The Earthheart - OOC

Aight, I'll do the timeskip later tonight :3

And by "tonight" I meant "tomorrow night at 2 AM." Sorry for the slow week guys x3 In the next few posts or so I'll give Mrorgain's big speech on... what you're all actually doing, and what the plot of this all actually is, laid out flat :P

I couldn't help but imagine Kyra using turn signals on the drive. Even though they're in the middle of the woods at night with no one around running from a crazy angel assassin. Safety first

Oh my god Mata. XD I was absolutely joking about the song choice, but I guess it did sort of fit. :P

:3

I love Arj. She takes nobody's crap x3

<3

The party seems to have a healthy variety of opinions, at least. Rhaokin makes a good entrance. I sympathize more with Tythirr.

I think Tythirr and Arj are probably of similar mind that this mission may not get nearly as far as Mrorgain hopes.

Well clearly it will because it's a work of fiction. :P But you can't blame them for their doubts.

I'd add that Rhao is equally unsure this is going to work out, but I felt it better to express at least one other worry about lest I repeat the rest of you.

Diverse opinions are good though, figure Glenn or Kyra might actually be able to be upbeat. :p

Glad you liked my entrance though.

Kyra will be positive later. :P right now she is sleeeeepy

We, the heroes, are destined to succeed because... fiction? Too broad. Heroic cycle, perhaps.

Indeed, I'd assumed this whole business was about averting the end of the world, like usual. But it would only be in Mrorgain's interests to announce as much to us. Perhaps we're being paid to be mindful which questions we ask.

Eight petabytes, incidentally, would be absurd to take at face value. That's approaching half a year (continuous) of uncompressed 3840x2160 video. Which is raw data, not code. (Uncompressed representations of the computational state of, say, a brain would also get into this territory.)

The longest genome (probably filled with duplications) is said to contain ~150 million base pairs. And the longest programs currently existing, no more than 50 million lines of code. Allowing a spacious kilobyte for each line, that's all of 50 gigabytes. By which point I'd claim that adding complexity tends only to decrease overall functionality.

While I'm overthinking things, 'safe for billions of years' sounds vastly overambitious. And ancient encodings would be unusable anyways if we didn't have magic translation.

But hey. Nice fireplace.

Yeah that is a real nice fireplace!

And what I meant Jazz is that because this is a work of fiction written by us, you can sort of expect the success of the heroes in the end because why bother writing the story otherwise. :P

While you're worrying about if we can read it, and how inprobably huge it is, I'm just surprised The Ancients left these in a format our modern computers can even access. Usb was an invention, not a by default. :p

Though clearly they weren't that forethinking, because a computer with five spare usb slots? Preposterous.

Hey, no, losing is fun. 'Invalidate timeline? Y/Y' screens are not. Some videogames are better than this. What do you mean, we're not talking about videogames.

Argh, well, I was saving a line about time screwiness for my IC post. Also, the improbably advanced entities responsible for this artifact hardly bear thinking about.

Ahaha. But if a USB hub fails, we could always go steal buy a computing cluster, and copy the blasted things to disk.

One of my favorite things about Video Games is that they refuse to allow the player to experience the rest of the story if they don't "git gud" but a video game this is not. :P

If there's anything I've learned from Star Trek, it's that you can interface with any technology from any era or civilization by setting it on the magic coffee table and pushing buttons.

Improbably large code and compatibility with our tech just screams that we're supposed to run it and blow past the loading screens. Maybe it's got instructions in there to build an ur-demon from base molecules, who knows. Magic code capable of telling physics to sit down and shut up probably needs to be big, and if it's worth protecting this much (and if nobody else has yet come up with an equivalent), it's got to be bonkers huge. And maybe there is quite simply that much raw data in there, we don't know.
It could contain an extravagantly designed UI, or the instructions could be in the form of high-res video of interpretive dance.

Some hilarious ideas.

*It's just a folder full of rare pepe's.
*The code is written in brainfuck. The programming language brainfuck I mean.
*It's the operating system Temple OS.

Right, so even if we fail, that's a valid ending. If we fail in a suitably tragic and/or metaphorical way, it might even be a cool one. That's... probably up to taste.

Running this code without trying to (or being able to) understand it, for instance, could not possibly blow up in our faces. It's probably obfuscated, yeah. In literally mindbreaking ways, if someone's feeling cruel. As for runtime magic, perhaps it involves many library calls and an interesting notion of 'native code', hence the big ol' table of CERN-style particle collision data.

If I may add, to tempt someone other than me to be out and out crazy and suggest it, though I will if no one else does.

We don't know what this does, only that the forces beyond the world itself want it. And we know it's just one piece of a larger puzzle. All I'm saying is, we have no idea what we stand to gain by collecting them, but if we just destroyed the one we have, it's no longer important for anyone, there's nothing to put together anymore.

Of course, that's coming from a point of view of extreme non-genre savvy-ness. If I were genre savvy, I'd of course know that it's our duty to collect all the dongles and unite them to drive back the darkness, and the darkness doesn't actually need to collect them, they just need us to not. :p

And because this is the first and probably only time I'll ever get to refer to Macguffins as "Dongles" and be even nearly correct. I will continually refer to these as dongles.

I've already gotten it in my head that these are valuable, and potentially exploitable, so. Well.

I'd be very interested in gauging Mrorgain's reaction to that suggestion, though. Didn't think to bluff. Am inclined to wait and ask my questions (like, 'can we reach all four in time?') after.

(Photo credit for the traced fireplace to Messiah220 on deviantart! And BionicleStoryTheme is owned by Bionicle. Just letting you guys know in case any pesky lawyers come asking around.)

It's up to you guys if you fail or not >:D Provided you DO try to collect the drives, and not destroy them, then there'll be some tough choices in the endgame. And for dialogue situations like this, feel free to make your posts shorter if there's not much to do but say stuff, lol :P

Harrison Ford confirmed for Vrana.

Hey now. Kyra might be wildly speculating but in her defense she's half asleep and it's true that we really don't know the consequences of destroying the drives. Especially because the plot just resolves itself and there's not point in continuing if we can just destroy them.

Oh no, admittedly true. I completely understand that.

As the party mage, Arj couldn't very well let pass without comment a view of magic as being so dangerous, we won't even hit it with a hammer.

*fails to make posts shorter, tries to make plot shorter instead*