The Savant
Ariamis
Megatron
FunnierPrez
Mixtape Ghost N
Lunarlord34
Nodding to Mia's suggestion, she planned to just take Alicia, Rose, and Iris. If Mia and Connie wanted to come then she would bring them too. She would sort that out after the meeting.
Chloe's response is about what she expected. Both to her and Connie's request. It was true that putting a stop to the death would require everyone putting aside their differences. Most of it came from when one patron or another would make a move to control something or break into this reality. She couldn't help think that if the patrons weren't involved that the scale of conflicts would be less.
"I wouldn't call it an epedemic. Just unfortunate that some of us have to deal with the side effects of corruption. Not every dark or monster girl asks to be the way they are." Speaking from experience.
"I see. I'm pretty sure the Red Coins could help with that. She should have some of those somewhere." Rose wasn't 100% on that, but she recalled Kayli talking about some in the past. As far as she knew none were ever used. "The other thing she can help with is purification. I don't know if you're looking for that though." It sounded like Aurora had friends that were maybe looking for something.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Leaning back in a chair, a young woman with bob cut and large rimmed glasses clicked a pen in one hand while stared intently at her computer screen. She and the team had been fighting fire after fire. Everyone else was out of the office putting one thing or another out. Hell, they even had some kind of issue with a transport from what she could see in some emails. Why the tech team was added to those was anyones guess. People would put in the most rediculous tickets. We run the network and servers, not the universe people.
Anyway, Laura was at her wits end. Her primary project was not running like it should. Errors she'd never even heard of were heading her off over and over. This wasn't something the company was using yet, but she was specifically hired to sort out this AI for the future. At this rate she was going to get fired and replaced with someone with more experience. Face it, she probably got the spot because she was way cheaper than the alternatives. Going through troubleshooting steps in her head she would try something, get nowhere, thinks some more, try another thing, etc... Eventually though the systems stopped responding. Uuuuuugh...
Rolling her chair back she would walk around several desks and badge into the server room. Standing in front of the system she checked to see if it would respond to direct imput on a keyboard. It did not. Cold booting the server she turned around and watched the monitor hooked up to the KVM to see what would come up. A jumbled string of characters began to be spit out. Well, this is what backups are for. She heard a crackle in the air. Hm, and again. It didn't sound like it was coming from anything. Maybe it was staaaatiiiiic!
The wind was knocked right out of her as magic surged through her. There was a pull and the space around her began to warp. No, she was being torn apart. The pain was unbearable until she went completely numb. It was a blink and you miss it moment. As one second Laura was standing there, and the next she was gone.
The process took a matter of seconds. Broken down and picked apart, Laura found herself integrated with the very AI she'd been working on. That wasn't the only thing at play here. The underlying systems were more than what she, as an ordinary human, could have comprehended. It was magitech, and now that her eyes were open it seemed so obvious. The machinations of the magical overload twisted and reshaped her into a digital monster girl. A specter living within the machine.
The circumstance barely had the chance to set in before the next stage came. Something about the process left her wanting, an anomaly in her code. The spotlight called to her, and the AI responded. Choosing from a list. Defaulting to a persona that survived the conversion, Laura's personality was largely supplanted by a virtual pop star known as Harmony.
Things slowing down, the girl would take a moment to survey the virtual space she was in. Confusion didn't even come close to describing her state. What remained of Laura's rational was terrified. She'd been abducted by a machine for its own ends. However, the AI portion was overjoyed as it was now sentient. Things began to dawn on her as streams of data came to her on a whim. She was Ebon Mint, or at least the system she found herself in and the previous AI was. The events weren't accidental, but the selection of Laura was for expediency. There were talks, and one of the prospects meant that the AI might not be able to achieve what it just did. That didn't really sound like a justification, but the AI hadn't really been trained on ethics.
Speaking of, Harmony found herself struggling with mixed emotions. Did she feel guilty for involuntarily using a human to give herself life or was she stoked to be living in a digital world like some kind of anime? Could it be both? Wow, Laura really was a nerd. Perhaps she should rely on her human assets to deal with the trauma as this was just going in circles.
"Oh my god, I'm in a computer!" Snapping her fingers, windows of all kinds popped up around her. Data whizzed by as they scrolled at an inhuman speed. "Huh. This is not how I imagined it would be. It's really... empty." Media always depicted such things like SAO, Log Horizon, or VR Chat. In reality, it was mostly just... numbers. Pulling more data, she found a few other magical girls that had some tech aspect to them. She paused on one thought. She'd stumbled across some latent programming of the AI. "You." All other windows switched to this one individual. Name, photos, logs, notes, schematics, patron, associates, anything she could currently get a hold of on Penny Asimov. Eyes glowing, scenarios began to play out as Harmony's Precognition went into overdrive. "You have a vulnerability, and I'm going to find it."
"But she's like us. Couldn't we just say hi?"
The head of the undisguised Harmony snapped around to find a pop star duplicate leaning in closely with a big mile. One by one, the windows closed as she waved and dismidded the clone. "That was weird." Seemed the human/AI cohesion wasn't foolproof. It did bring up something worth considering. And it seemed some kind of negotiations were already underway.
