Chapter Text

Hours later, but not many:

The girl now resides on the top floor of the great tower that has been made of her old home (a thought which provides her no small amount of pleasure). Her newly minted acolytes surround her, but her attention is reserved for the task before her on the table. Her concentration is shattered, however by a faint beeping coming from her headset. A look of annoyance flutters across her face for an instant before she shakes her head, letting out a small sigh.

===> Seer: Answer

---------- ghostlyTrickster [GT] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] ----------

GT: hi rose!!!

TT: Hello John. How is the Land of Wind and Shade faring?

GT: oh? lowas? well ok I suppose.

GT: everything's covered in oil though.

GT: it has the salamanders pretty upset.

TT: That is starting to sound like it would be related to your quest.

TT: I imagine that you are heroically attempt to vacuum it all up and gently clean it off the wings of small birds.

GT: heh, sorta. i guess it’s more complicated than that though.

TT: I can imagine.

TT: Well, I suppose it is good that someone is trying to complete their quest.

TT: Please do let me know once you locate the source of the problem.

GT: rose, aren’t you working on your quest too?

TT: No. I have no particular interest in blindly following the game’s directions.

TT: Besides, I have more important work to do.

GT: oh? like what?

TT: Well before you interrupted me just now, I was in the process of vivisecting an ogre.

GT: what? why?

TT: Well I don’t think it likely that the ogre would tell me what it’s made of if I merely asked nicely.

GT: well no, but that’s not the point.

GT: that’s not the kind of thing that heroes do!

TT: Huh. And here I thought that all of the turtles were calling me a hero of light.

TT: Alas, I suppose that they were wrong, and I shall need to play the villain in this piece.

TT: I may need to work on my maniacal laughter.

GT: see! this is exactly what i’m talking about.

GT: you are dangerously close to going off the deep end.

TT: Calm down John. I am just having a little fun. I am not actually going to go grimdark or anything.

GT: really rose?

GT: you seem far too enamored by your new dark wizard outfit.

GT: and now you’re going around dismembering ogres?

GT: this isn’t what the good guys do rose.

TT: They’re just trappings, John.

TT: I take on these affectations because these tools are efficient.

TT: We don’t have much time to save Earth, and I intend to use every tool at my disposal.

TT: They’re not going to make me suddenly turn into someone else.

GT: just tools?

GT: what about the wands?

TT: They’re not so bad, John.

GT: they scream as you use them!

GT: you alchemized them from your books on horrorterrors.

TT: The horrorterrors aren’t actually so bad either.

TT: I had tea with them.

GT: are you serious?

GT: how does that even work?

GT: how do they even reach their mouths through all the tentacles?

TT: Oh. They live in a hyperbolic space.

TT: Their surfaces are much bigger than they should be given their size.

TT: The tentacles only appear clustered like that when interpreted by a Euclidean-adapted visual system.

TT: Crazily elusive angles, indeed.

GT: you say that i can’t even trust nana, and you’re having tea with those things?

TT: It was only polite.

TT: And I wouldn’t say that I trust them exactly.

GT: oh?

TT: Don’t get me wrong, they have been informative.

TT: But I am still trying to crosscheck their data against other sources.

TT: And they have been somewhat elusive about a few topics.

GT: well good.

TT: That is a good thing now?

GT: yes.

GT: because we’re going to figure out what they’re hiding.

GT: and it’s going to break their stupid spell over you.

GT: and you’re going to join up with all of your friends and we’re going to go win this game together.

TT: Oh, my hero!

TT: Coming to save me from this wretched mire of depraved sorcery that I have sunk into.

GT: yes! exactly.

GT: now, what didn’t they want you to know about?

TT: Well there’s one thing that’s been bothering me…

TT: The origin of sburb. Where exactly did it all come from?

GT: didn’t you say it evolved from the whole frog universe thing?

GT: or are you doubting that now too?

TT: Not exactly. The use of sburb in the reproductive structures of universes seems to be confirmed by all sides.

GT: ah ha! so we are in the universe’s, uh, reproductive organs.

TT: Sigh.

TT: Yes, John.

GT: so the universe comes from other universes. what’s the big deal?

GT: i mean, you don’t really need to ask where any other biological organism came from.

TT: Well there’s little doubt that the game evolved. But evolved from what?

TT: It’s too complicated to be totally natural.

GT: huh?

TT: Well, consider what the frogs need to do to reproduce here.

TT: It needs to create a universe.

TT: Wait for that universe to develop intelligent life.

TT: Somehow manifest copies of the appropriate software.

TT: Recruit teenagers to play said software.

TT: Get them to actually win the game.

TT: This is all quite complicated.

TT: Not even mentioning that the game itself has all kinds of irrelevant seeming intricacies.

TT: Now evolution tends to find simple solutions to its problems, and this doesn’t seem simple.

TT: I suppose that sburb could be a metaphor for some kind of task that must be performed in order to reproduce.

TT: But then why, are the frogs using us as a computational substrate for solving these problems, rather than just finding something simpler?

GT: so, what? it’s too complicated to have evolved?

TT: Well there’s too much complexity that doesn’t seem to promote survival.

GT: so where did it come from then? did somebody make it?

TT: Well that is the hypothesis. The question is why.

GT: well maybe they wanted to build a universe so that they could have some friends!

TT: Really, John? They wanted some friends. So they created a universe, and waited several billion years for life to evolve?

TT: Also, do you challenge your friends to lethal universe-inducing video games for fun?

TT: Well, I suppose you did, but not intentionally I hope.

TT: But would you suspect our hypothetical creator to have done so?

GT: well maybe not.

TT: Not to mention blowing up Earth in the process.

GT: fine rose, you win. they’re probably not trying to make friends.

GT: or at least they’re really bad at it.

GT: so why did they do it?

TT: What do they get from this competition? Are they trying to generate drama of some sort?

GT: that seems like pretty far to go just to make some sweet movies rose.

GT: but hey, wouldn’t it be cool if they were busy filming us?

TT: Yes, John, the thought of finally being a movie star is the only thing that could possibly compensate me for the loss of my homeworld.

TT: That and being constantly spied on.

GT: i know you are being sarcastic, but i think you actually like the idea.

GT: hmm… but it doesn’t really explain what the whole game is doing.

TT: Right. So what do we know?

TT: The universes find intelligent species to play this game.

TT: Ones that win spawn new similar universes.

TT: Ones that do not have their planet destroyed.

TT: What does this sort of thing?

GT: so you only copy the winning strategies.

GT: wait. rose. i know!

GT: it’s like a computer program searching for a way to win the game!

TT: Hmmm?

GT: well suppose you wanted to write a computer program to be really good at sburb.

GT: you have some basic strategy, but you need to improve it.

GT: you can run a genetic algorithm.

GT: you come up with a bunch of similar strategies and play them off against each other.

GT: the ones that win you make more similar to them and throw away the rest.

TT: That does sound vaguely like what we’re seeing. But is there any other evidence for this theory?

GT: oh, not sure.

TT: Well what else would you expect to be the case if this were true?

GT: well, uh, lots of computers use tree pruning to play games.

GT: try out a bunch of moves, kill off the ones that seem to be going badly and keep one or two good ones around.

TT: That…actually sounds suspiciously similar to what Dave has been telling me about timeline management around here.

GT: really? oh, cool.

GT: wait. isn’t sburb a little too weird for someone to want to solve?

GT: i mean what with all the aspects and quests and stuff.

TT: Right.

TT: It could just be that the creators were weird. They liked games that seem bizarre to us.

TT: But some of that might be new. The universe may have evolved some since its inception.

TT: Perhaps it even started as a vaguely chess-like game and the complexities evolved later.

TT: Giving the players aspects seems like a good way to make winning easier.

GT: sure.

GT: what else?

GT: right! if they’re doing this, they’re going to have to clean up the old frogs now and then to save space.

GT: otherwise they’ll run out of memory.

GT: wait. that’s horrible. are they going to delete us?

TT: Maybe.

TT: On the other hand, the horrorterrors live in some sort of hyperbolic space.

TT: In such a geometry, space would be nearly unlimited. You might not need to worry about it.

TT: In fact, it might encourage you to build self-replicating programs as a kind of hypercomputation.

GT: neat.

GT: so we’re just bits in some alien sburb playing software?

TT: That would be the going theory, yes.

GT: huh.

GT: uh, rose?

GT: if we are here to play this game, do you think it’s two player?

GT: i mean what if there are some other kids on the other side?

