 75: Vitals Analysis (Eldritch) Level 100: Full Diagnosis (Minor) (Eldritch) A Class for those who study things which should not be. |
Most of those were just variations on other Biologist Skills adapted so they’d actually be usable on eldritch beings. Full Diagnosis worked for HP, Mana, and Stamina, Vitals Analysis let her identify vital spots on eldritch beings, and Behavior Analysis was the same was the one from Biologist. What she was actually after here was Eldritch Understanding and Organ Identification. Eldritch Understanding would give her the toolset needed to know why the things worked the way they worked, and Organ Identification would let her better understand those organs that seemed flat out incomprehensible. Sure, she knew about them and what they did, but she needed to know how. And once she knew that, she was in business.
Before all that, though, she had to figure out exactly how her transformations worked. She never seemed to have a change in intelligence when transforming, despite the fact that most of what she transformed into had no business being as smart as a person. So, she transformed the avatar back into a rabbit, and left it there for a moment. She then went over to the laptop and got a series of randomly generated math problems and opened up a timer. She started the timer with a telekinesis spell, solved the series of problems, stopped the timer, and wrote down the result. She repeated this several times before she jumped into the avatar and did it several more times.
There was no significant change in her times. She had looked at the brains of her transformations before, and they seemed no different to a normal animal of their species, so it wasn’t that the brain itself was different. So, she drew her first conclusion. Somehow, magic compensated for differences in how brains worked to keep someone transformed in the same state of mind.
Still, she didn’t think the brain and consciousness were completely separated while transformed. Either that, or the compensation also extended to handling new sensory inputs for her. She was leaning towards the former, though. If that was the case, it would explain why she had such a hard time sharing her senses between Parallels; they didn’t have the necessary tools to process that much information at once.
She couldn’t be sure that eldritch abilities worked under the same logic as other abilities, but she also had no reason to assume they didn’t, so she was tentatively working under the assumption that in this respect they were the same.
Which brought her to her next avenue of research. She was able to use any sensory organs made with Eldritch Abomination just fine, and she was hoping to figure out the reason why.
A bit of dissection around a severed appendage quickly revealed what was going on. At the base of each new organ was a cluster of nervous tissue, which her Skills were telling her was likely a sort of processing hub for turning the data from the organ into something actually usable without mentally overloading the main brain. She carefully scooped out an eye and the tissue surrounding it, placing it on a separate table, severing it from the body when she felt the tissue was starting to connect things more than it was actually processing.
Unfortunately for her, she didn't have anywhere close to the required background knowledge needed to properly determine how exactly the chunk of tissue was handling input and output. Fortunately, she didn’t really need to at the moment, she was more interested in the names of parts of the cluster, which she reasoned would give her a headstart on figuring out how to reliably replicate it.
Through this, she was able to find that while this cluster of nerves did indeed help with processing, it was actually useless in the state it was currently in. It seemed to connect to a central hub of sorts, while this was just pure processing. She followed the cut cord of flesh back to the “central hub”, removed it, and put it down on the table so she could poke around it.
It seemed that this was where connecting the new sensory input to her original sensory input took place. Something about calculating where to stitch together the input and then sending commands to the other clusters of tissue?
Mae frowned. This wasn’t working like she had hoped. She could theoretically figure out what was going on here, and she wasn’t totally sure she was right, but she had no way to pick apart the design and change it to suit her needs. She’d try and grind out the Skill levels and see where that took her, but it was starting to look like she’d need to pick up some sort of Neurologist Class if she wanted to make any real headway, and she hadn’t unlocked one yet. Either way, though, she had a lot of work ahead of her.
Mae set down her tools, frustrated. There’s no way things were going to work the way she had been going about it. It’d been two or three hours at this point and, as it turns out, attempting to design a secondary way of processing information with basically no prior knowledge was going to be close to impossible, even with the assistance of magic.
So, she just had to get that knowledge. She’d worked her way through all of the unlocks derived from Biologist, leveled her Racial Classes up thrice, and had about thirteen thousand experience stored up. Her mother had come home thirty minutes prior to rest and search for a new hunting ground, so she whatever experience she was going to get would come from her own efforts at this point.
Unfortunately for her, she hadn’t unlocked any sort of Neurologist Class yet, although she had a feeling that she was close. Well, feeling likely wasn’t a strong enough word. It was more of a certainty, and she was pretty sure that was coming from King’s Knowledge.
It is. Kali mentally said. Normally it’d just outright tell you when looking for the Class, but it doesn’t “really” exist until you or someone else is able to “directly” see the unlock requirement. But, for now, you’re only missing a Class or two and then you’ll be ready to get it.
And those are?
Something in the Student/Scholar line. Not sure which, but you would probably want to take that line anyway. It’ll help with your little project. Speaking of, you need anything else for it?
Just any corpses mother brought back with her latest kill.
Yeah, she’s been bringing back one of each type of thing she’s killed. You’re not gonna get any Skills off of them, though. Since Assimilate has been ported over to the new system, it’s only going to copy stuff from the new system. Even if we wait, the system’s not gonna retroactively apply to corpses unless they get raised, and these aren’t exactly in a good enough condition for that.
That’s fine. I just need their mass.
Let me know when you need the corpses, I’ll direct you to them.
Thank you. I will not require them for a while yet. I will contact you when they become necessary.
Mae sat down in front of the desk with the computer. She took the Student class, nodding in approval as most of her stored experience was drained and the Class reached maximum level. She reset it, took Scholar, and pulled up some online learning resources, focusing on stuff about the brain.
Look, great idea and all, Kali interjected, but I think you’re forgetting that I’m the world’s foremost expert on the brain. I had to do most of the stuff you’re looking to do now when making my magic system. Give me a second and I can create a dump of my knowledge for you to look through. It’ll probably be more helpful than whatever you’d find online.
Really?! Mae said with barely repressed excitement, that would be extremely helpful!
Kali chuckled mentally. Yeah. Just hold tight for a few minutes, alright?
Mae grinned, and then paused. Wait, why did you contact me anyway?
You stopped gaining experience for the first time in hours. I was just looking to see if you were going to need help.
Understood.
Mae waited for a couple of minutes, and was soon brought a small, glowing ball. “Just put your hand on it and you can mentally browse through the knowledge contained within. If you have any questions, let me know and I’ll clarify, so go nuts!”
Mae nodded. I will, thank you. She grabbed the orb and began pouring through the contents. Kali smirked and slipped back through the door.
Mae looked down at her body, flexing her hand experimentally. All seemed well, so she went through a series of rudimentary stretches and exercises, making sure everything was working as it should. Satisfied, she switched back from the avatar into her main body and went through the same series of stretches and found that it also could move unimpeded. She nodded in satisfaction, making a note to thank Kali again when she next saw her.
It was roughly six hours after Kali had given her the sphere of information. The first bit had been slow going, but once she unlocked Neurologist and then Neuromancer, her progress had quickly sped up. It sped up even more once King’s Knowledge let her fuse a few of her knowledge gaining Skills into one that would let her comprehend this sort of thing much better.
She opened the door and walked to where her mistress and Kali were still watching television. Mistress, she said, prompting the two to pause the television, I have finished my experimentation and I would like to implement my results.
“Experimentation?” Lilith asked.
I was looking for a way to increase my processing power, as well as allow us to share our senses all the time. I have succeeded, but I will need permission to alter your body.
Lilith looked towards Kali.
“I’m not going to weigh in on this decision. Or much of any decisions, really. Unless it’s directly related to me, I refuse to grant any permission related to what you do. Remember, you are the highest authority. Just take all the facts into account and I trust you to make the right choice.”
Lilith mulled things over for a moment. “Alright, I’ll let you do what you need. What’s the procedure?”
Mae laid down on the floor and retreated to the main body. She switched off the pain receptors, and went back to the avatar, standing back up. I’ve turned off your sense of pain. While what I’m doing shouldn’t cause any pain by itself, there might be some portions that cause pain as a side effect. All I’ll need you to do is not resist anything I’m doing. It’s going to look frightening, but I promise this’ll increase our capabilities drastically.
Lilith raised an eyebrow. “Alright. Ready when you are.”
Mae walked over to her, and then disengaged her avatar and the spare avatar. The avatar’s skin dropped from its body, exposing the muscle and bone to air. She quickly jumped from her body, the pile of flesh on the floor, back into the spare avatar and regrew the skin and organs she had replaced so no one had to look at it while she worked.
Please grab the pile of flesh on the floor, mistress. Mae instructed. Noticing Lilith’s horrified expression, she continued. That’s my body. I’ve made it into one that’ll replace unnecessary parts of one of our avatars and replace them with something useful. Mostly brain matter to expand my capabilities, but also a few other things to generally improve the efficiency of the body. It’s all perfectly harmless. Well, for us, anyway.
Lilith hesitantly reached down and grabbed the lump of flesh, flinching as it slithered up her arm. Mae hopped into the main body and began to work towards integrating her body with it. First, she replaced the skin with that of her own body, and then got to work internally.
I’m replacing most of your digestive system and reproductive system. She explained as she worked. I found that not only can we get nutrients by consuming mass from what we’ve gained with Assimilation, it’s more efficient that way. I’ve set up an organ that will automatically Assimilate anything you swallow, so you should still be able to eat just fine. As a bonus, you won’t have to use the bathroom anymore, so that’s nice. As for the reproductive system, I’ve still left it able to…give pleasure, if that was something you ever wanted, but the other functions have been removed for space. I can put them back whenever you would actually like to use them. I also looked into replacing your lungs and gills as well but subsisting on oxygenated blood from Assimilated mass just isn’t feasible. So, I’ve left them in for now, until I can find a better way to get oxygen.
Uh, that’ll be fine. Lilith replied. I think I’d feel weird if I couldn’t breathe or talk or anything.
I’d leave a way for you to talk. Mae said. You wouldn’t need to worry about that, but I understand. I’ll stop looking into that and work on other things. Anyway, that’s it for most of your organs. I’m replacing all the fat on your body now, since with the mass from Assimilation it's pretty much useless. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve increased the size of your bust and bottom slightly, as I could pack in extra matter there without harming how we look. I made sure to prioritize keeping us as similar-looking as possible, if not a little more attractive, simply because it’s been shown that people treat attractive people better than other people.
There was silence for a few minutes as Mae worked, before she finally spoke. Alright, I’m done. You’ll be able to move normally and can feel everything through me, but I’ll also be able to move the body if the need arises. It’s built so that you can shut down my control of the body completely, and in case of a dispute control always goes to you. You shouldn’t need to worry about that, though. I won’t be trying to move the body without your permission anyway. Oh, and I turned pain back on. It would be really bad if you were to get injured and not even realize it because you can’t feel pain.
Anyway, Kali, can we discuss Skill Points a little more? I’ve got a few uses in mind but I want both mistress and me to be fully aware of the situation before we do anything with them.
“Oh, right!” Kali said, sitting up straighter. “So, they’re basically like I explained a while back. You get one for each level of your Racial Classes and can spend them on Skills. So, I was going to have you save them and use them once you establish your own dungeon but what you’ve got in mind will probably pay off quicker, and we’ll be able to earn those points back pretty quickly.”
“So…what do you have in mind?” Lilith asked.
As things are right now, I am technically a parasite. So, I want to spec into the symbiosis line, and we’ve got enough points to get pretty far into that. With what I’m looking at, this will allow me to gain as much experience as you whenever you gain experience and vice versa. It will also add some of my stats to yours, as well as provide a significant boost to your HP and Stamina regeneration. It’ll require 136 points to fully finish the symbiosis line, but I think it’s a worthwhile investment, given the benefits gained from me are much larger than those gained from most parasites, and we’ll be significantly increasing the rate at which we grow our Racial Classes, given we’ll be receiving experience for them twice whenever you get some. Do I have permission to purchase all those Skills?
Lilith didn’t have to think about that one for very long. “Yeah, do it. I was only saving them for Kali anyway, and if she says this is better than there’s no reason not to.”
Excellent. I’ll do that in a moment. But, now that I’ve merged my body with yours, I don’t have any particular need for Classes, as the majority of my stats will come into play as buffs to you, and we’ll share Skills. As such, what would you like me to start working on?
“Uh, I’m not sure yet. Just pick whatever you think is best, alright?”
Understood. Now, I’m going to leave for a moment while I get the spare avatar out of here, and then I’ll be back. Feel free to return to your show, I believe you had almost raised the level of your Skills, right?
“Yeah. Just a bit more and we’ll be done. You can unpause it now, Kali.”
“Gladly!” Kali said, unpausing the TV as the spare avatar left. They watched for a while longer before Mae spoke up.
Why would she run away like that? She asked. That makes absolutely no sense! If she just talked it out, the whole problem would be solved, and they could both move on with their lives.
“Exactly!” Kali said. “We’ve been saying that this entire time! She’s the worst!”
But can she run Crysis?
As is? No. Theoretically? Absolutely. The brain actually has a huge amount of processing power, to the point that, in 2014, the most accurate simulation of the human brain was made on a supercomputer, and one second of brain activity took the computer 40 minutes to calculate. And that was one percent of the brain's activity. Currently, there's an algorithm to simulate all activity, but as of 2018 the most any supercomputer was able to run was 10% of the brain's activity.
So, you ask the question in jest, but, if she was willing to divert processing power to allow that, I'm betting it would be trivially easy to run Crysis.
And that wouldn't even be too hard, considering that, from my limited understanding of the brain, the actual hardware of the brain isn't too different from the hardware of the computer. It's just processing electrical signals. The biggest issue would be hooking it up to output, but provided Mae is willing to hijack sight and hearing she could probably stream it directly to Lilith's consciousness.
...I talked way too long about a silly topic, but I tend to nerd out, so you'll have to forgive me for that :P
Lilith damnit you are supposed to ask the question, 'what will happen when we transform?' she packed a lot of stuff in her form (not base form as far as I know) will it stay after transforming in a dragon and back again? or will it reset like normal, it is a question that should've been asked.
Ah, right, didn't think of that. In this case it's basically been treated as clothing, it'll merge into any other transformations and upon transforming back it'll still be there. Mae will have to do a little extra work if she wants to use that mass during the transformation but nothing massive, mostly just shifting around where it is.
I've made a note to touch that up ;)
On the people who are still alive.
Sorry, after reading the chapter title I couldn't resist.
That was the intention ;)
my 1st thought
Lilith is totally going to be banned for botting.
Thanks for the chapter.
and put it down for on the table so - down on
Mae nodded. “I will, thank you.” She grabbed the - Shouldn't that be telepathic, so italicized?
standing back up. “I’ve turned off your sense of pain. - again, shouldn't that speech be in italics since it should be telepathic
Fixed, thank you!
You would not believe the trouble Mae's speech has caused me typing things out. Recently it's been having her speech in italics and a close quote but not an open quote. It's just become a habit to put the quote whenever I finish someone's speech, so I don't even notice half the time and have to go back and fix it later lol.
More corrections:
All I’ll need for you is to not resist - you to do is
to look at it while worked. - while she
mass from Assimilation is pretty much - it is
as those I could pack in - as I
@Bilagaana Fixed once again, thanks!
Lovely to see an off handed comment I made got a nod in another story on this site... also free plastic surgery. Lol didn't see that bit coming.
I honestly couldn't think of a reason Mae wouldn't do that, just to pack in a bit more matter. It's nothing really noticeable unless you've seen her before and are really paying attention, so don't expect it to pop up much.
Well, scratch that, Carmen's a good point of reference for people, so it'll probably come up more than I was thinking, but eh, what can you do?
Also the whole mom thing really is the best solution I can think of right now. Seems quite a bit clearer than anything else I can think of.
@Fighterman481 Mom, Mother, Mommy, Momma etc. is the simplest way from a personal standpoint to solve this. as a reader? would probably be even more confusing
@Kornuptiko Yeah, it wasn't the best solution, so I've tried to make it obvious who's who from context, and I think confusion is, for the most part, completely mitigated. Just a compromise I had to make between realism and narrative clarity, I guess.
Thanks for the chapter!
Huh. Rather than strictly brain cells, it seems more like Mae turned herself into a 'networked nanite/nanobot' swarm that replaced 40% of Lilith's body. Theoretically possible, just insanely complicated to make it work as a brain so it's a good thing Kali helped or she'd be at it for years. Nanorobotics is the current name for it, but at that scale it's incredibly hard to manufacture things from scratch so most modern techniques are just about taking existing viruses, cells or DNA that mostly do the job already and modifying them until they do exactly what we want. One could say Mae became the foremost expert on, and first practical application of, nanoroboneurology?
I'm guessing there's a non-zero chance Mae just eats the computer once she's done integrating as a symbiote, giving Lilith telepathic internet access and Iron Man heads-up displays, then after more research using light magic to project 3d models like R2D2 and letting Lilith go into VR if she feels like it..
Side note: my plan for if I managed to do what Mae did, instead of 30-40% of my real body, I'd convert 100% of the moon or some planet nobody's using.
It's something akin to the concept, yes. I'm not going to pretend that's anywhere near my field of expertise, but that sounds pretty similar to what she would have done.
I think it would have taken somewhere around a month of constant work had Kali not stepped in. She has a lot of advantages that people in real life don't have, mostly form academic Classes and King's Knowledge. I foresee learning in general becoming a lot easier once this new system comes out, potentially advancing technology significantly.
As for eating a computer or gaining computer like function, that's pretty unlikely. She can't integrate any non-biological substance with herself, since everything's done via Eldritch Abomination/Assimilated matter and she doesn't have the capability to Assimilate things that weren't recently alive (relatively speaking). That's not to say building a biological computer is impossible, and with fine enough control over the material (which Mae has at this point) I don't see why you couldn't. That being said, Mae sees no reason to do so outside of an experiment. Remember that she is using what she made expand the capabilities of her mind. IMO, given the tech we have now, designing an extension to your brain like a computer is less than ideal. It's too rigid for what you would want.
Furthermore, Mae's not exactly an expert on computer hardware. She's got some experience from college, but not nearly enough to make her own computer. She has a lot easier access to knowledge on biology given what she is. It just seemed easier this way. Seemed.
Internet access is also highly unlikely. They have to go through some serious magical hoops to get internet and phone signals outside of the plane Earth is in, and that's not something that can be built into a singular body. Furthermore, she's lacking any sort of wireless capability. She can't send or receive a signal, but that's something that could be learned with enough trial and error. The system's gonna have her covered for all her HUD needs, but projecting 3D models are totally doable. VR access...depends on how the VR is implemented. Best case scenario it's something using an extra plane Kali has, in which case she could just waltz right on in with some teleportation. Other than that most of her VR problems are gonna come from the aforementioned wireless issue.
While I did consider a central hub of sorts, and that was the plan for a while, I eventually decided against it. The biggest issue is that it just doesn't work for what Mae has in mind. For that, she needs direct access to the body, and is she wanted to connect avatars in that manner she'd basically have to tether them to the hub. Heck, when Carmen is eventually reintroduced to their link she's going to have to modify her body to allow her to get sensory input from the other bodies as well, they can't just use Lilith's body as a hub.
The second issue is one of mass and security. She's just not going to have enough mass for something like that any time soon. She's got a lot of mass Assimilated, but that's only relative to the scale of a person. It's insignificant compared to a moon, much less a planet, and she'd have to worry about keeping that mass supplied with nutrients. Then, as she has no camouflage capabilities, people would eventually notice and try to deal with it. Right now there just isn't a way to get farther out than people have already gone, as Kali's teleportation is limited to places where people have been before unless it's on an uninhabited plane and Lilith certainly doesn't have the means to get out that far into space. I mean, theoretically if Kali was willing to sacrifice an entire plane for them it'd be doable, but once people start getting planeshift magic she's going to be on a timer. It's just an enormous hassle for little benefit. With Skills helping, she doesn't need much more than what she has, so it's just overkill.
@Fighterman481 by ‘eat the computer’ instead of assimilation I just meant literally eating a computer and now there’s a computer inside her. About to go into more detail than necessary so TL;DR: I'm still sure she can easily do it after about 30 minutes on Wikipedia but, yeah, it’s probably more effort than it’s worth given where Lilith is actually gonna work.
You can get decently powerful PC’s the size of a phone, and someone who can think as fast and flexibly as Mae could actually plug directly into the USB and video ports with very little effort, computer interfaces aren’t complicated, only fast. A little bit of lightning magic as power and output if she doesn’t feel like just grabbing a brain-computer interface from Elon Musk. But the internet connection is definitely a big one, if portals the even the size of a human hair can’t be maintained and there aren’t crystal balls that can keep watch on each other. If the crystal ball one is a thing though, there’s so many ways of abusing that to get enough bandwidth to run the entire modern internet through a pair of crystal balls the size of marbles. The caveats of course, this would only really be useful for making massive archives of information Mae would already be able to store with her super thinky skills, connecting to massive server farms even more powerful than she is to simulate and study a complex process in great detail, Skyping family, and running a High Arbiter PR YouTube channel. Lilith can already treat her job as a game if she feels like it (she has the stat screens) so VR isn’t important, even if Mae could use her parasitic connection to send all the realistic sensations to Lilith like she was really in there.
And yeah now that you mention it, maybe the ‘brain the size of a planet’ thing would mostly be done in the cores, cause you never know when you might want to use the surface, and a moon/planet turning into a featureless grey sphere might make people angry.
For that crystal ball thing it’s from a novel idea I had where someone uses just that to get people to play a ‘vrmmo’ that it turns out is controlling robots to build a human-habitable colony on Titan, making use of the chemistry going on there, and when their human body dies for any reason their mind is trapped in the robot one... but I’m currently distracted with more than a million years of backstory explaining how they got the communication orbs. I think maybe I should have it come from somewhere simpler..
@Koolpin Now that I think about it it'd be totally doable to have a separated space in which to keep some sort of processor, but given current tech I still think making one out of brain matter would be more space-efficient if you know how. Current guesses for the brain's data capacity run from 1 terabyte to 2.5 petabytes (or at least, that's what google says). Given a 2.5 inch 15 terabyte SSD (~10,000$) built to the specifications provided by the SNIA (apparently some standards non-profit, was the only measurement I could find that would allow me to get volume), you're looking at a volume of anywhere from .259 to .525 cm^3, where the average volume of the human brain is 1260 cm^3 for men and 1130 cm^3 for women.
Of course, given that we don't know the exact data capacity of a brain, if we assume it's the halfway mark of those two estimates the brain is still quite a bit more space-efficient than commercially available storage. But, this is all a hypothetical.
The main issue with wi-fi over a portal or any cross-dimension travel is that if you use any old method it gets super lossy. So, you end up having to have big, specially stabilized portals if you want to get wireless through. So, for the average area, people have been making do with small portals that they fit wire through. And while Lilith or Mae could probably get one of those set up pretty easy, the trick would be making it mobile, which is...not so easy.
Handheld phones for the most part don't get internet unless you plug them into a special cord, and generally only can call people on the same plane. The biggest issue with getting real wireless going so far is that Haven's really cramped for safe space. People have barely been able to make the space they have stable, and they can't send anything into space either because anything they try gets shot down by sky megafauna.
Of course, once the new system gets introduced and they can start expanding more and making things safer, things will change and they can start to get the ball rolling. There's a lot more manpower coming from Earth, and someone's gonna figure out a better way to do things.
Honestly High Arbiter PR social media accounts sound like a hilarious idea and I love it. Skype is probably going to end up irrelevant for family purposes due to Familial Bond, but could be useful in other situations.
But, all this is hypothetical. For the time being they're going to focus on getting things going with their Skills so they won't get instantly destroyed the moment anyone gets enough power to be a shadow of a threat.
I probably had more to say in this reply but I'm really scatterbrained at the moment and I've been typing this on and off for the better part of an hour so I'm going to stop typing before it becomes any more of a trainwreck than it already is .-.
she did have anywhere close to the required background knowledge needed to properly determine how exactly the chunk of tissue was handling input and output.
she did not have anywhere close to the required background knowledge needed to properly determine how exactly the chunk of tissue was handling input and output.
Question about how the following works in a class
Bonuses: X% chance to increase <STAT>
Does that mean every level X% chance to increase said stat with chances over 100% meaning a guaranteed increase for each 100% plus another roll of the dice for the remainder?
Fixed, thanks!
And yes, that is how it works. So, 150% chance to increase would mean a guaranteed point in the stat with a 50% chance of another.
Might want to add something along the lines of percentage not used on level up are retained for the next level.
This to prevent those people with really bad luck from never gaining a bonus point.
@SneezyOfTie In this case I think it's going to stay as is. With this type of system, luck is always going to be an element, but it should be mitigated by the ability to reset Classes. So, for now I guess that's intentional?
Another good chapter. Man this novel is always fun to read, thanks!