SBURB Patch Notes II: The Code is Mightier than the Sword

[dreamgor]

An indeterminate amount of time has passed for Dreamgor, since he escaped the battle between Skaianet after saving as many servers as possible. He's been unconscious for a week, only waking up to teach Aline in irregular intervals. Now he finally wakes up, fully rested, but starving and his throat sore. He sees a big pizza next to his bed, along with a huge bottle of water.
"Mine!"
He immediately pounces on the Pizza, gobbles it up in record time. It's cold, made entirely out of ingredients he hates, and it's the best meal he's ever eaten. He then drinks all of the water in the bottle without even pausing for breath.
"Ah, that's much better. Oh, dear."
He notices he's still in his bedclothes and with a non-appreciative noise and a fingersnap, he switches to his workclothes. Grinning again, he looks around for his equipment. He finds that all of it is near his bed, waiting for the moment to awake. He picks it up.
"Let's start working again, shall we."
>Musical Aura set to "Namida no Tane, Egao no Hana" from TTGL.

[The Almighty 404]

Log of the Avatar ∞ : I AM BACK

[crash826]

IM: [Hi!]

Not having received any pertinent information from 404's return, Adachi returns to conversations which she'd been having earlier, IMing the Dungeoneer who had inquired as to how romance worked on her part.

IM2(trilbyulatingDungeoneer): [I've considered your question, Mr. Dungeoneer, and I believe that I'd... either ask Mr. Girard what to do if he were still here... or look up Romance on SkaianGoogle and determine an appropriate response. Or just ignore them.]

IM3: [Speaking of which, Mr. Kopton: is that offer to fix Mr. Girard still open?]

[The Almighty 404]

IM: Whoa. Awesome what normality does to an addled mind. I appear to have got admin powers again. More appropriately, to be made of admin powers now. I can see code. Taste it too. It tastes like lemons and potatoes somehow.

[dreamgor]

IM: We're back in business!
Musical Aura patch:
*All music ever composed are in the playlist now.
*Players with Music related titles can play, or sing along with the song for greater effect. If both titles are music related even greater effect is applied.
*Option added. You can now select whether or not your allies and/or enemies can hear the song you're playing. If they don't hear it due to this option being activated, there will be no effects on them.
"Nothing else compares with this job..."
Dreamgor takes a minute-long break before starting yet again, his grin looks like it would split his face, along with his tusks.

[The Almighty 404]

*Added a context-sensitive music picker.

IM: They were using annoying songs as weapons. They made only their enemies able to hear those songs and waited until they went mad.

[shieldman]

Shieldman regains consciousness in a dark blue room, no door in sight.
"Hel-- hello?" he says, pushing himself upright. "Why was that so diffi... oh."
He looks down, everything past his waist gone. He raises an arm to check that the rest of him is still in existence, and sees "Prince of Void" scrawled on his wrist.
"Dammit, nothing like this ever happened in accounting. I swear to... whatever the hell I can swear to in here, I'm going straight to Hussie and asking for my old job back."
A terminal lights up on a nearby table, and he hand-walks over to it, still a little dizzy from materializing into the physical world.

IM: Alright, what's going on out there? Is everyone still alive? Is everything still alive? I wouldn't be surprised if this place was, too. Jeez.
Might as well do some coding to pass the time...

*Fixed issue concerning the content of books changing to solid time whenever Page of Time characters opened them.
*Imps can no longer exceed the mass of the universe they exist within due to pulsars being prototyped. Any excess mass will be converted into mini-imps that orbit the original.
*Added five new color schemes for the server player's HUD at the request of the ultraviolet and infrared players in session 923.
*Added hand-held fan as an item in shops in lands with the Heat descriptor.

He flops back down on the floor and lies down. Now more than ever, he felt sorry for a certain player in a certain problematic session he had heard so much about.

[The Almighty 404]

IM: I'm afraid the diagnostic is : you don't have a lower body anymore. Try standing now. You should be able to. You apparently have a new lobe in your brain dedicated to antigravity. And another one dedicated to controlling computers. With your mind.

[shieldman]

Upon reading this, Shieldman does his best imitation of a facepalm, hardly believing what he's reading. He quickly glances down, however, noticing that he didn't fall over from it. A look of delight spreads over his face, and he zooms about the room, doing aerial maneuvers as best he can until he whacks his head on the ceiling.
"Okay, okay. Serious time now. Maybe I can actually learn to use these... er... abilities right."
He focuses on the terminal screen intently for a few moments.

IM: this s gret! 404, youre a miriacle workr! but, umwm, where re you?

...okay, here's hoping that gets easier with practice. Fortunately he left his headache meds in his sylladex, not his pockets...

[Aline]

Aline goes to visit TD's office, as there must be important things to be told. Her memory is all but patches and more patches, each one more confusing than the other. Trying to channel Daniel wouldn't help a lot, as he was known to be the greatest jerkhat she'd ever known.

"... Hello? Anyone here? TD?"

[Bluesunnyday]

Bluesunnyday sits down in his office. He takes a deep breath, and opens the secure channel again.
%%SECURE CHANNEL%%
That's good. Erm... I have a question Tricia. Have you ever had... feelings... for other people?
%%%

[tacticalGenius]

Elsewhere, elsewhen, Avery T. Deaconari was . . . well, a little too busy to be partaking of the pizza.

Yes, he'd survived. So had many of the Shodans that had followed his Last Command - but just as many had been severely - damaged? Injured? What was the right term for their kind? - or terminated outright.

Even so, those who'd survived were still under the effect of the Last Command. They would still "hold the line", as they'd been ordered to do - but with Skaianet being rebuilt, the line was somewhat different. It was no longer a series of fixed points in the campus' damaged infrastructure, but the perimeter of the rebuilding site. And for the past week, Avery and the surviving, functional Shodans had been patrolling it. Itchy might have been gone, but he wasn't taking any chances.

Yeah, it'd been a long week - and it had been made longer by the dull routines of triage, dealchemization, realchemization, and patrolling. Avery still had his realchemized smart gatling gatling gun, but the Shodans were no longer armed with a haphazard mishmash of quick-alchemized weapons. Now, they were armed properly: those designated as snipers had been issued with Sonic Cannons, the checkpoint teams had gauss pistols, and the roving patrols had laser rifles. They even had attire that could reasonably be considered a uniform.

Yeah, Skaianet Security consisted of one Nth-dimensional multiform and a bunch of cloned, crazed AIs in humanoid bodies, but . . . well, that's par for the course at Skaianet.

IM: Could someone send a few of those pizzas down to the security office in Temporary Edifice P3X-666? While spam sandwiches, donuts, coffee, and ramen are fairly easy to alchemize - and edible, for certain definitions of the word "edible" - they do get a tad boring after a week with nothing but.

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Hmm . . . Shodans that have basically become Skaianet's armed security suddenly going rogue? Tell me more, Kira. *insert devilish grin here*

[trilbyulatingDungeoneer]

TD has been playing the soundtrack of War of the Planets for the last five hours. He rotates his chair and sinks it to the floor in one smooth motion, as his office has been tripled in breadth and height since the rebuild, apparently a gift from hussie himself. Or, lord english. He's still not sure.

Setting the patches he'd created to run automatically, he gets up and walks over to Aline.

"What's up?"

* Fixed bug unique to session 740,000, where every single player had either the Horror, Tzeentch, Lord or Change descriptors.
IM: I probably should've chrono-ported out of the 41st millenium a bit faster.
* Scratched session 8888,8888.i^8 yet again, as the resident Taker of Skulls and Thief of Light's feud sparked up once more.
IM2: Why do we keep letting these au vriskas into the medium anyway? I guess she's got a more than worthy opponent now, but sitll.

[Aline]

"Well, you told me to talk to you, so... I guess I should follow your advice. It's the sensible thing to do, right?" She scratched her own head, wondering what felt so wrong about this phrase.

[trilbyulatingDungeoneer]

"Oh, I know. But what I need is for you to tell me what's at the forefront of your mind at the moment. Other than why you're here, of course."

* Put out a blanket ban on all carapace prototypings.
IM: That's actually how the Lich got half of his powers. He prototyped a sprite with our session's Jack Noir pre-entry, then jumped in before I could stop him. In hindsight, he probably shouldn't have been allowed to be our entire team's server player.

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After all, the only thing that effects carapaces directly is other prototypings. The only bonus, apart from foul tempers, that doing so gave to the underlings of our session was the ability to be effected by the prototyping rings. Luckily, our denizens were smart enough to limit that to minibosses only.

The dungeoneer's pet glitch is sitting in its kennel nearby, and hisses at Aline. TD silences it with a look.

"Don't worry about casey, she looks bad, but her bark's worse than her bite."

[JustAnotherUser]

IM: Uh, about the Pizza... I'm kinda busy helping Adachi right now. Girard has gone pretty deep into their internal mind-space, and he's quite hard to find.

[The Almighty 404]

IM: I think I am at the Vanishing Point. I can see everything ! At the same time ! I can also see everywhere and everywhen. It's beautiful. It looks like a lotus.

[shieldman]

IM: I think I have the hang of this. Hold on, I'm going to try and contact Tricia directly, she's in charge of this, right? In the meantime, here's one or two more patches I ironed out:

*Added an intentionally vague "Morality meter" for God-Tier characters to ensure they were not the victims of out-of-the-blue Just deaths.
*Improved recursion detection in regards to prototypings; redundant prototypes will now attempt to find a non-recursive state that satisfies all enemy types (sorry, no more double carapeople all the way across the sky).

IM2(Tricia): Hello? I was informed you are in control of this... er... wing of the operation. What's going on?

[orngjce223]

Click open. Read.

...Jaw drop.

%%SECURE CHANNEL%%
...Assuming this is leading up to what I think it's leading up to, you're proposing romance, and - let me be honest here, I know there's something here that I've never experienced before. I'm willing to figure out what it is, since it seems to be directed at you. I just don't have a name for it.
%%%%

IM: ...In regards to what? I can help you with quite a bit, but I have no idea what you are talking about. Facilities, network, Sburb architecture?

[Bluesunnyday]

%%SECURE CHANNEL%%
Well, if you're willing to stop trying to confuse me with all those fancy pants words, I MIGHT be able to explain what you might be feeling. It might be love. Love is a pretty complicated thing. Love is when two people decide that they want to be together for the rest of their lives. That's why a common marriage vow involves "until death do you part". Usually it's between two people, and it's pretty much a sort of "upgrade" to friendship. It's also a really nice feeling, but that's hardly the most important part.
%%%%

[crash826]

IM: [I CAN TASTE COLORS]

IM2: {EVERYTHING IS MADE OF MIRACLETANIUM}

IM3: <MY TONGUE FEELS LIKE A TUESDAY AFTERNOON VELOCIRAPTOR>

IM4: |WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE|

IM5: [I {AHAHAHA WHEEEEEE} s this suppo <JOHN MADDEN JOHN MADDEN> sed to happen?! |MASS DESTRUCTIOOOON|]

((note: Different brackets determine different languages.))

[Aline]

"TD, I have no idea on what's going on with my mind. My memories are scattered right now. I came here basically because I have nowhere else to go, nobody else to talk to. It's confusing. And for all I know, letting my animus take the control to tell what's happening is not going to lead to a good thing."

She looked at the glitch, sighing at its hiss. She was already used to these things hating on her. Like she was an enemy, or something even worse than they were.

"I don't want to become a villain or a burden to Skaia. Also, I'm wondering where that evil talking candy corn came from, and why did he fake friendship with me, out of all people. He even coerced me into trying to replace pumpkins for candy corn in the programming. Whatever these pumpkins may be."

[dreamgor]

*Fixed a very rare bug where __ of Time and __ of Space players or objects they transfer could become very small upon time/spacetravel, and then becoming exhibits in a museum belonging to the consorts without them intending to do so. IM:Yeah, I'm not too sure about this one either. I think I'll try to figure out more about this, and then start working on more patches. Maybe it's just the day-old pizza I ate, but I have a feeling there is more behind this.

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Whiplash! Whiplash! I couldn't take reading such a serious message as Blue's message, and then Crash without getting a whiplash. I'll sue you! (Not really.) Very obscure reference, this patch is. No, nothing to do with Star wars. Edit: And... back to serious again...I swear, you guys.

[trilbyulatingDungeoneer]

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isn't that the 501st?

TD smiles kindly at Aline, and gestures for her to take a seat.

"Firstly, you should know that we all have issues with morality here. The Lich, for instance, was my best friend for a decade before we played sburb. I'm sure that, in most timelines, he and I still are, but it wasn't to be. Make no mistake, he fought itchy and brought you, daniel, or whichever iteration of the omnikid it was to us for his own purposes. You, however, will not. Be a villain. You're trying. He wasn't."

The Dungeoneer tosses a scratched disk to Casey, and she growls at him, too, before devouring it.

"Just like with casey, a vicious possibility and the potential for violence don't necessarily amount to evil actions. I should know that better than most..."

TD checks a screen, which shows the Cuccobo in its pocket dimension. He smiles, and turns away from it.

"As for not having many memories, and nobody to speak to..? I can help you there. With both things."

TD sits back in his chair, but doesn't rise up this time. He holds out a bottle of pink liquid.

"Care to slam a wicked elixir?"

* Fixed bug that unnecesarily heightens restrictions on the Friendship disease among triple-Alpha-x level individuals.
* Fixed bug that unnecesarily lowers restrictions on the Pokerus disease among pokemon-based players.

[JustAnotherUser]

Daniel stands, jaw dropped, looking at the humanoid hole in the wall. He breaks out his PDA.

IM: Oh Crap, I think I mis-reconnected that wire. Adachi is sort of running amok through the facilities.

What do?