erroneous messenger, sleep!

[incanted]

Brilliance is probably the first person to notice Rainbow's Janepoint broadcasting the message, "error 112358: inferior pattern recognition".

Comments

[cardistry]

[...Um, Bella,] he says, [Jane broke.]

[incanted]

[Shit, again?]

[cardistry]

[Yep. Even worse this time; the terminal just says "error 112358: inferior pattern recognition".]

[incanted]

[...Shit. Well, at least we have no strandees in either direction here. Sucks for the bunch that were just going to - I wonder if that's why, actually. Aegis was with them. Maybe Jane needs her own body or something.]

[cardistry]

[Maybe,] says Brilliance. [I wonder if she'd even want one.]

[incanted]

[We will have to inquire. The alternative is apparently dealing with periodic outages or keeping Aegis in a box.]

[cardistry]

He giggles.

[What a mental image.]

[incanted]

[Ayep. Which I'm going to guess Aegis wouldn't go for, so since Jane doesn't seem to mind not even having a body, maybe she wouldn't mind having one that lives in the Belltower and doesn't do much.]

[cardistry]

[Guess we'll ask her when she comes back. If nobody else thinks of it first.]

[alicornucopia]

Teno should really stop getting ludicrously drunk in backwater dimensions and talking about his old job.

"It can have a wielder but you don't need unique wielder status to use its functions, there were a bunch of us and it needed constant supervision," he says tiredly. If he just tells them everything, they said they'd drop him off near Cenarist, where he was planning to go next anyway.

It doesn't cross his mind to worry about the treatment of the Device that killed all his old co-workers.

[pythbox]

"But if you don't have wielder status," asks the unnamed individual sitting to his left, "how do you get access? I assume it's controlled in some way. You don't make a weapon like that and then leave it a free-for-all."

[alicornucopia]

"Right, right, you need the access codes, not to mention the incantations for the actual functions, lemme - it's been four hundred years -" He fiddles with his memory implants. "And physical access to the Device. So yeah, the password incantation is - here, I'll write it down." He scribbles down all the incantations they're going to need, then swaps back in his standard memory module; he doesn't want to live day-to-day with four hundred years distant memories that fresh.

[pythbox]

"Thanks," says the nameless person, smiling slightly. "Those will come in handy. Does it have any protection against standard dimensional locators?"

[alicornucopia]

"If by standard you mean any kind invented in the last four hundred years, no, it's completely locatable. It was state of the art then and it's still got a lot of juice, but we couldn't design anything that we didn't have the knowhow for."

[pythbox]

The smile widens.

"Perfect."

[alicornucopia]

"Yeah. That all you need?"

[pythbox]

"I do believe it was. Cenarist, right?"

[incanted]

+Hey, Brilliance, I accidentally told the Emperor of Japan's niece that I'm 'yes, sort of like a mahou shoujo', so the next time I'm there it might be politic to show up jacketed, fair warning if you were going to be doing anything distracting next Tuesday.+

[cardistry]

Brilliance doesn't answer.

[incanted]

+Brilliance?+

[cardistry]

Nothing.

[incanted]

[Brilliance?] Maybe the magephone is glitching.

[cardistry]

Still nothing.

[incanted]

And there's not a busy message, so he's not just asleep...




Port.

[cardistry]

Brilliance is lying on the floor of a room that looks like a futuristic cargo bay, half curled up with his arms over his head, screaming. There is no one else in the room.