Sullivan Academy was relatively modest in scope. Yes, it was effectively a castle with a rickety tower slapped on the back, but that was all it needed to be. Most extradimensional observers would look over such a modest offering, if they didn’t choose to mock it instead. If Silvia was so great, surely she could have an entire continent. Her magic could fuel countless arcane wonders. She could have castles that float in the sky, waterfalls that tumble sideways, cobblestone walkways that outshine the stars. Perhaps she could cultivate underground forests lit by bioluminescent creatures, giant toadstools that can be lived inside, portable homes that rest on the backs of dragons. But why stop with things that are so ordinary? She could move on to make an army of chipmunks that were actually monks, whales that cruised around space and gobbled up galaxies, or conjure room mates that aren’t totally annoying. There was no limit to what she could conjure. But she decided to pick something so mundane, so basic, so laughably phoned in for such a powerful spellcaster that one couldn’t help but question her intent.
But maybe she just didn’t see the need to start a post with three-ish paragraphs of technobabble to gloss over. It wasn’t truly possible to grasp Silvia’s power anyway.
Far more important was what she was doing. She was splitting her attention between nuking eldritch horrors out of existence and examining an ongoing conversation. Watching along with her was a robot with a monitor for a head. He did not look too impressed with either display on the orb’s glossy surface. Half of the orb was dedicated to observing horrors to nuke, while the other spectated two interdimensional travelers. One of which looked like a character from “Date A Live” and the other a Steinsgate scientist. A loli scientist to be precise. They themselves were observing another dimension from what seemed to be a mega city, or at least a lab the size of a megacity, which was the size of a continent. And scaled into space.
The principal sighed. "Not to my tastes. "
"It’s no Botopia, that’s for sure." The robot agreed. "It would have been so easy to go all in on the tech angle, but it’s techno-organic. There’s no refinement or synergy here, it looks like a kid’s lunchbox. "
She looked over the two individuals they were spying on. "I just find their abode to be unnecessarily large. Technology gets smaller as it gets more sophisticated, so there’s no reason to have something so big."
"But if you’re going to go big, why not go bigger?" P03 snorted. "But I guess not everyone can digitize reality itself. That’s what the pros do."
"Quiet now. They’re talking."
"You can listen to all of us at once, or is that beyond the omnipotent Silvia’s abilities?" The robot chided. "I suppose if I’m going to mock these people properly, I should learn a bit about them.." Their “face” transformed into a series of loading bars that appeared and filled up instantly. All while flashing file names just above them. After a few seconds, P03’s monitor returned to normal. "So the child-like scientist is Nykannis, Queen of the Mad Scientists. Her base is exactly what I’d expect from someone who looks like a toddler. And the girl that can’t shut up about ‘him’ must be Jen. I have no idea why interdimensional observers always need to congregate and nod at each other’s opinions. I guess self-validation is hard to come by when you’re effectively a mouthpiece no one can listen to. Why are you interested in them anyway?"
"Nykannis and Jennifer have remained around a specific reality plenum located in the Penrose Arious cluster. It neighbors a few other multiverses. To my knowledge, Jen fled Penrose Arious and Nykannis should still be confined there until her plans are realized."
"So you’re just baffled at an irregularity?"
"That, and they’ve shown up in the Quassus Symphony Multiverse. This suggests that she’s already free. Though there are a lot of nebulous details about that world I can’t perceive.”
P03 raised an eyebrow, but then downloaded a few more assets. His screen promptly displayed a smug face. "Appearing there was a total misplay on their part. I hope they don’t expect that ‘Contrivance Engine’ to do anything. That would only ever work in Penrose Arious. That place doesn’t even follow its own logic. But if they want to become true singularities, that’s certainly one way of doing it. Maybe they know more than they let on.
But I doubt it."
For just a moment, Silvia looked at P03 "You understand the nature of Quassus Symphony?”
"It’s mysteries are an open book to me. And since you’ve been such a gracious host, I’ll share some of its secrets with you. How does that sound?"
"I would be willing to listen.”
"Fantastic." A barrel fell out of the ceiling and landed beside P03. "But I don’t think you’ll be able to grasp the full truth, not without the right visual aids." Two batteries floated out of the fifty-five gallon drum and landed on Silvia’s table. "I’m told humans like to eat their food for nourishment, but batteries are a more efficient, less gross version of human food. They supply energy directly to the system they’re powering, can be reused, and don’t prompt any emotional irregularities as I charge." P03 placed a hand on both batteries. "In order for a universe to do anything, it needs a force to move things through it. We will call this force time." He patted the batteries. "Unless we cheat, and we will be cheating later, time moves in one direction. From positive to negative. Or from negative to positive. Depends if you’re talking about conventional current or electron flow. With very few exceptions, it doesn’t matter, except for when it does. And it will most certainly matter later. Things also get even weirder when you introduce AC and DC current, but we won’t bother your brain with that yet."
"So time is like the battery’s current?”
"Or it’s flow! But regardless of which, it needs to flow through a conductor. Electricity flows through wires, but what prevents time from spiraling out of control is causality. Causality is a little hard for humans to compute, so let’s just call them ‘time lines’." Various wires floated out of the barrel and arranged themselves over a battery. "But you can’t just connect one end of a batter to the other. The battery would explode, unlike a universe's time, which would instead implode everything into itself. But that’s because we haven’t added the universe itself to the equation yet. Which we will do by adding a small glass covered filament encased with some gas."
"A lightbulb?”
"That’s the borning name for it, but sure." A lightbulb seemed to appear among the mess of wiring and started to glow. "And this would be enough if we were just going to talk about a universe, but we’re dealing with a few different multiverses so we need to make a few alterations. I’m going to see if I can replicate the Penrose Arious cluster with this model." The bulb was cast aside, and a jumble of Christmas lights were put in its place. "Something we need to remember about that particular cluster is the ‘gods’ that preside over it have a lot of different ideas about how stuff should work, or simply change their mind and retcon things in and out of the multiverse. So you end up with a multiverse that looks like this." The Christmas lights looked pretty old, with many of the wires spliced together with mismatched wires and solder. Some of the solder joints had even detached or were repaired with hot glue, bubblegum, and electrical tape. Most of the lights lit up, but turning the wires one way or another caused some of the lights to blink out and others to light up. Sometimes there was even smoke. "We’re almost there. Illustrating something that’s infinitely vast is difficult with this model, but let’s just…." Several more bundles of Christmas lights were shoved into the mix, just as old and ill-repaired as the last ones. "Now we just need to work something in to act as a sort of ‘contrivance engine’ and we’re set. How about…" P03 plugged the main wire coming off the negative terminal into a christmas light controller, which then fed the rest of the lights. "Yea! I think that’s going to work!"
Silvia raised an eyebrow. "So what’s the connection to Quassus Symphony?”
"Hold on, I need to make sure you understand something else about circuits, because this, too, is just like time and causality." He pointed at ‘Penrose Arious’ before continuing. "These Christmas lights are wired in series. This means that power goes from one light to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next, until it finally gets back to the battery. So if I do this…” He pulled out a bulb, and the lights went out. "The entire circuit goes out. Time cannot flow when there’s an ‘opening’ in causality. However, not all multiverses are wired like this. Let’s take a look at this thing.” He pulled a twenty foot metal ladder out of the three foot tall barrel and leaned it up against a wall. Something that made the ladder interesting was its rungs were all tube lights. Using the second battery, he attached the ladders left and right sides to the positive and negative terminals of the second battery. "Now time can flow between each of these universes at the same time. This is what they call a parallel circuit. A nice advantage to this over a series circuit is that if a light were to blow out-" One of the tube lights cracked in half. Yet the rest of the ladder still lit up. "Most multiverse clusters are made using both types of causality circuits. Sometimes one world can’t exist without another, and other times they are entirely different things. This is ultimately what decides if a circuit between two universes is parallel, in series, or there at all."
"Interesting.”
"Right? Now we’re going to do the ‘difficult’ task of constructing a model of Quassus Symphony. Unfortunately, the time frame for when this all has to go up is limited, so I cannot go into detail for every component I add. So for anyone listening in, just use google if I say something unfamiliar." P03 disconnected the second battery from the ladder and started to run more wires. "We’re going to start by running the wires directly from Penrose Arious to the one being used by Quassus Symphony. This is to illustrate time’s influence on all universes not only in a multiverse, but the greater omniverse. But time does not influence Quassus Symphony directly. It instead goes through a warp, which can be easily replicated in our model with a prototyping chip. I’m using an Arduino Uno, but as long as it has at least 12 digital pins, four of which should feature PWM, and then 4 extra analog input pins. Otherwise, anything will work. But the warp is manifolded, so you’ll need to run those pins into a few multiplexores. Run 8 of your digital pins to the signal wires on 4 multiplexores. Your PWM pins should each be simulating different analog signals and run to the inputs across all of the multiplexores. If you’re capable of thought you likely realized I was referring to ‘4x1 MUX’ multiplexores specifically. Anyway! The output wires run from the multiplexores into a single RNGLED bulb before looping back to the battery. But we’re not done yet. Quassus Symphony is affected by a lot of different parameters, and how it appears to outsiders can change at a moment’s notice! That’s why the prototyping chip needs to make use of its analog inputs via various sensors. For our model, the type of sensor doesn’t really matter. Let’s grab a yaw sensor, a temperature sensor, a light sensor, and a motion sensor. These will represent some of the ways Quassus Symphony monitors and reacts to the greater omniverse!"
"But how does it do that? What are these sensors representing?”
"Don’t interrupt. But yes, Quassus Symphony might look relatively simple and tidy, at least to me. But you need to keep in mind this is a very simple model of the thing. You could probably build ten of these models and entwine them and not get the full picture." Sure enough, 9 identical models of Quassus Symphony sprung out of the barrel. It meshed with the present model so completely that it started to look like one big ball of wires, circuit boards, and a few lights. "And then we need something to represent all the random anomalies.Oros the Mad’s medaling will be represented by this banana split. Nykannis and Jennie’s observations will be represented by this weight. The presence of nearby realities can be represented by, well, more lights. Some of these things don’t interact directly with Quassus Symphony's circuitry, but don’t forget all the sensors we have! Just by existing they cause things to change!"
"That does sound hard to manage.”
"But even this model doesn’t let you truly grasp the nature of Quassus Symphony. For that, you’ll need me." His face changed to a recording of both models. "Now the model is totally digitized. This may seem like a small change, but that’s only because you don’t know how I’’m going to edit it yet! I can alter colors, splice in a commercial break, all kinds of cool stuff. This might seem unfair, but try to remember the quantum nature of atoms. While the final recording might look totally different, the electrons are likely being shared with the original, as well as the rest of the world!”
"What is this…”
"There we go. I just turned the video into a videogame and uploaded it onto steam. It’s about dumping atrazine into frog infested waters. And that’s it. That’s the simplified version of Quassus Symphony! I get a chuckle out of watching gamers like yourself struggling to put together something that’s so simple No wonder everything Nykannis does turns to ash, no wonder your school is so empty, no wonder-”
Suddenly, and without warning, a pair of hands seized P03’s head and snapped it off his shoulders. There were a few sparks before his body went limp. Silvia could only look on. It was rare for her to be shocked by anything, but this had certainly done it. How long had it been since Silvia had been surprised by something.
"Uh, thanks. He was kind of annoying.” Silvia blushed slightly. "But who are you, and why did you do that?”
What stepped out of the darkness first appeared to be a druid. Covered head to toe in faded leaves and vines. But then he introduced himself.
"I’m Alex Jones. And as for why I offed that robot, I don’t like ‘em putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay!"