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On Monday, Bella arrives at school completely and stably human shaped, with everything she has learned about critters (except for her own species, which she isn't liable to forget) written down as margin notes on a page reminding her to ask Darren about D&D and filler decoy notes about that. She's probably going to have invent an actual cipher alphabet or something eventually but for the time being she thinks this will probably do for casual inspection.
She sits next to Darren in English.
shesepankh
shesepankh
"Maybe that'll be the division of labor. I'll catch up to you and then start learning to program while you collect information for me to eventually incorporate into the program."
shesepankh
Bella goes back to her long-term projects list and writes automate some runing subtasks? under the existing items. "How were these runes originally discovered-or-invented, or don't you know?"
castmyown
"Discovered. There's a way to find new ones and that's how I learned most of the ones I know. Thing is, you have to reference something that the potential rune has through another rune, so I don't have any idea how it got started. I'm actually pretty sure there are runes I just don't know."
castmyown
"Like..." he draws another rune. "This one's got the same aspect of persistence that the one I showed you has. It's got lots of other completely different things to it, but these two have that in common. So if I made a spell that uses the first rune and looks for something with persistence, this rune can come up."
shesepankh
"Huh." Bella copies the second rune onto a fresh page. "Okay, and what else does this one do?"
castmyown
"I was going to save this rune for later, but since we're here and you're probably curious..."
He starts explaining what it does! It's more complicated than the last one, and it has different levels of strength to its effects. Darren explains these in percentages. Persistence seems to be the only thing it has in common with the first rune, and in other things it's wildly different.
He starts explaining what it does! It's more complicated than the last one, and it has different levels of strength to its effects. Darren explains these in percentages. Persistence seems to be the only thing it has in common with the first rune, and in other things it's wildly different.
shesepankh
"Cool. So the finding new runes - I guess you find yourself looking at an insoluble puzzle and then you're like 'if only I could get X without all this Y and Z, let's see what other runes do X' and then you find something that doesn't do Y and Z but maybe it does P and Q and with any luck they're easier to cancel?"
castmyown
"Pretty much. I spent around three months just trying to find out new runes and nothing else. It got kind of dull after a while, so I went back to making spells and looking for more runes if it seemed like I needed them. I found lots of runes over the three months, though. It helped a ton, it's just mind-numbingly boring if you do nothing else but that."
shesepankh
"Yeah, that sounds like it'd get old. I'm sort of glad I'm the second one of the two of us finding out about magic, because I am selfish and terrible."
castmyown
Darren snickers. "It's fine, you're not selfish and terrible. I can't blame you, I'd want the same. I had fun figuring things out, though, so I think it's all right."
castmyown
"Where are you selfish? Not wanting to spend months doing nothing but looking for runes? That's sanity, not selfishness."
shesepankh
"I'm selfish in general. Everything is about what I want. It's just that I happen to want nice things for other people a lot of the time - the mental framing is still very self-centered."
castmyown
"... I'm not sure I understand? You want selfless things for selfish reasons? Is that what you mean?"
shesepankh
"Something like that. I want, like, world peace, in roughly the same way that I might want a sandwich. 'Selfish' is descriptive, here, not a value judgment."
castmyown
"That's... Quite different from how I think. But it's still rather nice," points out Darren.
castmyown
Darren shrugs. "That's fine? I like you as you are. I mean, I came to the same general conclusion, so it's like - different variables adding up to the same sum."
shesepankh
"The Dungeons and Dragons and the notetaking could not possibly do by itself." She turns a page. "Gimme a rune."
castmyown
"I like to be thorough."
He gives her a rune! This is like the first one in that it doesn't have the percentages of strength in separate effects - though he does give the rune itself a strength percentage.
"The percentages are kind of arbitrarily measured, because there isn't a truly 'basic' rune to measure by. I use the first one I showed you as a base since it's common and easy, and worked from there," he explains.
He gives her a rune! This is like the first one in that it doesn't have the percentages of strength in separate effects - though he does give the rune itself a strength percentage.
"The percentages are kind of arbitrarily measured, because there isn't a truly 'basic' rune to measure by. I use the first one I showed you as a base since it's common and easy, and worked from there," he explains.
shesepankh
"Makes sense." She takes diligent notes in the format she seems to be using. "I'm making a batch of flashcards when I get home. And when I have more of them down I'm making charts."