An Interesting Proposal

Sleeping in the suit wasn't very comfortable, though it was quiet enough that it was restful. I didn't want my operations to stop and so I stayed where I was for the night as the machine continued pulling up resources. My dreams were filled with visions of potential advancements, most of which I took quick notes of when I woke in between the dreams. By the time the sun was rising I was already at work making the designs. It wasn't until I heard a growl that I realized I had been neglecting my stomach and had to finally stop the mining operation and head towards town for supplies, mine being completely depleted with my lack of foraging. Before heading out I checked the various systems, seeing how much I had stored of both materials and power. To my delight I had an overabundance of both, which meant that the system could run optimally and the weight increase in my suit would be negligible. I was sure with a few more iterations of technological improvements my ability to store things would be nearly limitless.

As I approached town I wondered if I needed to leave the suit behind, but my mind was quickly made up when the engineers came rushing out to the suit and ushering me forward so that everyone could see what was possible with the technology that was being developed. The townsfolk gazed at the approaching behemoth with awe and wonder, most of them keeping their distance but some found enough courage to come touch the suit while it was moving, though they all kept their distance from the feet as they came down. When I was close enough I stopped and climbed out, the suit going into standby and lowering itself to the ground, making it about a quarter of its standing size. While many of the villagers inspected the suit, which was safely locked down to prevent them from using it, I went to the market and did my best to barter for something to eat, though it was getting to be harder to do as the materials I had weren't worth nearly as much now that they were able to refine better things already and I wasn't willing to part with most of the ones I had risked my life to learn about in the first place. This made breakfast pretty meager and I realized I would have to start finding my own food from now on, though my mind was already coming up with ideas for that. As I munched on my breakfast and worked on getting a few more things to make it through the rest of the day I noticed the engineers starting to follow along, though at a distance. They seemed hesitant to ask me what they wanted and I pretended not to notice, trying to finish my business before they finally got the courage to ask.

When they did it all began in hushed tones with them coaxing me in to a remote building and the door being locked behind us. Despite the fact that, with the door closed, you couldn't hear anything outside they still continued with the quiet voices. They began by explaining how they were advancing and how their research was leading them towards a problem they were facing and that they believed I could help solve, and that was namely that they didn't have the time or resources to spend teaching others what they were learning and they needed to find a way to quickly pass that knowledge on. That was where I came in, they all knew of the technology I guarded very carefully and they desperately wanted to know if I could produce a copy of it, blank of course, that they could then study to see how it worked. I found it hard to answer them, I knew the design still resided somewhere in the memory of my device but I was very hesitant to build another one for fear that someone would use it and never figure out how to undo what it did. I thought about it for some time before they finally reminded me that they needed an answer, they assured me that all their research would be fully disclosed to me and hopefully that would mean I could benefit from it as well. It was another temptation to think about and I knew their help would be invaluable, the entire race of them seemed very capable of understanding things on a level that I wasn't sure I could keep up with, which was the other part that scared me. I told them I would need more time, which they understood, and I went back out and got in my armored suit, wasting little time to reach a great distance from the village. I tried my best to think the situation over, but my mind was going in many different directions and I found the only way to focus was to keep working. The sun sank in the distance and my work continued until it was rising once more.

Advancements

The hole grew, I stopped trying to keep the ground from sinking, it was just slowing the progress. The area was rich in resources and I wasn't going to stop until I had them up. I figured it would make a good location for a larger workshop, a much more complicated one. The sun was starting to rise and I deployed the charging panels from the suit to charge up the power modules. Being so heavily refined they would hold a much larger charge than the small battery pack and once they had started producing enough I removed the temporary unit so the resources in it could be refined into something more useful as well. The properties of the various metals made the suit nice and cool to be around, despite the amount of heat and energy coursing through it while it had the panels open. The area was much more comfortable to be in, so I was letting the massive suit do all the hard work while I enjoyed some breakfast and continued working on my designs.

A little later in the day I had some visitors, from the looks of it they had planned to visit me today and found me not at home but had decided to follow the strange tracks I had left from my mechanical suit, when they saw the thing working they stopped and seemed unsure of what to do, so I went to them instead. It was a group of elders and a few of the engineers I had taught to make a display. They were carrying a few things with them and so their visit seemed to be about business, but they just stared at the mechanical figure in the distance. With some coaxing though I got some questions out of them, mostly about what that thing was that was decimating the ground in front of it. When I explained what I had made they all wanted to go take a closer look and it wasn't easy keeping up with them as they raced towards it. They touched the parts they could and made sure not to go near the moving pieces for fear of losing a limb. The suit was huge, about three times larger than any of us, though I knew it got a lot smaller when it wasn't standing, another thing I had not thought of when I had built it inside the house. I explained to them what it was and what I anticipated using it for, mostly as a safer way of doing the work I already did and on a larger scale. I could see their minds at work trying to figure out how to build their own, then they realized where they were standing and were frightened, they frantically looked at the position of the sun and then had a perplexed look on their faces. I laughed and pointed to the machine and explained that, though they were in the area that normally got too hot to be in, all the danger was now contained in and powering the mechanical figure that stood before them. This of course lead to all sorts of questions which I did my best to get around, trying not to give them too many ideas for working with this dangerous material before they were ready. I also tried to steer the conversation towards the reason for their visit, which took some time but they eventually got to it.

The objects they had brought with me were their first attempts to make advanced mining equipment. They had the technology in place to get the resources up, but when they used it they mostly brought up junk ores that had no value to them. They were hoping they could find something to trade with me so that I could assist them in figuring out how to actually find the valuable ores. This of course was now more towards the back of their mind as they marveled at my mining mechanical suit. I assured them they were pursuing the right path and that the mining suit would probably be on their list of future projects, but they needed to figure out resonance of the minerals they were looking for and to find a way to distinguish the useful ones from any other once they had a way to produce and capture the signal. This instantly got their minds going and they took only one more longing look at the technology I was currently using before heading back to town to work on their new ideas. With the visitors gone I began construction of the additional pieces to my suit, these modifications would lead to much faster advances in my own technology, which I was sure I would need as this race of aliens was quickly catching up to my own abilities. As I watches the new parts coming together I wondered if I had given them the knowledge too freely that time, but I quickly brushed it off as it was a simple suggestion and they would have figured it out soon enough watching the machine do its work, it was not nearly as subtle when it produced the shock that gave me the frequencies.

Bringing Life to the Dream

Despite all my improvements the ground had noticeably sunk when I had finished pulling all the minerals out. I knew no one would mind as it was the area that few things could survive in due to the tremendous heat that would have come had I not just pulled out all of that wonderful ore. There would still be plenty of hot spots, just not in the location I had been trapped in before. Making my way back to the house took some time, despite my best abilities it was difficult to carry the amount of weight I had added to the pack and I had to rest quite a few times before I was comfortably back in my workshop. The complexity of the design would cause the device to work much slower this time, there were so many little things to do in the refinement and construction of each part. The capability of the device had never been pushed this far, but I was sure it could handle it, at least once I finished programming the steps in. Once started all I had to do was wait comfortably in my bed, envisioning larger construction devices that could make this process go a lot faster. Slowly but surely the device spat out pieces here and there on the floor, then pulled them back in and assembled a finished part, which would wait until the next set of parts were done and then pull those in to put them together according to the design. It was fascinating to watch the thing work, no additional input needed once it had all been started. As the form of the technology slowly took shape my excitement grew, if this thing worked as I anticipated it would completely change the things I could do on this planet.

I'm not sure how much time passed, or when exactly I fell asleep, but the sound of boards breaking woke me up pretty quickly. It was dark in the room, I wasn't sure if the sun had gone down or if something had just covered the house, it sounded like something were crushing it. The boards continued to moan and creak under some great weight, it wasn't until I heard the sound of the device still working that I realized my error, the thing I was constructing was much heavier than my floor could handle. I couldn't stop the process now, it must be nearly done to have that much weight in one spot, plus, so long as it didn't cause the house to fall I could just repair the damage it caused later. I fumbled around a bit looking for one of my light sources, when it was on I could see the construct before me and the screen on the device showing how far along it was. From what I could tell of the progress it should all be done within an hour, and then the real fun would begin.

My second error was realized once I had entered the control area of the device. I had not planned on a way to get it out of the house and so I could not just walk out. I climbed back out and scanned it back in to storage. Refined materials were much lighter, but the pack was still heavy once it was stored again. Luckily I only had to take a few steps to get out the door and deploy the unit once more. The moon reflected off of the dark metal, it would have been hard to see if I hadn't made it so shiny, but it was probably better that it could be seen for now. I climbed back in, closed the hatch and started it up. It took a moment for all the components to draw in the necessary power I had in the makeshift battery but soon all systems were up and running. Before I could take it out on a test run I needed to run it through some diagnostics to make sure things at least were theoretically running properly. I entered the sequence of commands and waited, the screen showed lots of useful information with only a few minor problems that I was sure I could fix. When it passed all tests within my acceptable margins I slipped into the controls and began testing the sensitivity, the mechanical suit moved almost as well as I did, though within the limitations of the joints. It would definitely do for now, but future improvements would give it much more agility. Even though it was still dark I decided to start working on the next part of my plan, the suit would allow me to hold a lot more materials and while it worked on extraction I could easily fix the flaws I had found already and begin designing and constructing the first upgrade.

Exchange of Knowledge

I woke early, I had to explore the village before everyone else was awake. As I made my way around I saw so many changes to the once small, simple village. The village was in a much more majestic condition, almost like it could be a capitol, though I was sure all the villages would look like this soon enough. The doors on the walls were closed to prevent the creatures from getting in and it turned out there were several gates leading in and out of the village. There was now a centrally located storage facility for the food, so it looked like they would maintain their community as a whole instead of each individual having to fend for themselves, which told me that there would be less chance of conflict. Each villager had their own idea about what their house should look like, though most were similar in style, varying the most in color. In one of the more secluded corners of the village was the workshop where they had built and now stored the device they had made. The doors were open and I could hear that someone was already working inside. I decided to see what they were up to and ask about what their plan was after they finished remodeling the village.

There were only a handful of them working, they were so absorbed in whatever it was they were constructing that they didn't notice me for several minutes. When they finally did it was to their detriment as they quickly forgot where they were in the configuration. I could see on their faces the disappointment they felt as they realized they would have to start again, but still they were glad to see me and asked if it would be possible to learn more about the display capabilities that I had in my own device. I was surprised they hadn't figured out a similar technology already, it seemed trivial compared to working with converting matter to energy and then back to matter once it was modified. Knowing that they wanted what I had and that they had knowledge I didn't fully understand, I decided to compromise a bit and teach them what I knew about the display technology in exchange for a copy of their notes on their research, this of course wasn't approved until they woke a few of the elders up and all was agreed upon. Within a few hours I had a copy of the notes and they had their first crude display showing them nothing at all. It would take a few days for them to figure out how to display something useful on the screen, but once it was implemented they would greatly speed up their technological advancement.

With the notes that they had, and some food I had bartered for, I began learning more about what I had been doing. The irony of learning about something I made after I had made it didn't escape me, and several times I just sat there chuckling to myself as I realized how impossible the idea would have been had I not had the product sitting before me. At times I would stop my reading to modify the designs I had stored, the end product would be so much different than what I had imagined and it took me a few days going between my home and the village to restock my supplies before I finally got through it all. When all was done I felt much better about working on things, I finally had some idea of how it seemed to work, though their way of doing it wasn't perfectly the same as the way the device did it, but I would be able to figure that out eventually. I took some time to digitize the notes, cleaning them up and making the text easier to read once it was stored safely. I also added my own notes as well to clarify a few things that were different in their version than from mine. My next task was to gather the remaining materials I did not have for the final product of my invention, it had been changed so much that it would no longer be one simple piece of technology, but rather a series of ever growing ones as each one paved the way for the next.

GOAL: Graduated!

This isn't the first time I've graduated, but it was definitely better this time around. The first time I graduated I simply got some congrats and all was done, very anticlimactic considering it took months to do. This time, not only did I get congrats, but I got a big golden swirly, a full set of armor and a vehicle! Definitely much more exciting. My mentor received some mentor edition hunter gloves and she is very happy about it. She really didn't have to do much for me this time as I already knew what I was doing, but she had helped me so much the last time I was going through a discipleship that I had to have her as my mentor this time around.

When I saw that I might graduate last night I was happy that my mentor was on, I really wanted her to be there when I clicked the button. Unfortunately she wasn't on the same planet, so it wasn't quite what I hoped for, but it was still good to see her reaction when I hit the button, she hadn't quite realized I was going to get that last percent so quickly. So when I asked her what she was doing and to stop for a moment I could only imagine what was going through her head. When I clicked the graduate button she quickly found out and then wondered what I had received and the value of it, which someone else was much quicker on doing the math and told her the TT value of a full set of pixie. When that was all done I finished up my mining run, which was another loss for me, and went back to storage to prepare for departure.

With my graduation done I no longer had a good reason to stick around Calypso, it was time to head back to Arkadia, which I had been missing, to see if I could survive there again. The flight was uneventful, I had only seen one pirate when I left and he went off on his own in a different direction without paying me any mind what-so-ever, so my trip was long and I sat there talking to my society. The only other thing I accomplished last night was entering some information about me as a potential mentor, though with my lack of play time I doubt I will end up with many disciples, but at least the info is there if anyone felt they'd like to learn a bit from me, though I feel I will be updating it again with the normal times I might be found online. When I arrived at Arkadia it was already late, I was tired, and though I really wanted to start adventuring again I had to go to bed, thus ending my productive evening.