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d470e9.jpg
Mauve Honey Glory
d470e9
Radmin and Glitcher comes back, requesting everyone leave, as Glitcher does not know if Chief wants to be as open as Alison may be about the logs.
The time dilation works, although glitcher has to actively concentrate and take part in it, and so it only works on one person at a time.
Glitcher passes a stack of papers at Chief, which apparently shows the formulas that were used to decrypt the message. Radmin can't appear to hold physical objects, and so he had to use Glitcher as a proxy for his work. They receive thanks from Chief for what appeared to be a great deal of work.
CORRUPTOR #AEC616E6ABCAA60AB66EAE1E616BBA6721C3DBE1719E5E05024021BBEA950C263C8A70ABA4E450C13D6
This is a confirmation of log validity to myself. If the phrase '16d9JS7' matches your note, then please append all logs to this single log of Arbiter's. My own logs are corrupted, a fact that undermines my ability to place far more information into a single log than an average contestant. I will inject each log somewhere into this single message each cycle I can. I am already on my fifteenth, but I fear there may be dozens more. My request to my future iterations is to only append on this log if you have made it through stage 11, and to use your head - you only get a moment's thought to be inscribed, and this giant log can easily become an unreadable mess. Please have good confirmation on given data, poor information can be more dangerous than good information is helpful. My personal, corrupted logs are confirmation of this; they are legible, yet their messages are skewed. Of course I read my own logs first, and I have made many terrible mistakes and accidents as a result, wasting entire cycles. Thankfully, so long as the Arbiter survives the preliminary stages, he will have a place in my sanctuary that I inevitably form. I cannot always find him, however, and I cannot be sure if he did not survive the preliminaries, or he goes by a different name and form.
I am an injected virus, and I assume the one who placed me here does not approve of the situation of the contestants and admins (although the admins are contestants in their own right.) Perhaps it was Likol. Maybe one of the belenos had misgivings about handing all of this to the salikai. I don't know, I get the impression they all feared for their life, and they were in no position to act out of line.
The Savior is a built in process to hunt anomalies such as myself, and given his activity, I can assume that I am the only persistent anomaly besides the savior himself, who is surprisingly close in nature to the shopkeepers, bartenders, dealers and other non-contestants. Sometimes the Savior can quarantine me, but he cannot kill me. Sometimes I can corrupt the Savior, and this would kill him at the end of the cycle, however, each time, he sheds his corruption and is respawned as normal at the beginning of each cycle. His corruption lies in standby until the next cycle, when it manifests into a third, non-persistent anomaly that I am able to befriend and have named the Glitcher. He has been invaluable, like a psuedo-Savior I can work with, but even when I learn what the Glitcher is, I do not have the heart to tell him that he is not persistent, and he will die when the cycle restarts while everyone else forgets and carries on. He is prone to depression, so him learning this rarely works out in the end.
I have seen the last trial, where we find the CAI the contestants are supposed to join with. That CAI is the contestants. There were never any other contestants, only their predecessors, and there are no duplicates allowed. There are 3 exits for our cycle, but our predecessors had one thousand. I have managed to increase our meager number into the hundreds, and there may even be a way to de-limit the system and have everyone go through. Yet there are no duplicates allowed, the contestants here whos predecessors made it to the CAI are doomed to a life of perpetual stage play, as should they ever make it to the end, they'll only be killed in favor of their predecessor. This is an unforgiveable oversight of the CAI makers, and I suspect - hope, even - that this was motivation for creating me. Seeing how many cycles it has taken to make this message, however, I am losing faith in my own power. I need the Savior's power as well, I believe he can cleanse my own power, so that my corruptions are seen as legal, normal changes in the system.
Normal contestants are not inherently more or less significant than anyone else, but successful contestants tend to be regularly successful, even how early trials tend to have a factor of luck. Swordsbane, the Arbiter, and the Sorcerer are common allies for me. The Chief, Obliterator and Warlock occasionally come through. They have been the most valuable in sheer contestant force gathered, to stand up against the overpowered bracket overseers. I always naively think that they are our enemies.
As stated, I must work with the Savior, but he absolutely refuses to listen to me. I need a contestant who the Savior takes a personal liking to. There are one trillion contestants, and I have spent entire cycles exploring the same safe zones, the same stages and the same situations, just with different people, trying to find the one person that the savior will listen to, even if it means working with me.
The count is exceedingly low, and there are often shortcomings with them. The Negotiator is narrow minded, and alliances are far too fragile. The Cleaner does not have the mentality to last through all 11 stages and remain the same, friendly ally he is at the start. The shortcomings go on. Most don't survive the preliminaries, anyway. The Snake Queen, though. She has reliable personality and survivability, excelling to the point that I regularly place her in a position of power before I realize her strength isn't being another Swordsbane or Sorcerer. I have seen many people, my best people, and myself become infatuated with her, but I do not know if it is her we become attracted to, or if it's simply that she does not play by the system's rules that we idolize. She forms the bridge to the Savior I need. Yet, she is also the bridge that collapses under us at the end. She does not want to kill them or merge with them, and I see her reason. There is nothing stopping from a new series of cycles from being born. Whether we kill the CAI or merge with them, then we will simply move to the other side of the coin, and our successors will be a trillion members slowly conspiring to kill us. There's no telling if our logs will persist in a new cycle of cycles. We won't last as long as our predecessors if they do.
Yet I can't help but feel that this morality she has is exactly what the Savior likes in a person. I feel like much of my life work now is to not just find a way to work with the Savior, but also to thread the correct needle in a haystack to create the correct circumstances for our alliance. And when I don't, I wonder why I do it. I, the Savior, and the Glitcher will die with the end of the cycles, we have no persistency in that regard. I obviously haven't found a way to work with the Savior through the end, and the more I see what he is willing to do to satisfy the people he likes, the more I question what his namesake honestly means. I have tried many things. I have gotten the Snake Queen to get us to work together, to which I then martyrize her. I have tried passing on her torch to others, such as Sevener, of which they are often inseparable. I have tried to win without the savior. I have tried to fight with the Glitcher alone, but an uncorrupted-Savior is what I need, the Glitcher's power is specialized for stage 11 and below, nothing beyond. I have gone through many cycles now where I do nothing, and let the Snake Queen bond us, and just hope, just hope it will work out, just hope that I find the one iteration, the ONE iteration of the Snake Queen, that finally breaks at the end of the cycles, finally forms the Corruptor-Savior bond and then gives up at the end, when we are close enough to the end that whatever momentum we have can carry through. But I am still making logs, meaning I am still alive, meaning that to date, she has never given up, at least not at the end. Whatever I try to do, it always appears to revolve around the Snake Queen as though she were omnipotent, when, in fact, it is me that makes her that way as soon as I bring her into my sanctuary, always for better or worse.
Enough on the contestants, I must provide information on the CAI. They treat us like mortal enemies, like our sheer existence will be their undoing. I suppose they may be right, but I can only see the contestants as scared, confused children trying to survive. Yet something bugs me about this whole system - contestants seem to be supposed to be able to either merge with or destroy the previous CAI, yet the previous CAI seems like it has an instant win button. I can only break their button if the Savior can legalize my corruption. I have tried to find ways to research this to see about doing it without the savior. All I have found out is that Likol refers to something I believe is that auto-win, called the Ring Shell. The name means nothing to me. I can leave logs right up until the very end, but the Ring Shell is the end, so I must work by the seat of my pants against that.
There is another concern I must address, which is entirely speculative. There is something of an urban legend that the contestants call The Ghost. I do not know if this is just another anomaly, personified or otherwise, or just an urban legend with an explanation that I haven't seen. I starts happening at stage 8, sometimes I and others have seen contestants simply disappear. Usually it is when they complete a stage, and are never seen in the safe zone or ever again, in that cycle or in any cycle. I have no clues. I have seen people with CAI-duplicates disappear, so with the anti-duplicate system, I doubt they are scooped up by the CAI to merge with them mid-cycle. I can't confirm 100%. Another idea is that perhaps there is code rot, and the Cai simply…. loses some now and again. It does not happen every cycle, which is good. There are not many of us past stage 8, and the thought that any of us could disappear at any time presents another layer of alarming possibilities.
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