A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

Alice and Demor spent the next several days trying to find ways to get an enchantment or Artifact to work the way Alice now envisioned it working. Of course, that opened up more questions from Demor. Alice was hiding things about the System, and he knew it, and some of those secrets were actually needed by him.

Alice decided to take a breather a few times, and asked Ethan what he thought about exposing a few of the System’s secrets to Demor. Ethan was hesitant to give Alice full approval, which told her a bit about how Ethan himself viewed Demor’s trustworthiness - however, he did, grudgingly, approve some more information leakage.

“So, what you’re telling me is that we need to reduce the impact of people’s beliefs on their surroundings?” asked Demor.

Alice nodded. “Reality mana shapes how much people’s beliefs can shift things. Imagine reality as a… a giant soup, I suppose. Normally, that soup has a specific texture and flavor. However, people’s beliefs can influence the ‘taste’ of this soup, altering it considerably. This is very dangerous, because the underlying laws of physics work out in a very specific, very helpful way that keeps humanity from just snapping out of existence and dying on the spot. Tinkering with it too much is liable to cause a mass extinction event… like the one we are potentially in the midst of right now.”

Demor shuddered. “I… see,” he said. “How exactly do human beliefs and reality interact with each other to make this happen?”

Alice used {Shared Memory} to run him through a list of interactions she had already witnessed - manaborn monsters, altered terrain, and some of the Society experiments she had read about. By the end of it, Demor looked concerned, which relieved Alice a bit. Given the man’s personality, it wouldn’t have surprised her if he had been more gung-ho about it… which might have made matters worse. Seeing him feel appropriately worried by the unstable laws of reality was a relief, although Alice couldn’t know for sure if the man’s attitude would later change.

Something to think about later. At least for now, with Demor now properly understanding the nature of the Artifact, the two got back to work.

Through the use of Alice’s {Experimental Mana} Perk, along with copious use of {Safety Analysis} and a variety of other Perks, Alice tried creating a variety of new types of mana for her new needs. She hoped to create a way to command and control the Artifact, even without a bunch of humans sitting around and telling the present reality-mana cloud what ‘reality’ was supposed to look like, since that was prone to a whole host of errors. Humans could make mistakes, or let their attention lapse, or be misinformed. That wasn’t usually very dangerous - it was normal for someone to get distracted while doing something.

However, when playing with the fundamental laws of reality, someone getting bored and thinking about the next book they planned to read, or their spouse, or whatever else would have dangerous consequences. Alice didn’t even trust herself to remain perfectly focused on a task if she was trying to contain and control reality mana. Maybe an Immortal with the right build could pull it off, but realistically, they needed something that wasn’t human to manage the reality mana. That meant they needed a list that detailed how the laws of reality and the System worked, and a way to transmit that information to the reality mana, and a way to solve any distance issues that might occur. New, never before seen types of mana were invented and summarily discarded by Alice and Demor as the days passed by.

Normally, enchanting materials would have posed a limitation as well, but luckily, Demor had a combination of Perks that could resolve that issue. It might not have been very effective at acquiring Artifact materials - but it could substitute the materials for traditional Enchantments just fine. The cooldown was a bit longer than Alice would have liked, but it still provided them with the materials they needed to try new things.

After another week of experiments, they had their first breakthrough. It was Alice’s 37th attempt at creating an enchantment that could record how reality worked. She didn’t fix the core issue - but she did confirm that, at the very least, with the right enchantment she could bridge together different types of enchantments and have them communicate intelligently. She had already known from the System that communication mana could help facilitate exchange of information - but the importance of meaning mana became increasingly clear as she tried and failed different mixtures of mana and different types of enchantment. 

To resolve this issue, Demor and Alice created a series of ‘relays,’ which could constantly parse any information that other enchantments had, and then relay that information to a cloud of reality mana. It was still far from a total solution - after all, Alice had yet to figure out how to actually record information in a stable way in another enchantment. Just writing it down didn’t work, and most other types of mana had limitations on how much information they could record before the whole thing imploded.

To make sure that this communication and meaning mana was always available for Reality mana to use, Alice created a set of wires that could take her place when she wanted different enchantments and types of mana to communicate with each other.

The second problem they managed to fix was the distance limitation issue. Alice had already noticed that relaying instructions to a cloud of reality mana had a distance limitation. If it was too far away from the ‘source’ of instructions, the whole thing just didn’t work. Reality mana would simply sit there, inert and useless.

To fix this problem, Demor actually didn’t need Alice’s help. Instead, he had Ethan help out, thus sparing Alice some of her mana regeneration for use in other experiments. The two of them created a type of dimensional ‘relay’ that let tiny thumb-sized bits of metal pass information to each other via teleportation. The exact mechanics of how this worked were beyond Alice’s knowledge, but as far as she could tell, the two had made each enchantment open incredibly tiny portals at regular intervals, then toss along a small packet of communication and meaning mana - and had somehow timed it to make sure that it was just fast enough to keep the Reality mana doing what it was supposed to do, with the minimum mana cost. It was brilliant, and Alice was glad that the two of them had managed to solve one of her problems without any help from her.

Of course, this solution did have its flaws. These thumb-sized metal boxes could somewhat sense each other’s locations, but the effects were limited. Once they were built, they couldn’t be moved around too much, or they would break. Furthermore, each box needed to be manufactured, and each box also had its own range limitation.

In short, maintaining the Artifact and allowing it to work in a desirable way now required its own host of lesser enchantments, used primarily for maintenance. Alice couldn’t say that she was entirely surprised, but it was certainly unfortunate. The less production and maintenance was required to make this whole mess work, the better off the world as a whole would be. Still, at least it was something.

It took several more days for Alice to find a good type of mana to record the laws of reality in. Since she had so many failed attempts, Alice wasn’t really expecting much when she tried out new things anymore. Her first successful attempt happened when she was thinking about her time back on Earth working with computers and robots. She thought of lines of code - how they were so incredibly precise that even a single misplaced parenthesis could break an entire project until it was fixed. Just for the heck of it, she tried creating something she called ‘coding mana,’ which recorded information and made it easily accessible for other types of mana.

Of course, ‘recording mana’ might have been a more accurate name, but Alice decided to stick with ‘coding mana.’ It reminded her of home, and that made her happy enough to keep even an inaccurate name around.

In any case, this mana didn’t have quite as much broken mana leakage as the various other types of mana Alice had tried, and still did what she needed it to do - it contained information inside of itself and made it possible to transmit that information to other bits of mana that needed that information. When combined with communication and meaning mana, Alice found the combination of enchantments and mana types effective enough at relaying information that the Reality mana was finally doing what it was supposed to. The first few tests with Jonathan indicated that, when Alice programmed her understanding of the System into the coding mana, it helped solidify and stabilize his magic seed, just like when Alice manually controlled it.

It wasn’t a perfect test, but Alice didn’t have the time for more extensive testing, sadly. She spent the next few days coding every single thing she could remember about the nature of reality, physics, and biology into the coding mana, with some assistance from Ethan and Cecilia. They stuffed all of the information into another, much larger metal box, this one nearly the size of Alice’s entire body, with some help from Demor to make sure the enchantment on the box didn’t fall apart.

After nearly two weeks of hard work, the group finally had a set of enchantments that worked together to accomplish their needs. Alice had some Perks that had finally come off of cooldown that she needed to use - and then, they needed to get the whole mess set up and see if they could get it working on a larger scale. If they could, they would have finally solved the issues caused by beliefs and mana.