૮꒰˵• ﻌ •˵꒱ა ewe can do it~

[noarchitact]

WHO: You, you, & you.
WHERE: the Pasture!
WHEN: Day 91

[ 🐑 baaa. ]

Comments

[audacity]

Right, scary smart. Almost forgot again.

[hardpity]

[ wiggles fingers in a presumably spooky manner ]

OOooOOOooooo...

[audacity]

[ yeah, that's a laugh ]

Speaking of smart, how's that satellite coming along?

[hardpity]

Construction is complete! I've got a few final tests to do before launch though.

[audacity]

Yeah? Like what?

[hardpity]

Mostly endurance tests to make sure it doesn't break up and fall down as a cloud of flaming shrapnel.

[audacity]

Oh right, the tests to make sure it doesn't kill us all.

[hardpity]

It should be fine, but the last time I didn't do proper safety precautions on a build my mom hid all my game consoles as punishment so I'm not taking any chances.

[audacity]

Of course it'll be fine. You made it.

But yeah, it doesn't hurt to check. Video game groundings or not.

[hardpity]

Right? hat's my attitude! A real engineer doesn't let his pride get in the way of others' safety though! Says my mom.

[audacity]

Your mom sounds like a pretty smart lady, herself.

[hardpity]

She's WAY too smart. And has WAY too much enthusiasm. She's our current chief engineer and sometimes when she gets really excited for a project she'll go until the whole rest of the engineering department is facedown on the floor with exhaustion.

[audacity]

Sounds familiar.

What about your dad? Is he an engineer too?

[hardpity]

He's pretty smart, but he's not on the same level with me or my mom... he's a hard worker though. A real details guy. And really dedicated to the job. Like, sometimes he'll end up camping out under his desk during an emergency because there's no time to go to bed...

[audacity]

Geez. What kind of emergencies are we talking about?

[hardpity]

Technically the situation back home is a developing emergency, but we've got a plan for it... well, the more common one is when a pretty big or powerful Phantom manifests.

[audacity]

Are Phantoms related to the blot thing, or something different?

[hardpity]

Phantoms are the end result of an Overblot incident. That is, uh... so basically, when a strong enough mage builds up enough Blot without taking a rest, it sort of starts to build up independent momentum. At the tipping point, it physically manifests as a big monster while the mage goes into a superpowered berserker state. If nobody subdues the mage after that happens, they die, and only the monster is left. It's guided entirely by instinct and emotion, which means they're pretty much exclusively massively aggro.

[audacity]

That sounds horrible.

[ takes a minute to remind himself that aides is immUNE. phew. ]

[hardpity]

When we get a bead on one in the wild, we send a retrieval squad to pick them up, put them in deep freeze, and store them back home at the Isle of Woe, in, um. Our. ... Big jail.

[ MAKES A HAND GESTURE it feels weird to say "we lock them up in tartarus" even if he doesn't actually know ceph's personal traumarus about it. ]

[audacity]

[ NICE DODGE,,, ]

So there's no way to help them go back to normal? The monster's just...the monster?

[hardpity]

There's a window of time where you can subdue the mage and get rid of the monster. After that the mage can recover naturally. But once the Phantom's used the mage up, that's game over.

[audacity]

Geez. And that's different from the other emergency you have back home? The developing one.

[hardpity]

Technically, that's ALSO an overblot incident. The big difference is that Malleus Draconia, who's currently overblotting, is a high-level fae prince, and can pull magical energy from the natural world indefinitely, so while he's not at risk of death, he IS at risk of putting the whole world to sleep forever. Well, we're working on that though. He'll pay the PRICE for the crimes he's committed to me.

[audacity]

[ instant kill bill sirens ]

What did he do to you?