Soul Bound

1        Soul Bound
1.3      Making a Splash
1.3.4    An Adroit Pursuit
1.3.4.3  Cubism

Twenty minutes later Kafana and Wellington stopped maintaining the spell as Alderney and Bungo finished gathering the timbers that she'd made glow and set them down in a pile in front of Aslög.

Aslög: "Thank Krev! By myself, I would not have found half of these."

*ding* [Your reputation with the Scandi has increased by 1000.]

She looked relieved, then worried as her eyes focused on the wheat sheath symbol on Kafana's robes reminding her that she was speaking to a priestess of Cov. Kafana smiled reassuringly, and moved the pendant about her neck so it hung on top where the gem marking her as a guardian of all eight prime deities would be clearly visible.

Kafana: "Praise Krev indeed, for his courage will strengthen your arm, as Mor's justice will fuel your endurance and Rac's wisdom will guide your strike."

Aslög's eyes widened, and she spoke earnestly: "Suor Kafana, thank you! Aid unearned, unexpected and unasked for - a blessing valued all the more for reminding me of my people and my home. Come, let me at least offer you and yours the hospitality of my æs."

[Quest "Foreign Favours" available for faction "House Sincero" - create favourable impressions at the Embassy Ball. Reward variable. Do you wish to accept Aslög's invitation?]

Bulgaria returned, eyes twinkling, and answered on their behalf: "We would be honoured. And, here, a small token of our esteem to mark the occasion."

He handed over a list of dates and purchasers that he'd hastily copied from the warehouse ledgers with his ring's magical aid. Aslög leafed through them, then excitedly showed them to Rinfindiel before drawing upon her skaldic training to gather herself.

Aslög: "To me, this token is far from small. It is my heritage. I have been passed the tagelharpa, the great harp, of my father; our tradition is that I must add to it before passing it on, as did each previous generation. The speaker of spirits says it is the will of she who was my great-grandmother that her timber live on as timbre - that it become part of the Great Song, part of an instrument worthy of bearing it."

Bulgaria: "You honour the followers of Rac?"

Aslög: "It is said that all have worth to those with the eyes to see it. I had thought to take the recovered relics to the tree-wed, that its heart become one with the heart of my harp. But it is also said that dead eyes may see what living eyes do not. I had not though to find a bard who sings the same song in these lands, yet it is clear to me now that the speaker of spirits saw more than I."

Bungo opened his mouth, looking utterly lost, but before he could say more than "Eh?" a dewy-eyed Rinfindiel elbowed him in the ribs. Hard.

Aslög placed Kafana's hands around the baton of sacred wood that she'd used as a focus when casting the finding magic.

Aslög: "A song is not diminished by being shared - it is enriched. This token of our meeting is now yours. Maybe it always has been. In your hands, may it speak to others who are, like myself, slow to hear and understand."

Aslög released Kafana's hand, the gifting complete, and spoke more briskly: "And now we should part. I to follow these leads, and you to prepare - the ball at the Scandic Embassy is less than ten hours away, and the road leading there is beset by ruffians, they say. Fare you well!"

By her side, Rinfindiel placed one hand over her heart and lightly tapped it twice before gracefully stretching the arm out towards them, palm upwards: "Navaer!"

As the pair walked off, Bungo sent a reminder on the group's private chat channel.

Bungo: {That went well I think. Don't forget to check your skill updates, if you haven't already. Our vessels have been busy.}

Wellington: {Seven.}

Bulgaria: {Five here. But that's not my vessel's fault - he's been doing a great job.}

Vessel Tomsk: {That's appreciated. I got nine for Spirit Tomsk, so far. Why did you get so few? I know Vessel Bulgaria got through two pots of ink, writing rumours to be spread by the Lovari, the Basso Defence League and all the 'nobles' of the Royal Court of Hermits, Mendicants and licensed Panhandlers.}

Bulgaria: {The skills I was using were already maxed out. I haven't found a 'secret agent' trainer I like.}

Alderney: {Any that were easy for you to find and identify, wouldn't be much good. Thirteen for me; but that includes some from working alongside the Raggedy Man that I hadn't been mentioning. Kafana, how about you?}

She had sixteen but, if she admitted that, she knew she'd end up explaining that some of them were trivial and so shouldn't be counted. Which would inevitably result in being horribly teased over having a "Tickle debuff" skill. No thanks!

Kafana: {Still counting. Say, what's going to happen when Soul Bound runs out of memory? Is it like this warehouse? Will they stick an "Out to lunch" sign on the door knob until they've enough empty space to handle additional customers?}

Alderney nearly tripped, despite all the points she had put into DEX.

Alderney: "Kafana! You see the cute rat nibbling on the ledger Bulgaria left open? Even it winced and is looking down its long twitchy nose at you."

Bungo was kinder: "They don't keep the whole game in memory on your tiara. But yes, you could compare the shelf space in a warehouse to the data storage capacity of the game's servers, and the number of clerks to the rate at which your tiara can access that data over the network. But even if Soul Bound had a billion NPCs and players, I don't think that 'remembering' levels in a few dozen skills for each of them would be a problem - that sort of information is easy to convert into short strings of 1s and 0s. Much shorter than images of every moving muscle on every rat, pony and person that you've seen over the last hour."

He then quickly added: {Talking of which, there must be a clerk or someone shape-shifted into pony form, hiding behind the shelves - System just gave me a penalty for mentioning out-of-game concepts in front of NPCs. Stick to group chat.}

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Wellington: {Vision is still limited by bandwidth. The real problem isn't the resolution of information sent to the senses of your character each second. It's the resolution at which the servers simulate the world in order to make decisions about what happens when your character performs an action.}

Bungo: {Oh Gods, yes. Imagine if, in order to decide whether you healed a cut on Alderney's nose, the game stored a separate record for each of the billion cells making up its skin, bone and muscles? Or, worse, the billion codons in each of those cells?}

Wellington: {That would be ten to the power of thirty-one codons. At 50% compression, that would still take 10,000,000,000 times more storage than existed on all the computers in the world back in 2025. Even if we could do it, we wouldn't want to. You don't double the cost of your game just to cater to a thousandth of your player base.}

Bulgaria led the way back towards Cov's Arch, occasionally staggering to remain upright under the apparent weight of the unwieldy bundle slung across his shoulders. Mask-wearing crowds, made nervous by his random weaving, left clear a wide straight passage for the group to stroll down, like courtiers before a king.

Bulgaria: {So they cheat?}

Alderney: {Developers prefer the word "approximate".}

Bulgaria: {But you agree this world is less complex than our own? Less complex than players assume it is? Less complex than the developers pretend?}

Alderney: {Sure. Why wouldn't a game developer use a 2D image of things so far away that players couldn't tell the difference between that an a fully 3D rendered model, except that it makes the graphics smoother? A developer who does it so well that it actually helps players to suspend their disbelief, is admired for their cunning.}

Vessel Tomsk: {Fire doesn't apologise for being fire. Deities don't feel embarrassed by their own actions, even ones that mortals would see as cheating. Zer would take positive delight in it.}

Bungo looked thoughtful: {What if they're not?}

Alderney: {Not cunning?}

Bungo: {Not pretending. What if there's an in-game reason why objects in the far distance not only appear to be two dimensional, but actually become two dimensional, complete with a popping sound of air being rapidly displaced when a player approaches the object and it turned back from being a two dimensional picture of a tree into an actual three dimensional tree?}

Kafana: {That feels intuitive right to me. I felt Dottore doing something when he healed Pierrot that didn't match an attempt to interact with a billion strands of DNA each storing similar information, but did match Pierrot having bauplans that stored much of their information in the form of mystic links to separate heritages and Dottore attempting to control which bauplan was currently dominant in that part of Pierrot's body.}

They were now past the bottleneck of the arch and, at the junction just beyond its western end, Bulgaria had chosen to lead them south along Wall Street which had a raised pavement for pedestrians that made it easier to walk along.

Bulgaria sounded a little disappointed: {So they're not actually cheating. They just picked rules for Covob's laws of magic and physics which they could simulate easily?}

Wellington: {Suspiciously so. Suppose Flavio's Questology group knew that the machines XperiSense use to simulate their world were limited to using finite precision digital representation of data, finite data storage and finite processing power. If they knew enough about the laws of their world, it might occur to them how well suited those laws were to being efficiently simulated on such machines.}

Kafana cast a worried glance at Vessel Tomsk. Tomsk wouldn't care about such things, but how would his vessel take the news? She gave him a friendly side hug as the group made their way down Wall Street towards the bustling Low Market.

Kafana: {Tomsk, how're you doing? Are you okay being called "Tomsk" or is there a different form of being addressed by us that you'd prefer?}

Vessel Tomsk: {"Tomsk" is fine. I've discussed this with all the other vessels. On occasions that it makes a difference then, when I'm in control of our corporeal vessel, refer to this-me as "Tomsk" and other-me as "Spirit Tomsk"; when he's in control, refer to other-me as "Tomsk" and this-me as "Vessel Tomsk". But really, such occasions are rare - we're both Tomsk-the-adventurer and prefer being addressed just as "Tomsk" when doing so won't cause confusion. I think we all envy you a little, Kafana, for the hours you and Vessel Kafana spent joined as a single consciousness.}

Kafana: {So this talk about simulations hasn't left you worried that you might be a "fake Tomsk" to his "real Tomsk"?}

Vessel Tomsk: {I get to spend two days with our incomparable Columbina for every one that other-me spends with her. And even then, in my dreams I get to experience her taut body and pliant words as other-me sees and hears them, because she has made most clear her enthusiasm for us sharing such things with each other.}

Bungo: {If Kokopelli ever finds out, her "Womble Fan Fiction" forum on The Burrow is going to explode like a firework.}

Vessel Tomsk just continued with his answer to Kafana: {But as much as I treasure such glorious memories, the dream experiences I value the most are the thoughts and feelings of other-me that accompany those memories. I know his mind in a way that no others do - from the inside. We both value the same things: spreading moments of love and being a protector of the innocent. What we aim to do matters to us more than where we do it because only the choices you control can define you. The transcendent choice, of who to be, has a worth that none can steal - be they thief, mage, priest or 'software developer'.}

As she thought about his words she spotted a man wearing a peacock mask going in the opposite direction, and something about his posture and movement jogged her memory. That was Captain Leonid, of the river boat Passaro that they'd met at The Lobster Pot restaurant!

Kafana: {You're Tomsk alright. I'd recognise the poetry and self-assuredness in that voice no matter what mask, face or body conceal it. You reassure me.}

Vessel Tomsk: {If I'm wondering about anything, it's the meaning of Wellington's earlier answer. Do Seers create futures or just see their echoes as they approach? Is the hand and hour of my death fated? Is how I face that Wyrd the only choice I've been left free to make? If that is so, I may choose to fight against it all the way to the end; I won't let the knowledge that I'm making my final stand change who I am and what I stand for. But I do want to know. A life lived to the full has room for joy as well as honour.}

Wellington: {I answered "yes", because logically the rules must either allow the possibility of immutable prophecies or not allow them. But I do not currently know which is the case for Covob.}

Bungo: {What about for our world?}

Alderney looked suspiciously at the tall womble: {I smell a red herring.}

Bungo: {That's just because we're near the docks.}

Alderney: {No, Bungo. I mean that every time it is your turn to tell us about your skill gains, you raise a distracting question. What are you hiding?}

Bungo: {If you must know, Grandmaster Air certified me as being a Master Mage, because I persuaded Flavio to attest that my work on the "Chemistry" technique of magic use was worthy of the title. If I'd waited for a formal evaluation, we'd have missed out on getting the global reputation boost for my being the first player in the world to do that.}

Bulgaria: {Nice. But doesn't skipping formal evaluation harm your chances of being put on the fast track to High Master?}

Bungo shrugged: {Yeah, but I don't see myself going down that route anyway, so to me it was worth the cost. I've enough on my plate with becoming the best decoy tank and cultivation guru that I can. There's no single 'right way' to play Soul Bound.}

Bulgaria: {So what's 'right' is relative?}

From a gap in the old city wall ahead they could hear competing cartographers hawking the wares in their shops.

Wellington: {More like an optical illusion changing when seen from a different perspective. Both "faces" and "vase" can be correct answers, but "banana riding a bicycle" is always incorrect.}

Alderney perked up: {Do you want one? My vessel learned how to make magic Carnivale masks that knock the socks off any on sale at the stalls near Sweet Delights. You'd look great in yellow, Wellington.}

What was up with Alderney this morning? Even Wellington looked flummoxed. Had she stayed awake all night, playing with her dolphins?

As tactfully as possible, Kafana offered their manic pixie crafter a suggestion: {I think Wellington would consider a mathematical mask to be more reasonable.}

Alderney pouted: {Mathematics? You want something really unreasonable? Look at how powerful numbers are. Everything from moving planets to flocking birds can be described with them, and usually in just a few lines of silly Greek symbols. You think it's a coincidence that phi is scrawled over more architecture than even Kilroy managed to visit?}

Wellington's face showed his relief as the conversation returned to topics that were, for him, filled with comfortable certainties. In a relaxed tone of voice, he fired an opening salvo in their defence. His words, though, were completely unexpected.

Wellington: "Do you all remember Nimrod's choice?"