Wouldn't you feel a bit weird about it if you got transported to a planet of blind people who thought you were a existing category of magic superhero because of your ability to perceive that things were happening even if they were across the room?

I'd probably first wonder how these people were failing on a society-wide level to compensate effectively for their blindness that I'd have such an overwhelming advantage, but after that maybe a little. Not enough to still be correcting people a decade later though.

You compensate pretty nicely for not having osanwë with the internet and so on but it's still kind of an advantage. Though I only use it on people when the PRT demands payment for my software consults, and I hate that.

Good, mindreading is sketchy as fuck.

At home everyone can keep me out. i would tell the PRT to go fuck themselves on the scanning for villains and so on but I really can't invent all the artifacts I need fast enough on my own and I can't convince them of the merits of the project because they won't believe me about how Arda's magic system works.

The other Earth we found is pretty Earthy, Arda sounds more made-up.

I really thought the language would do it but I overestimated them.

Most people are not going to get PhDs in linguistics to investigate weird claims and if they did equivalent things they'd be as likely to go quiz Myrddin or something. Have you gone and quizzed Myrddin?

I emailed him and asked if his magic system had different implications than we'd arrive at modelling him as a cape. Didn't get an answer. And you don't have to get a PhD in linguistics to know what the people who do have them said.

I wouldn't have got more than a paragraph into the abstract if the bot hadn't digested it for me tbh.

Like I said, I overestimated them.  

You haven't even read your own PHO page, I don't see why you're expecting other people to take time away from whatever they've already determined is important to read terribly written linguistics theses.

It wasn't terribly written. Its author is available for interviewing. And if the organization responsible for parahumans can't delegate anybody to check claims that some of the known-to-exist alternate dimensions have different magic systems, then I have to assume they're missing other things at least that important and I basically can't expect their priorities to overlap with mine enough to be worth my time.

"Gosh, he eats leaves, we have to assume he's missing other things at least that important..."

I was the equivalent of thirteen, and I was starving, and the only advice anyone had deigned to offer me on how to get resources in your society was a meth addict under a bridge who recommended I trade sex for it. But I'm glad everyone thinks it's hilarious.

Let me know when you have the AI thing.

Hi, I'm Lorica's bot, Rete 1.0. You can view a live feed of my progress on your project here.

He checks on it periodically in between writing better project descriptions for the other Tinker-aided artifact design efforts and making his improved necklace and converting and chunking the algorithms that are maybe usable. It hits some dead ends. It turns up some results that are subtly and complicatedly wrong. He sends an improved project description. 

Thank you! I will edit the process accordingly.

He may be as fed up with Lorica as with the rest of her pretentious our-incompetence-is-your fault organization but he likes Lorica's bot! What a good bot. He watches its progress again, figures out what was wrong with his description this time, sends a new one. 

The third time he does that it produces something clever. It won't work as it stands - won't work for the thing he'd meant that section to do at all, actually - but he sends it off to another Tinker whose specialty is in repurposing and gets it back from there and stays up for a week straight (he only needed to drink coffee once; now he can imitate the effect on his body any time) and sends Lorica's bot new, more complicated project directives -

Lorica's bot is faultlessly polite and helpful.

And eventually he has something that should make an artifact that lets the bearer make artifacts even if they don't themselves have osanwë. They do still have to be a person, so it's the easier part of the problem, but still. It's a long set of instructions; the encoding will take him sixteen months. He makes a face when it becomes apparent he can't get it any shorter, and he gets started. And he writes Lorica.

I think my artifact that lets the bearer make artifacts will only work on people. Can you do proper AI - I realize it might not be wise even if possible -

Lorica suspects she could do person-level AI but considers it unwise to do so under the auspices of the Protectorate if at all. She will graduate the Wards in 2005 or 2006.

-Rete

Did Lorica ask you to communicate with me instead or something?

I now handle Lorica's email by default and forward to her anything I can't handle or of a personal nature.

Oh, okay. I can send you a project description for an artifact that'd be more directly designed with person-level AI in mind, if we have until 2006 or so. 

 

And he gets to work on that, sends it over a few weeks later.