Chapter 198: 27: Repeatably Unforgotten

"The fallen star keeping one illusion alive is cool, but the result makes me wonder. What if it's painful to see it? What if a different moment would have been better? I tried to think what I'd rather have had, and it started getting really complicated," Danika explained.

"I want to make a quest of memory that you, or even a whole party or guild, could go on," she continued. "You'd start from the shore of any body of water at night, beneath the moon, and then travel up the River of Lethe between the sands of the God of Sleep, and meet Aletheia. The god would let you choose to carry away a sandstone statue of memory that would replay images when water fell upon it, or to forget your memories so that they would never replay in dreams, with skills, or at your death.

"I think the statue should contain not only the memories of the seeker, but the memories of the seeker or seekers that would have shown in the remembered person's stored memory of life, if that's possible," Danika finished.

"I love it!" Ariana declared. "This would be an awesome test of the new repeatable quest framework too!"

Danika glanced nervously at Devon Yu who thought that people should be treasuring the memories of their game lives and then moving on. She trembled with relief when he nodded slowly and said, "This too is good. Although it has a lot of overlap in records access with the Twins and the Sandman, so I question the need to add the greek personas of the river of forgetfulness and the spirit of truth? I'm not sure about the rules regarding the game's records of the target, but perhaps if it only included those involving the questors, it would be allowable."

"Would the sandstone statue gradually wash away?" Takahashi questioned. "Like, if you brought it home and installed it in a fountain would it have a reduced lifespan compared to if you used it as a grave marker and ladled water over it once a year?"

"I… hadn't considered those details," Danika admitted.

"Takahashi and I could form a team with you and help with the details," Ariana suggested.

Takahashi nodded, but turned to look at the director of their division. Devon Yu frowned, glanced at Danika's hopeful face and then looked around at everyone else.

Devon nodded again and said, "Then you three may begin the new quest while the rest of us go over the old quests, tomorrow we'll discuss what new problems have been created and what old problems seem to have been solved so far."

The meeting ended and Ariana practically dragged Danika away. Takahashi followed cheerfully. "Sorry about dragging you guys into my selfish project," Danika said as Ariana set up the blank white space they would begin with. "Devon sounds pretty certain that there will be new problems? But he seemed so optimistic before?"

Takahashi said, "It's quite a challenge to predict what a change will do to the game. It's got a very adaptive system, and some of the new changes were on the system level, so it's even harder to predict how they'll affect things for certain. There are bound to be problems we couldn't imagine. Don't worry, it's normal."

Ariana laughed and added, "I'll be a little shocked if we don't wind up having to abandon this for a few days and concentrate on bug reports, since the overlay system affects the repeatable quests most and those are really popular."

"Oh," Danika replied a little glumly. "I was hoping to have this finished within a day or two."

Takahashi questioned, "Build a quest to preserve or destroy a lifetime's memories in less than two days? That's quite ambitious, and you'd never have managed alone." He didn't question why she was in a hurry, and he looked more excited about the project than his somewhat dour words indicated.

Ariana frowned and said, "I get what Devon was saying about the Twins overlapping, but they are strongly associated with fire while the foundation of this myth is strongly associated with a river."

Takahashi suggested, "The mortal twin is only lightly defined compared to her sister, and they are both birds, birds are usually associated with water and especially river scenes. I don't think it would be difficult to say that the river belongs to the mortal twin, or is even perhaps composed of her tears?"

Ariana told Danika, "You weren't here when we were forced to add revives in addition to reincarnation, and the Twins became the Twins instead of just The Bird. A lot of elements were separated from all the legends that had been crammed together into the Phoenix goddess, and they weren't necessarily separated logically. The Phoenix became the avatar associated with revives and the Bird became the avatar associated with reincarnation."

"Well, that would sort of fit with the river of forgetfulness that all spirits must drink from before reincarnating," Danika agreed.

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Ariana came to a halt and stared at her blankly. Takahashi chuckled and commented, "You derailed her. That wasn't where she was going. But true enough."

"Sorry," Danika apologized quickly. "Please continue."

"No," Ariana stated. She summoned her own dragon assistant and instructed it to contact Devon Yu and have him consult with them.

"Um," Danika began worriedly when Ariana stood silently tapping her toe while Takahashi looked on with cheerful patience.

Ariana turned to Devon Yu who appeared beside her and said, "We need to do this in the expansion area so we can work with the copy of the Twins."

Devon chuckled. "Of course you do, it didn't take you as long to realize that as I expected though." He tapped a couple of things in his menus and then said, "I've given her permission to make changes in the expansion and to the gods."

Ariana dismissed the space she'd created, and Devon winked at Danika who flinched as their surroundings suddenly transformed to the empty sky over the Empire. "Try not to destroy the world on your first day as a master of the sixth class," he advised kindly and vanished in the way of a certain elven wizard.

Danika gulped and then followed Ariana and Takahashi to the vast expansion area.

--

They spent a long day. Each of them only took brief breaks for the necessities of life and returned to keep working. If the repeatable quests had broken, the bug reports weren't getting bounced to the sixth, because when Danika guiltily checked the available jobs list, there were several available, but no more than on a normal day and nothing looked particularly urgent or unusual.

The expansion area itself had been transformed oddly by the introduction of the hidden update. The system had been filling things in and Danika could tell from their reactions that Ariana and Takahashi were just as surprised, or even more surprised about some of the changes. Their celestial assistants were kept busy taking notes as they worked their way to an empty expanse of sand marked for a future minor oasis in the plans.

"Make the oasis for the body of water while we finish up our notes," Takahashi instructed. "That way if something goes wrong we won't mess up anyone else's work."

"Unless things go catastrophically wrong, and we destroy the whole map," Ariana pointed out with amusement.

Danika gulped, but began building. She had already worked out a lot of the bird and the berry bush oasis, and it was shockingly easy to create. Her assistant cheerfully called everything into existence and in just a few minutes a clear pool of water lay before them in a little patch of meadowland.

Ariana looked up from her own screens, looked around and then asked, "This is almost what your application scenario was isn't it? You want to use it here?"

Danika shrugged and said shyly, "I'd been thinking about how it would be implemented using the new system, and how it would be like an oasis, it was really easy to make. But we don't have to include it here."

"It's good, use it," Takahashi instructed.

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