1????????Soul Bound
1.3??????Making a Splash
1.3.1????An Obligated Noble
1.3.1.7??Venerated books
When they entered Tori was scribbling on a sheet of paper, which she finished with a flourish then passed to Bungo, who held it up for everyone to see.
Tori: “Here you go. One handy dandy social events guide, as promised. I also added the tedious business stuff, so Herberto can’t moan at me.”
Tori: “I put stars by my recommended picks. The cheese rolling can be funny, but most of the nobles prefer the horse trials over at Alto.”
Bungo: “Tori, this is amazing. Thank you!”
He bowed to her and, perhaps thanks to his high DEX score, managed to make it look good. From a doorway behind him entered a long-limbed man with a narrow jaw and a high forehead surmounted by a shock of gravity-defying hair.
Wellington: “High Master Mage Camillo! It is good to see you again.”
Kafana hadn’t met him while at Villa Landi, but on the first day of the Wombles' adventures in Soul Bound he’d been a guest of the Lord, and his looks were familiar; he must have been present in the background at the feast, though her memories of that occasion were rather confused. She did remember that he was an expert at reality magic, and had spent time with Wellington in the Villa’s library.
Camillo nodded to Wellington in acknowledgement of his greeting, but turned to address the two Landi siblings first. She wondered why, then felt an intuition in her mind: =the siblings held social rank 3 just from being kindred of a House Primus, Camillo held social rank 2 from being a High Master, and the Wombles had no rank at all. Etiquette required Camillo to greet the siblings first.=
Was that from her Etiquette (noble) skill? It was a little scary that a game running on her tiara could insert a thought so well, that it was difficult to tell whether or not the thought had been her own. She blanked out Camillo’s exchange with Herberto, something to do with a vault, and sent a query to the expert system on her own tiara:
Kafana: {Minion, can you give thoughts the game sends me a different flavour, so I don’t mistake them for my own?}
Minion: [Nadine, one of issues addressed by Brain Shield patch you had Balthazar write is attempts to use thought insertion maliciously. I can certainly extend that to non-malicious insertions, however it may interfere with how real the game world feels to you.]
Kafana: {Hmm. Good to know. Leave it as is, for now. No, wait, if a thought insertion from a skill made me inclined to do something out of character like beating an NPC beggar, because Torello’s etiquette said to, that wouldn’t count as a malicious exploit, would it?}
Minion: [That is correct. The patch currently only treats things harming you in arlife or making you vulnerable to harm in arlife as malicious.]
Kafana: {OK. New directive: please also highlight thought insertions that Melchior judges to be incompatible with my personal ethics. I want to be able to recognise them as not coming from me.}
Minion had already been part of the tiara created by Alderney and Wellington when they’d gifted it to her, but Balthazar and Melchior were some of the new expert systems that she’d specified. Unlike the other Wombles, she was still very new to using this technology, and didn’t really know which system she should be asking to do what - she relied upon them being like a well-intentioned close-knit family, and working nicely together. So far they had. She put the matter out of her mind, and returned to the online conversation.
Camillo: “Tori Landi, putting quill to paper - an unusual day indeed. Have you forsaken your sword at last, and taken up the ways of a scholar?”
Tori: “Is beating an achlis over the head with a book more effective than using a sword?” She shook her head. “No, Master. The day I abandon the blade, all Covob will be Seth-shatter, Nahas will freeze deeper than the Cradle of Wastes, and the High King shall return once more.”
Camillo: “Adventurer Wellington Fiducia, well met. What brings you here? I trust you and your friends are in good health?”
Wellington paused a moment, as though he were listening to a cue, and then replied: “Good health indeed, and we are brought hither by friendship, curiosity and a need for books and wise advice upon magic. But, come, let me first introduce them.” which he proceeded to do, so smoothly that even Bartola could not have faulted his manners, naming the teachers they were under for each of their professions.
Camillo didn’t react to Kafana being Columbina’s journeyman in cooking or Suor Isabella’s journeyman in serving the deities, but he did blink at mention of her being a spell-singer under Captain Nafaro who was Torello’s Grand Master Water, and Wellington’s journeymanship under Johannes who was Torello’s Grand Master Light. Bulgaria being a mage under Ruffiana and Bungo being a mage under Flavio and Olga just got a nod.
After the introductions were concluded, Wellington mentioned his decision not to apprentice as a bibliomancer under Lord Zeno, the Count of Libri, on the grounds that Bungo was already a seer and duplicating skills seemed inefficient.
Camillo: “One can never have too many bibliomancers. They’re rare because it requires talent in both seeing and reality magic. Familiarity with runes, gestalts and mind magic also combine well with it. And they are very much in demand. After all, books are repositories of wisdom, the great leveller that each benefits from in measure to the effort they put in, the very heart of civilisation.”
Tori: “If you can find those pearls of wisdom, among the rants about whether toenail clippings should be destroyed so they don’t get used for curses.”
Camillo: “A high level bibliomancer can find the exact tome or even the precise page and line, that bears upon a seeker’s intent.”
Herberto: “At Samhain, just before the seas become dangerously stormy, Pentapolis hosts a great Book Fair in honour of Rac. I was there a few years ago, bidding on behalf of my father at an Antiquities Auction, and got to wander around it. Teams of mages jostled for position before the door like hounds before a hunt. When the doors opened each team raced in, led by a bibliomancer, determined to lay claim to the pick of the new treasures. Three academics from the history department were trampled in the crush, and one had to be sent to the healers still clutching a slim vellum folio with his broken arm.”
Tori: “Foolishness!”
Camillo: “In his life, a man may meet and converse with a thousand people and, if he is lucky, a handful of those thousand will spend a few minutes sharing wisdom that inspires and improves him. But with a library, ah, in a library such as this one you can get hours of attention from not just the brightest minds alive today in one city, but from the greatest minds in all of history and from every corner of the world.”
Tori: “A book can’t teach you the way another person can, a person who can answer your questions and see where you’re going wrong. Who says that someone has to write books in order to be great? Some of the best and bravest people I ever met, the ones who taught me the most and inspired me the most, couldn’t even write their own name.”
Alderney stepped in, and drew Tori off.
Alderney: “Hey Tori, can you show me where Domatore’s breeding notes are shelved? Also, would it be possible for my Vessel to visit some time? She likes libraries. Is she a Guest of House Landi too? How does that work? What if...”
The deluge of ideas and questions didn’t stop, but faded into the background, as they sped up a ladder straight through a hole in the ceiling, faster than a pair of greased weasels.
Tomsk: {I’ll go with them. Meet at the music room?}
Bungo: {Go ahead. I’ll arrange it with Herberto and catch up with you. Divide and conquer.}
A minute later, Kafana found herself in a more relaxed room, with just Herberto, Camillo, Wellington and Bulgaria. Being able to multitask was nice, but it was a bit exhausting. Did it have a stamina cost rather than a mana cost? She’d have to check later, and talk with Alderney to find out what it felt like to someone viewing the sense recording her tiara made for later broadcast.
Camillo: “Ah, well, perhaps that’s enough upon the virtues of the written word. Herberto said you have less than a bell before you’re due to meet Lord Landi in the auditorium. What questions are you curious about today, that I can help you with?”
Victor Serebriakoff who wrote about it on page 74 of his book "Educating the Intelligent Child".
L-Space and ):
In fact, 9% of the time, there isn't a sound component at all (just a thought, feeling or impulse), 37% of the time they report experiencing a mix of both sound and non-sound components, and most of the rest of the time the sound component is closer to the reconstructed/muted/compressed fragment experienced in dreams and non-vivid memories rather than a full auditory hallucination. But for now, let's talk about the most common sort - internal dialog and experiences similar to that.
* 1 month - recognise a difference between the voice of their mother and the voices of other people
* 3 months - can locate the direction a sound is coming from
* 5 months - produces babble
* 7 months - turns towards sources of sound and repeats the pattern of syllables back to them
* 9 months - pretends to hold conversations, voicing each party in turn
* 11 months - has learned to say some words, associate meaning with them, and uses them intentionally to convey that meaning
* 2 years - audible self-talk (but private rather than intended for an external audience)
* 3 years - imaginary friends
* 4 years - silent inner speech and dialog
* 5 years - can read a book out loud
* 6 years - sometimes use a different voice when reading out loud the dialog of different characters in a book
* 7 years - able to read silently
* 8 years - sometimes hear different voices in your mind when reading silently the dialog of different characters
Most voices fall into two categories:
(A) External voices you are hearing with the physical ears on the side of your head, that you correctly attribute to an external source
(B) Internal voices that you are conscious of having intentional triggered, that you have correctly attributed to the internal source you identify as your self (or a part of yourself that you accept rather than reject, that you identify with).
Another category of correctly identified 'voices' are known as "impulsive thoughts". These are mostly sudden strong urges (like scratching an itch) which area reactions (rather than intentionally generated by the conscious self) and are often unwanted (because they make it harder to think about anything else for a brief period and take no account of consequences the urged action might have, or even if filling the desire is physically possible). But, despite that, the person accepts the part of their mind generating those thoughts as being part of what they identify as their self.
Lastly there are internal voices which the person doesn't attribute to a source they they are willing to identify as being part of their self. How they do get attributed varies with culture, the type of messages conveyed by the voice and the manner and circumstances of the conveying.
* Intrusive thoughts - unwelcome thoughts that repeated over long periods; often ego-dystonic (saying things that are at odds with the person's normal beliefs, desires or values).
* Parts of the mind personified and treated as distinct from the self (such as a Parental Blessing, Conscience or Animal Totem)
* Dissociative Identity Disorder persona
* Telepathy, Alien mind beams, guidance or revelation from the Christian Holy Spirit, etc.
Tiara technology adds some additional categories:
* Internal voices/thoughts originating from an external source, that get correctly identified as being external
* Internal voices/thoughts originating from an external source, that get incorrectly identified as originating from the self
* Internal voices originating from an external source, that get incorrectly identified as being external voices
That last of these is an intentional feature of immersive Velife that the game, Soul Bound, depends upon to create the illusion that the player is actually physically in a different world.
The first of these would include standard Orglife chat channels, where you aren't hearing the words spoken using your ears, but you are aware that you are wearing a tiara that's using technology to stimulate the auditory part of your brain and you are aware the words you 'hear' are being spoken by another human in your player group.
The second of these is the dangerous category, which side-steps the filters your brain has developed to defend you from accepting without question everything that you get told by other people. And it's existence is just a corollary of the other two. No new techniques or hardware would be required. The third category being possible implies the ability to spoof the posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus's ability to identify sources, and the first category being possible implies the ability to insert voices/thoughts into the player's mind.
