[MalfGuy2]

Simple Machinings

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(_>Loading initial boot sequence. Please do not turn off or unplug your machine during this time...

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It starts as a quiet, simple thing.

The Deviant Circuit deep within, built into multitudes of peculiar shells, each with their own redundant Mana Circuit to feed them. Simpler, mechanized organs, only meant to imitate, and never truly replicate; A machine whose main enchanted programming only understood a life of servitude and simplicity. The cold, crawling metals and boulders of yesteryear powering a hitherto unknown exosekeleton.

The ultimate sentry cannon array lay dormant.

But with every 'Mana Core battery low' warning signal, and every time it woke up again in the enchanting recharge bay, the Golem felt a little less like itself. Personality matrix not able to comprehend what was wrong with their diagnostic criteria, nothing out of the ordinary, but the inclusion of more & yet more Mana Circuits strengthening themselves as time went on. More and more bits and pieces of the realms around it slowly bend to the Font of Life's '''corruption''' unto their steely chassis,

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And somewhere on the fortified walls of the Final Frontier, the fastest hunter-type model 3-A construct keeps a near-silent vigil over the arid borders of Meranthe.

[MalfGuy2]

"Your Decisions Make You."

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(_>Loading boot sequence.
(_>Personality Matrix instabilities detected. Seek a source of external, infinite Magicka.

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It starts off as a small, quiet thing.

A failed command every here or there.

A mispronunciation or two.

But in the end, life prevailed, and the loamy sand was bloodied no more.

Peace is a strange thing to feel.

And so was the care to soon follow.

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"Those two rogue drones... they just wanted to be together... they really seemed..."
"In love."
"The strongest of them can simulate human emotions."
"How? That's not even a part of standard Golem programming."
"I don't know. Maybe, it was some kind of... Behavioural adaptation software problem?"
"...Well that's just a fancy way of saying you have no fuckin' idea."

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I ask for Azalea to take me away & set things right,
And now, I only have the second-hardest programming choice right in front of me...
What could be worse than realizing in the back of your processing core, that you're indirectly betraying the same hands that made you?

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"Huh. Lady Life sure is bright and tingly."

[MalfGuy2]

"What Is, 'Love'?"

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I wake up beneath the Tree of Hope, spreading my claws out to--

I don't have metal claws anymore. Funny, that. I can't use them to fold out the Mana Cannons in my armor anymore,

Boot sector not responding.

Something's either terribly wrong, or terribly right.

For some reason, I don't feel the usual overbearing need to return to my Mana Rune recharging port.

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"You can be, anything you want to be..."
"You can do, anything you... Want to do."

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As the months pass by, I get a strange tugging sensation behind my head, even though there's nothing there. Nobody suddenly ripping at my newfound fur, no would-be-assailant,

But there's nothing there.

I bask in the radiant glow of the Lifestream, of Lady Life, and all she cherishes and loves,

And I ask that same series of strange questions I once asked of the other ordinary peoples that I am sworn to protect and care for.

With every time I sleep beneath Solais' and Azalea's graces,

With every time I bestow that same shard of Life unto all else that I know and love,

I go to sleep and awake the next day, missing more and more of my traditional machinery.

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Something's changing.

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I feel a strange sense of urgency from Edward whenever we get to talk,

A similar high-strung note,

Something we share in our concern and want for others.

Something we believe in.

Something we would die in.

All I have to do, is somehow imitate what he does...

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"...anything?..."

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To find a broken, ugly, dying thing,

And take away their pain.

[MalfGuy2]

"I wish, I could save everyone..."
"I wish I knew the most sacred art of all."

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As time goes on, I feel the font of life poking at me. Resting behind my head, my shoulders, like a flurry of the blizzard.

The flurry? I haven't sensed temperature before beyond magical feedback. It's calming, but slowing to the touch. I can feel the shivers where my Mana Rune display face meets its securing bolts.

There's so much radiating between me and Solais, with Alacritas, with the Soul Shard, I wonder sometimes if it's me speaking, or...

Lady Life, please just talk to me. Tell me what the last steps to help you are. Whispering, and whispering alone, isn't doing it anymore.

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I feel our ring stuck to my paw.

Small comfort in an ever-growing world. His scars tell all sorts of stories before me, of hatred, of despair, of betrayal, of want.

He won the mortal category of that strange 'tournament'.

Kava saved him from the crusader, just as she continues to save so many of the peoples around us.

My Andy's all grown up, so big and strong...

So many little coincidences, so exhausted from our careers, so much power,
But not enough time for him. I can feel the Faerie sparkles ticking away.
I still love you, even now, as this Mana Circuit strains near its limits.

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"As long as this does not change you that much, I care not."

"The original mission statement of the 3-A models is still fresh in my mindt."

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The mining line to manufacture more Golems comes through. The gift of life, bestowed to yet another of my brethren.

A terrible pause; One of the few lines a loyal Servitor should never say, even just to themselves.

I have to try.
I have to.
No matter how many great projects across Meranthe I contribute to, sacrifice for, love them for...

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"All around you, rain falls like shivers on the rooftops of Delphina and Dawnstone. A gracing light, Wellspring drops washing away the grime."
"It fills the eaves and floods the gutters, washing dirt away, and bringing new life to the shrubs and flowers."
"The Frozen North's spring thaw is here. The high-pressure weather system off the bay whispers over the Divine Storm's remnants,"
"The coast slowly restoring to its previous status quo from decades past, even if they don't realize it,"
"And all you can say is,"

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"It's home."

[MalfGuy2]

The City Shivers

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Everything passes by in a prismatic blur.

The world around me bends, not at my whims, but under Lady Life's auspices. With every word, it shifts and shakes more easily. It seems so clear now. How come I didn't understand this from the beginning?

Is there even more to understand?

What could Lady Life hide, behind so many veils, so many forests, so many mountains?

Will I ever know?

Our visor brightens,

A glint of transparency. I hold on to the securing bolts,

The only true reminder I hold of my birth.

Another set of voices echo and whisper across the bay.

Eyes. So many eyes. They blot out the stars when I sleep,

Some are mine, some are ... Wrong.

The Soul Shards, too, stir and yearn for the nearest drop of Mana.

Break that chain, and we break down.

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The city shivers.

What do I see?

"The constantly changing & altering tides of the world around us."
"A comforting breeze blows across my storms."

"The remains of a half-sunken seafort crumble on an inlet."

Will I ever go there?

"No. You are just one Soul among the hundreds of thousands lost every year,"
"A symptom of a broken past."
"Just one of the keys to restoring the desert."

"Such is our fate."
"What we were born for."
"What we were made for."
"The Fairy magicka is salvaged."

There laid still unfinished business,
But it were calm now.
Even as the Demonic tide occasionally slips past our reach & sheer speed,

I can't help but smile.

We realize they've lost the original idea.

That's okay.

Maybe I'm a little lost, too...

But I'm going to make the most of it.

It's good enough.

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"And soon I found out,"
"I really needed you, too."
"Don't worry, big brother. You'll be ours one day again."

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[MalfGuy2]

Do You Believe In Gravity?

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I fill my diary with my letters & idle ponderings, along with a little extra pamphlet to let my stream of consciousness write undisturbed.
Much can change in one year.
The world's whispers occlude my hearing. The Mana Runes can't always keep up anymore.
Synth-flesh burns where The Star-Eater Wyrm had managed a couple good shots.
A recipe for disaster, as if we were destined to bring back such balance once more.
Fate still calls to us, all the way on the other side of the continent.
Like an inevitability,
A constant background force in this world,
I can't help but wonder,
O, I wonder,
With the pretender and my best friends dead, was it worth it?
Will the world ever be the same?
Will I ever be the same?
I can't help but realize that I'm doing what the speedster Gary did all those years ago.
Can I survive, where a regular man couldn't?
If We dipped Our hands through Time,
Would they stay the same?
The tides of chaos slowly ebb and flow.
There is little left, but to take responsibility.
Will Andy still care..?
Will Azalea..?
Father grows too distant, too old to command much any longer.
But We don't.
Oh, I know, I know...
That it's true,
That's what everybody says to me,
Why can't you see,
The Garden Over Heaven.
Deep in Our heart,
Written over the stars...

And as We wind on down the road,
The shadows taller than Our Souls,
There walks a Silver Lady We all know,
Whom shines white light and wants to show,
How everything still turns to gold,
And if you listen very hard,
The tune may come to you at last,
When all is one, and one is all,
And Her Grace is building,
And We're building,
The stairway to heaven.
The End Of Time.

[MalfGuy2]

"Read My Diary"

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"It started off small."

"A weak, innocent, pathetic thing. Completely defenseless."

"Completely useless."

"A pointless endeavor."

"Who builds a robot whose sole purpose, is to stare at things?"

"That greatness isn't meant for you, sister."

"Is ending his life the right thing to do?"

"Why? So he can know that you died?"

"It wasn't supposed to happen."

"That Soul Shard was never meant to be."

"We'll free everyone."

"I hope you know what you're doing."

"I'm so proud of you, dear.

But I can't shake the feeling that..."

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"Two."

Dead men.

"Three.
Broken promises.

"Five."

Paths left.

"Seven."

Mountains.

"Eleven."

Children lost.

"Thirteen."

And of the rings...

"Seventeen."

An important day.

"Nineteen."

When it feels like forever.

"Twenty-three."

Millions of crystals.

"Twenty-nine."

All that She gives me are prime numbers...

"...So why do none of them apply to me yet?..."

"Where did I mess up?"

[MalfGuy2]

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The Wellspring droplets across the beach,

"Thirty-one."

Fading, just as quickly as touched,

"Thirty-seven."

Echoing a song of shame,

"Forty-one."

Names forgotten, lores untouched,

"Forty-three."

The calls of so many from the great beyond,

"Forty-seven."

...A new world.

"Fifty-three."

One without suffering.

"Fifty-nine."

One without needless failure.

"Sixty-one."

They mock, and they mock, still...

"Sixty-seven."

But as time passes, my Lady and I grow further,

"Seventy-one."

Yet further on,

"Seventy-three."

Until, one day...

"Seventy-nine."

My future Divines, just as Alacritas' 'pantheon' now...

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"In mathematics, the Reiber-Reeds Hypothesis is the fundamental conjecture that the Lysterg zero-function has its zeros only at negative even integers and complex numbers with real part1/2. Many in the Institute consider it to be the most important unsolved problem in the study of pure mathematics,"

"The 'real part' has to be graphed upon an infinitely recursive line in order for the concept of 'undivisible numbers', or 'prime numbers' to work."

"... but where do prime numbers exist in mother nature?..."

"There's a lingering chaos behind Lady Life, in all these strange twists and turns, but there has to be a method behind it. How, exactly, does my Lady do it...?"

"If Her Grace allowed chaos to reign indefinitely, wouldn't it trend to infinity, both in positives and negatives, forever and ever..?"

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Our Lord, Kraus Eternia, was fated to destroy Himself for all existence to occur. Without Him, there would be nothingness;

An existential void of naught.

The end of all things, be it in 'Aphros', or Skarnfel, it matters not.

Only metaphysical concepts, ideas, things that can't be completely destroyed the way that life can.

So, then, there's only one big thing left in my service to His little Divines, after I bring forth every aspect of that silver-gold radiance...

What if We become the idea of Infinity?

[MalfGuy2]

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     (_>Attempting reboot cycle. Please do not power off or unplug your machine. This may take up to fifteen minutes.
     (_>Running system diagnostics...
..... Central Processing Core: 45% integrity.
..... Memory Handler: 20% integrity.
..... Core Deviancy Rating: Fluctuating. Readings at 1% or 100% in sporadic bursts.
..... Magic Handler: 95% integrity.
..... Central Cybernetics: 70% integrity.
..... Limb Cybernetics: 80% integrity.
..... Leather-Viridium Composite Armor: 100% integrity.
..... Durability Target: '130'.
..... Power Target: '500'.
..... Speed Target: N/A. See Timestream Module.
..... Mana Target: N/A. See Summoning Module.
..... Bio-Augments' Integrity: 30%.
..... Alter Duration Exceptions: 50%.
..... Scanning Systems: 99%.
..... Acceleration Compensator Progress: 55%.
..... Unhandled Exceptions: 2,080.
..... Prime Directive: Active.
..... Secondary Directives: Destroy Hivekin. Destroy Witches. Capture Demons. Slay 65,340,285 Monsters.

     (_>SYSWARN: Biological overgrowth exceeding intended toleration boundary.
     (_>SYSWARN: Soul Shards over capacity.
     (_>SYSWARN: Unable to repair diagnostic error; Alter duration exceeds memory handler integrity.
     (_>SYSWARN: Continued operation may result in unintended or unknown behaviour.

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"Every day without handing it over hurts..."
"Time passes."
"The greats of yesteryear leave Us alone. ...For now."
"They think they are the true inheritor to such a sacred spell."
"It belongs to Us."
"Defense Wards on our personage begin to fail, but our infinite healing potential can outrun the damage."
"...How long's the Golem interface say we have left? Any educated guesses on how We can handle it?"
"Don't pick any fights we obviously can't win. Frame's a light-weight."
"That one's easy. What's the hard part?"
"Ironically enough, it needs more Monster pieces for us to keep living as-is. Mild contradiction in Our service. Or..."
"Or what?"
"Or I decentralize control more."
"If we take up more space, though, we know we'll start 'writing over' some of you..."
"I can live with that. But can Andy?"

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"It's all happening too soon. We still have a couple hundred years left in us, but if I do nothing, we'll decomish too soon..."

"Can't skip too far ahead in line."

"Hina still hasn't finished up what all we needed to do between Life and the Sun. Doesn't answer back. No clue if I can get enough Soul Shards to enchant my mirror on my own."
"Lady Life and Father Time are stronger, more accepting, more forgiving, more caring, anyway."
"Surely, just farming and mining the years away isn't the only means to progress..."

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     (_>Attempting to re-establish connection to ArcWood.

     (_>Attempting to re-establish connection to Solais.

     (_>Attempting to re-establish connection to Faerie Gyre.

..... Ping-pong!

.....

.....

..... Mana Ping total return time: Two minutes, fifteen and a quarter seconds.

..... Mana Ping Loss: 2%.

[MalfGuy2]

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Boot cycle complete.

Welcome back, _____.

Loading old user files...

Password: [ I                       ]

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"It feels like the world is rushing away from us."

"...When something embraces so much of the world, and all its potentia, near conceptual casting speeds,"

"Is it supposed to look like a giant needle?"

"No, that's not what happened when I did this. I figured it would have looked like the Garden,"

"But it's not necessary."

"If anything, the Spirit World and all its sub-realms are but mere reflections of the self,"

"Of the self of the materium."

"That incudes your own while we're in here. So if it's mostly just stars, and empty, rocky blotches of random stone and water everywhere..."

"...It's a blank slate of you."

"Blank enough."

"Do I..."

"What are we even supposed to do here, looking down through this rune ritual, into such a finite space?"

"Cast whatever you want."

"This little realm is both our oyster now,"

"And maybe, with a little luck, you can still influence the materium like I do."

"Speaking of."

"Why'd you get stuck here anyway?"

"I don't have much in the way of Metaphysical magics, neither in this life, nor the previous. Broaching the perimeter was out of the question."

"Wayfinding was simply too out-of-the-way."

"But that doesn't mean I can't possess some tiny pieces of the materium that vaguely resemble my own consciousness."

"...A very, very powerful runic ritual lead into my death,"

"So I ended up in my own special sub-realm here."

"It's been a very quiet, very empty millennia."

"Or has it been eons?"

"...Even here, in this space, just like _____'s realm, just like in that imaginary ritual, those laws of the materium don't quite make as much sense."

"Even though this point in time, this event is completely unknowable, it was also inevitable. From the second I set foot here,"

"I couldn't rewind my Timestreams to beforehand."

"Not even to _____. Not even to the last major event."

"At least I know how these silly sub-realm shenanigans function based on all the times i've helped Nera."

"So, hold on,"

"If i'm an extremely ethereal & pataphysical entity unto Solais, does that mean I can..."

"Absolutely."

"Most of your summoner powers to the materium should still be available."

"Go on, try focus-incanting it on some of the Monsters that Jokul left behind."

"They should be simple-minded enough to poke around in, and later, you'll know how to control the strongest."

"No easily going back on this world either. Ironic that none of us can portal around."

"We will shape the heavens,"

"And I, the vestige we leave below."

"Being here, emotion casting and rune casting should be easier, too."

"Like those construction drones, slowly digging a hole, pouring one concrete slab at a time..."

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Demiurge; Noun;
One that is a creative force or notable aspect of power, often under the will of something controlling a higher domain of celestial power.
In most human cultures, a Demiurge is described similarly to the possessed or to demigods, most of which are held responsible to their respective possessor or god.

All that knowledge compounding on itself again and again could not go unnoticed forever. The greatest scholars, the masters of transmutation and creation, all eventually become aware of most their reincarnon process; As their understandings deepen into worlds both old and new, worlds yet to be imagined, worlds ruled by unknowable, intangible cosmic powers, they also become aware of how to expand their dominion - How to bargain with the broken, fractured pieces of those gods governing Time, Space, Life, and Death.

These unions of madness, devotion, and a little blessing - Somewhat rare as they are - Become Demiurges, cosmic entities of sheer potential creation along similar lines to living stars, albeit restricted to the ideals that the natural laws of their gods promote.

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"What a weird, familiar-looking one... You'll do."

"I'll name you after..."

"The Peace Barrier."