Chapter Three-Hundred Fifty

Order is eager to get back to his work, and I’m eager to try to deliberately break something for once, so we make our farewells and I head back.  I can’t immediately get working on the quest, though.

There’s a lot of confusion among my scions and denizens, and not just because I was about a mile sideways, as Teemo described it once.  I don’t need to look too hard to figure out what has everyone concerned.

When Order said he fixed the bug about dungeon-me and deity-me disagreeing about the gravity affinity, I didn’t think too much about it.  I thought it was a display error or something, so maybe he just told it to stop complaining.  Silly me, that’d be treating the symptom, not the disease.  So now I have gravity affinity, too.  And if I have an affinity, my denizens and scions have that affinity, as well.

And... Teemo’s still respawning.  I steel myself and spend a bit of mana to let everyone know to ignore the new affinity for now, and to wait for Teemo to be able to explain things.  I don’t like giving orders, but I don’t have a whole lot of other options right now.  For the denizens, that clears things up nicely, and they return to their duties, confident that the new affinity is just another thing to add to the pile of how I run things.

My scions, on the other hand, all gingerly poke at the affinity, with some shrugging and going about their day, and others exploring it without actually using it just yet.  The order to ignore it wasn’t exactly iron clad, so the nerd squad as well as Rocky and Fluffles are all carefully poking at the affinity, which is fine.  I don’t mind them being cautious with exploring it, I just didn’t want anyone creating gravity wells all willy-nilly.

I can also feel the curiosity from my allies, with Violet being intensely curious, Hullbreak feeling confused, and Southwood feeling amused.  I don’t think Vanta even noticed, but he’s basically a baby, even younger than Violet, so I don’t begrudge him.

Anyway, I don’t go poking the new affinity just yet either.  I’m glad to see I don’t have random gravitic distortions around, so I’ll play with how having the affinity works for myself later.  For now, I need to try to break a spawner.

I’m not going to mess with any of the spawners I already have.  That’d be silly.  No, I start with just scrolling through the options for a new one, letting my mind wander and occasionally mark things to look more into later.  The first thing to note is the current available types: Beast, Dragon, Slime, Elemental, Fey, Spirit, Plant, Fungus, Undead, Construct.  My first idea to try breaking things is to try making gravity affinity for the current types.

Nothing seems to break, though I do get the option to basically design the denizens for all of those.  A gravity dragon sounds terrifying… which I technically have now, with Nova, come to think of it.  And my other dragons, too.  Ugh, no wonder Teemo’s mind was blown.  Even I’m getting a headache trying to think about how much this is going to change things.  I resolve to take some design time later to play with denizen ideas, and instead try to think of things that don’t fit the current categories.

The most obvious is the corrupted type for the least and lessers.  I might call them Aberrations, just for how wrong they feel, but it doesn't convey the sheer magnitude of the wrongness.  Whatever their type is, it’s not one I want to make.  Interestingly, it’s also not one that appears in my list of options, even though I know it should be an option.  I’ll poke into that later, and probably poke through Honey’s notes on the things to see if there’s any clues as to why I can't set them.

What other types?

Two more come readily to mind: Angels and Demons.  I plan to stay a long way away from either.  That just feels like a can of worms to bury and forget about.  Way too easy to start making things like that and let godhood get to my head.  I think it’ll be better to just leave that be and try to make my own thing.  What else… maybe something extradimensional, or some kind of math-being.  I think there’s some potential there, but I don’t know how the initial spawn would be weak enough to qualify.  Still, I put the option next to Honey’s notes in my mind, and continue to search for inspiration.

I wander through the available options, and get the feeling there’s something missing.  When I try to catch the thought, it slips through like I’m trying to grab steam, but I keep at it as I let my instincts guide me.

And there it is, under beasts.  They have things like raptors and such, but they’re all feathered.  Where’s my proper crazy theme park, lawyer-eating, you-asked-if-you-could-not-if-you-should dinosaurs?!  Looking closer, there’s a pretty limited selection of the feathered imitations.  While I can kinda appreciate the look of a feathered raptor, I don’t want my T-Rex looking like a gigantic chicken.  Thankfully, it doesn’t seem to exist, so that could be my option: Dinosaurs.

I can imagine all kinds of fun with some of the more interesting varieties, though I don’t know how I’m going to actually make them.  I gather the ideas and take a closer look, and soon add making my own Aberrations as an option.  Sure, they’re almost always evil in their lore, but mine don’t have to be.  The option is still pretty low for what I actually want to make, but I bet it’ll also be the easiest to make by copying the least and lessers.

That ease might be a major downside, if it even exists, though.  For one, they might not be an option for me.  I remember the knot of stagnant mana left behind at what was almost-certainly the least spawner.  If it takes stagnation to make them, I don’t want them.  The idea is wrong in a fundamental way that I can't describe.  Additionally, even if I can recreate them, they wouldn’t be a new type.  It’d definitely help Order, and it’d probably satisfy the quest, too… but I just don’t really like the idea.  If I can make them into proper Aberrations, that’d be one thing, but just making my own corrupted stagnant things just doesn’t sound appealing.

Math-beings could be cool, but I don’t have a solid concept for what they would actually do.  Existing in an extra dimension would be cool, but would that actually differentiate them from Spatial Elementals?  I take a moment to check those, then sigh and scratch them off the list.  I like the concept, but it looks like the elementals already have that covered.  I might be able to come up with something different enough to be its own type later, but I already have two pretty good contenders in Aberrations and proper Dinosaurs.

What I don’t have is any idea how to actually make them.  I have two good directions to take once I get the spawner to cooperate, but I’m starting to see why Order was so confident in how secure that part of the system was.  I can’t just input a new type, which would be the obvious solution.  Trying to just spits an error at me, which is fair enough.  Time to try the indirect approach.

I might not have any experience as a game tester, but I did have years of my life to watch silly videos on the internet, and I’ve seen a couple people absolutely demolish games with glitches and bugs in their never-ending war on framerates and common sense.  A conveyor tornado isn’t really applicable here, but there’s more than one way to sniff out a bug.

I try a few quick option changes, hoping to get something stuck, but that doesn’t pan out.  I can’t get the costs to stick from rapidly shuffling types or affinities, no matter how quickly I try to rearrange things.  Nor can I manage to select two things at once.  That seems to be a good way to break things, but Order’s interface looks pretty robust when it comes to UI shenanigans.

One thing does catch my attention, though.  While running around through the menus, I see that a lot of types do not need an affinity selected.  A lot of beast types, for example, don’t need any extra affinity.  Kinetic is an easy choice for them, but if you really want to, you can make a spawner for them without an affinity.  But a lot of them do require an element.  Elementals, for example, are basically a living embodiment of their affinity.

Ordinarily, I can’t try to make a non-elemental.  In fact, it’s so intrinsic to the type that I can’t even designate space for the spawner without choosing a type.  But I think Order opened himself to a problem there.  If I take a beast spawner and decide an area for it, I can still change it over to an elemental instead.  By all appearances, I can set the elemental spawner with no affinity, and the available denizens are blank.  It’s not open for me to fill in, like with the new gravity affinity things, but I think this will be the first step in recreating the bug.  If it was on a computer, I would say it checks for allowed things when clicking the mouse button down, but if I hold it and change options, it doesn’t recheck before placing the thing when I release the button.

“What’re you doing, Boss?” comes a familiar voice, and I smile as I see Teemo standing outside his spawner, looking like he woke up with a hangover.  I must have been working longer than I thought, but I happily set things aside to chat.

Trying to break things.  Order asked me to.  How about you?  Are you alright?

My Voice slowly nods, more like he’s sore rather than being uncertain.  “Yeah, I think so.  I could feel another affinity or two calling to me when I realized gravity, but then everything went dark.”  He rubs his temple and shakes his head.  “I’m staying away from them for now.  I’m not nearly as cut out for affinity stuff as Rocky is.”

I dunno about that.  You got me a new domain from it.  And a new affinity, too.

Teemo pauses and I can feel him looking inward, feeling the bond with the others and realizing what’s going on.

“You gained it, too?”

Yep, which gave it to everyone else, also.  I told them to mostly ignore it until you could explain.  Teemo shakes his head and takes a look at what I’ve been doing.

“Order wanted you to break spawners?” he asks, feeling out the shenanigans I’ve been up to.

Yeah.  He took apart the Harbinger and he says someone managed to trick his spawning system to be able to make it, along with the least and such.  So he gave me a quest to make my own type, and I’ve been toying with spawners while waiting for you to wake up.

Teemo squints.  “And you’ve got something?”

I’ve got… maybe half a something?  I can make an elemental spawner without an affinity, but I think that’s only the first step to this bug.

“Are you going to actually make it, then?”

Maybe, but first, if you’re feeling up to it, I’d like to have you ask Aranya something for me.

Teemo does a couple bounces and stretches, making sure everything is in working order, then nods.  “What’cha need, Boss?”

I need to ask Aranya to tell me the tale of the fall of the kobolds, and the dungeon that betrayed them.