Chapter 203: Truth and Forgetfulness
They laid out the basic framework first, with the outline Danika had given, and then they began filling in the details.
Danika had wanted to let anyone call out to the gods, but Ariana and Takahashi convinced her that buying a 1 Karma token from the Twin's shrines which could be used to start the quest would be more logical and consistent with the game. Anyone who had a token, or any party, or even a larger group of guild members, could use it to call upon the goddesses of memory, from any shore at night while the moon was visible in the sky. A path laid out by moonlight on the surface of the water would appear, and they could walk out onto it.
It was the most open and easily accessible hook for a repeatable quest yet designed. The moon's path would then carry the questing person or group to the river of forgetfulness. There, the quest would change according to who was doing it. A character like ZipZing might fly all the way, but a human might pay for the services of a ferryman. A large group might have to come up with other methods of following the river, and the length and hazards of the journey would vary from person to person, or group to group.
The river ran between banks of sand from the Sandman's dreams, and the hazards they faced would be shaped from those sands. The quest grew more detailed as they worked. The framework created for this aspect of the goddesses limited them to their bird forms at first.
They all stayed late, but eventually Ariana logged out to go sleep first. Takahashi left next, with the reminder, "There's still all day tomorrow."
Danika looked around and then nodded. She logged out and slept for a few hours, but she was the first one back in the morning.
--
There had been several texts from Aishin that she'd missed, and she hoped that he wasn't upset, but she'd replied: "I'm sorry I missed your messages, working on building a new quest. If you message ZipZing through the game my assistant can forward them."
Danika worked on defining the scope of the memory scenes that a statue might be embedded with, and the extent to which "memories" or the game's records of important moments could be removed, until it was time for the morning meeting. The meeting was noisy but didn't go over it's scheduled time, because everyone was eager to get back to exploring the changes that the system update had made. So far the problems found had been small and easily modifiable.
By afternoon Danika's group was stuck. The Twins were giving them trouble. They would follow the outline, but they both gave the impression that human memories, whether kept or tossed were meaningless. Visually the quest was working well, but emotionally it was… uncomfortable. Danika was so focused on the problem that when her assistant told her again that ZipZing had received another message, she just told it, "I'll ask for them later."
After several attempts at rebuilding the interactions, they stopped and took a break to talk it over and decide if it was time to call for help.
"Do you think it's because these two are separated from the Empire?" Danika asked.
"How would that affect this?" Ariana questioned in return.
"I don't know, but don't they seem kind of apathetic about everything?" Danika asked. "It seems like they wouldn't get angry enough to destroy a mountain even if you killed an army in front of them right now."
"Maybe the update modified the gods more than we expected," Takahashi suggested.
Danika turned and asked her assistant, "Are the twins here still copies of the Twins in the Empire?"
"I don't understand," the celestial servant admitted promptly.
"You can't ask it to analyze something that complex," Ariana pointed out.
"Oh," Danika replied. After a moment she summoned the traveling merchant and asked him. He went into his frozen thinking mode, while Ariana and Takahashi stared at her with startled faces.
"Um," Takahashi said doubtfully, "the merchant does have the most ability to understand queries of any of the game's AI's but what even made you think of asking him?"
"He knows everything," Danika replied simply.
Ariana laughed until the merchant answered, "No, they were once copies, but I think they have been restricted and altered too much to be considered copies anymore."
After they got over their surprise, Ariana and Takahashi helped her submit the request to dismiss the goddesses from the expansion area and create new copies. It took quite awhile, but eventually they realized that they'd all been making the same mistakes in the quest design as they had with the goddesses reaction frameworks. The new frameworks could hold specific requirements like the traditional ferryman being an option for traveling the river, but it sometimes worked better to just say that the character would find a way to follow the river.
The current goddesses themselves were actually a bit different than any of them had assumed, though not even Takahashi and Ariana who had been working with them closely in the expansion area could say how much of that was generated by the framework update, and how much had already existed. The Phoenix was firey in temper as well as ability, but she came across like a grumpy accountant when managing character revivals. Her sister, The Bird, was even stranger.
The goddess who encouraged reincarnation, had been somehow linked to the ability to unlock screenshots and video, even though nothing in the game specified which Twin was in charge of that, it was simply a function of the Twins. The new copy wasn't just apathetic about lost memories, she despised the characters who wanted to voluntarily throw away their own records.
Once they switched the goddesses roles, and let the fiery twin clinically burn unwanted memory records from the characters, and the other carve the statues from the sand and imbue them with the desired memories, the quest ran much smoother.
Danika stayed on again after Ariana and Takahashi gave up for the night, even though both of them told her that the quest was already good enough, and could be tweaked more after testing. But she'd sort of clarified an idea and wanted to go back through and edit everything to see if she was right. They didn't forbid her, so she kept on.
She simplified the framework. She carved away the extra details they'd all spent so much time adding and kept only the most striking, leaving the system to freely fill in the story between the points without all the constraints. When she finished she said regretfully, "I'm too tired to test it."
She was rather startled when her celestial dragon replied a bit primly, "Honorable celestial servant of the sixth class, Danika Belova, last among your rank, serving the Jade Emperor in the construction of the Living Jade Empire, you have only slept 6 hours in the last two days and have ignored 19 messages to ZipZing, who has just received another. I believe the latest message concerns your safety."
"What?" Danika asked blankly. "What does it say?"
"It is from Aishin and says, 'If you don't open the door, I'm going to get the building manager to open it.' The last one said, 'I'm coming over to check on you.' You have not replied to one of ZipZing's messages in over three days."
Danika said, "Reply that I'm opening the door!" She logged out and quickly disconnected herself and pulled herself over the edge of the VR-medi pod and over to the door.
Shinichi's expression was a bit grim as he looked her over, but then it softened and he stepped in and closed the door. A moment later he was kneeling beside her and hugging her tightly. "Are you ok? I'm sorry. I was getting angry at you, but you look like you're a wreck and," he added in a muffled voice, "you smell like you haven't bathed in days."
She shoved him away enough so that she could look up into his face with an embarrassed but puzzled expression. He looked back at her worriedly. She remembered that her assistant said that she'd ignored 19 messages. He'd never ignored her messages. Sometimes he didn't answer right away, but he always answered as soon as possible.
She dropped her eyes from his face and bowed her head. "I'm so sorry," she confessed unhappily. "I haven't even read all your messages yet. I only listened to the last one because my assistant dragon told me that it concerned my safety."
He didn't reply right away, but his grip on her tightened. She was afraid he was angry. She was afraid to look. He drew in a deep breath and instructed her calmly, "Danika, give me your key, take a bath, and I'll go get breakfast and come back, and then we'll talk after you've eaten."
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
gusdefrog
gusdefrog I feel like this chapter describes the writing of itself. Long complicated descriptions that were tossed and trimmed to leave only this in the end. Hopefully the balance between saying too much and too little is somewhere near here.
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