Chapter 169: 2: Manipulating Patterns

Danika's hedgehog transformation wore off while she was logged out to eat lunch. When she returned, she was her usual cute fairy dragon shape, and a quest dialogue informed her that she had acquired the hedgehog as a messenger animal.

She tracked down two more repeatable quests during the afternoon, and noted another characteristic of them. They were all fairly short in duration, most of the repeatable quests could be finished within a couple of hours. The hedgehog quest was actually the longest, since it could last up to a week if your transformation curse was of a longer duration, but the actual thievery to trigger the witch into cursing you didn't take more than a few minutes 

She took a longer break from the game when she ate supper, and did her exercises. She'd decided to try moving them to evenings because the morning meetings of the sixth were scheduled at the time of day that she'd usually done them. And she didn't really want to get up any earlier, but she couldn't just go on skipping them like she had during her training weeks.

That evening she spent some time with Shrubbery and her mother, Eyes on the Sky. Eyes on the Sky seemed a bit lethargic, but when Danika whispered a worried inquiry, Shrubbery laughed and whispered back, "She's doing ok. My dad is just gone for a couple of days on a work trip, and he refused to take her with him, so she's pouting."

They played long enough for night to fall, and Shrubbery played with using the sunstone to power some of her daytime only dryad skills. A few of them still wouldn't work, but most of the light powered skills were usable that way. And Shrubbery's mother asked them something shocking when they were collecting hairs from a shrew that had found its way into Shrubbery's garden.

"Why don't you collect teeth from that snail while you're at it?" Eyes on the Sky questioned.

"Snails don't have teeth," Danika objected. "Do they?" 

"I don't know, they chew up plants really well," Shrubbery replied doubtfully.

"I'm pretty sure that snails have lots of really small, really hard teeth," Eyes on the Sky said confidently.

Danika zipped over caught the snail that Eyes on the Sky had suggested, but as carefully as she examined it, she couldn't see any sign of teeth. She thought of the giant frogs she and Aishin had collected teeth from though. She'd never known that frogs had teeth either. Maybe if she could find giant snails they'd have visible teeth too. 

After a minute she released the snail she held.

--

The next day she asked her dragon assistant where to find giant snails. The little celestial dragon informed her smugly that there were six different kinds of snail within the Empire that might qualify as giant.

At the meeting that morning the people who were given the task of arranging for the enraged goddess reported that they were having difficulty getting the twin goddesses AIs to take any interest in NPC reincarnations. 

Danika asked worriedly, "What happens if you succeed before the expansion is ready?"

"We're just working with copies," Paul explained kindly. "Come over to our space after the meeting and I'll show you. We can still force the event with a script, but that usually creates odd discrepancies later."

After the meeting finished, Danika followed Paul and Ariana to a space that was much much larger than the small area assigned to her. The scenery stretched beyond what she could see, as though they were in the actual game map. 

Ariana saw her confusion and explained quickly, "This is the test area for the whole expansion, not just our part." 

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Paul added, "Though if we succeed, we'll want the mountains available for destroying."

The more the two experienced designers told her about the way they were trying to begin the expansion, the more similar it seemed to the framework method that Danika had been suggesting to Lin Hao for the repeatable quests the day before.

After a bit, Danika gathered her courage and repeated her ideas to Paul and Ariana. "So that the quest events would be added to the response logic chain of qualified NPCs rather than scripted onto an individual?" she finished. 

"That would be perfect for this," Ariana agreed. "We could just directly add the responses we want to their list of choices instead of trying to edit their back stories until the system gives us the response we want. Working with existing NPCs like the Gods is a pain. Usually we try to add new NPCs to do whatever we need whenever we can." 

"How did you get the Turtle to be angry with the Jade Emperor for the goblin quest then?" Danika questioned.

"We didn't intend him to be angry, he was just supposed to ask the players to free his staff," Paul explained laughingly. "The whole angry Turtle God was something the system added once the quest was placed in the game."

That made Danika wonder if the designers knew that the God of War had almost flooded the entire northern plains to restore the balance that all the added quest goblins had disrupted. She was about to ask when Paul said with enthusiasm, "It would be an awesome quest implementation system for my white mice too! If the conditions were loose enough, any white mouse the game generated might have a chance of triggering the quest!"

Ariana interrupted, "She doesn't need to hear all about your pet mice right now, you're supposed to be explaining the limitations of the current system that we're running into, so that she's aware of them while she's learning to design quests." 

Danika suddenly realized that it was true, and the few quests she'd already designed had the same limitations as the repeatable quests she'd been doing as ZipZing. Hopefully not as blatantly as Stubbles Och'tern's quest, but the same limited scope was there. Her quests couldn't go much beyond what she'd written into them. 

"My mice are perfect examples," Paul argued.

Danika thought that it was rather impressive that a young man like Paul had created the most intricate and flexible of the existing repeatable quests. She ignored Ariana's eye rolling and asked him things about how he'd created such a large group of "normal" NPCs within the quest. He explained how he'd worked around a lot of the limitations by giving each mouse an elaborate backstory that guided its future choices instead of a list of responses like most of the quest NPCs used.

Basically, his mice were like the snow leopard guardian, anytime her backstory was referenced it sort of overrode her current pattern, but she had a stable system generated experience pattern that she used for her normal interactions. Danika told Paul about the similarity, and he curiously tried to call up a copy of the guardian.  

A larger than usual red celestial dragon appeared instead, and informed them officiously, "The honorable celestial servant of the seventh class, Lin Hao, first among his rank, serving the Jade Emperor in the maintenance of the Living Jade Empire has restricted access to this NPC for an unspecified duration."

The notification made them all very curious, and Ariana said, "I'm totally going to ask next time I see him in the halls, but it's not worth taking up his working time for."

The copies the design team used were different than the instances of an existing NPC that Danika had been accessing when she called on the traveling merchant. They were like the elementals she'd tested her racial changes on, they had the same data, but were not linked to the game. They warned her never to try to directly copy the merchant, as it would overload the system. 

Paul said reassuringly, "But don't worry, because we already had trouble with that one, it's locked for any NPC with a library over a certain size, and you can't do it by accident because you need at least 3 team members to approve the attempt. We had to do that with the goddesses, because they interact with everyone who dies so they have really large libraries." 

When Danika returned to her own small white space to select her next job, her head felt stuffed with new information. She selected a request for someone to review a flower hybrid. She thought it sounded reasonably limited in scope.

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