crystal; rifter cultural exchange war table plot

[aberratic]

FORM: Crystal
SENDER: Ness ( aberratic )
RECIPIENT: all y'all
NOTES: This is a long one, she's a yapper. Important points bolded for the tl;dr, not for ic emphasis.

[ she has learned her lesson in contacting jayce far too early in the day; today, when ness gets on the crystal, it's closer to midday than to the first rays of dawn. she wants to reach the largest possible crowd, after all, and can't reach people who are asleep.

so: it is midday, and the first thing heard over crystal is a stack of papers being tapped neatly on a desk. buckle up, riftwatch, this is gonna be a long one. ]

Hello, Riftwatch, Ennaris Tavane speaking. [ does it sound like she's reading off a pre-written script? maybe. look, she has a lot to get through and she doesn't want to miss anything. ] In looking into how I could best make use of myself here, I found that there's quite a lot of information on rifter technology and knowledge that might have a use in Thedas, but it all seems to be a little spread out, in various different offices and projects. My aim now, which I have received permission from Provost Niehaus to undertake, is to gather all this disparate information and compile it to make comprehensive files for each field. To that end, I have requests of our organization, both rifter and native Thedosian alike:

Rifters, I would like to hear from you on technologies available in your world that Thedosians may be able to reproduce. Some of these notes include reference to a Riftwach Cultural Exposition which took place last year, and I would especially welcome input from anyone who attended or presented at that Exposition. Much of the work on this end has already been done by the agents who worked on this endeavour before me, so my goal here is mainly to ensure that I understand exactly what it is I'm compiling, but I welcome new ideas to add to the compilation—and no innovation is too trivial to be included; at the Exposition, a rifter Jude Adjei met with great success in distributing his peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. If it can be achieved by the means and materials we have available to us in our new home, it's worth consideration, at the very least.

Native Thedosians, here I defer to your expertise in our home. The goal of compiling this information is to be able to facilitate a dialogue between ourselves and the rest of Thedas, to bring to bear the knowledge of worlds beyond to make life better across this continent, here and now. The question I put to you is, who would be most receptive to this dialogue? There are some names in these notes, a Monsieur Guillaume du Naigh, Signora Jacqueline Fioranati, and we have experienced no small success in engaging with the University of Orlais—but it has been some time since the Exposition. Have we made any new contacts? Which organizations are of the most open minds? Any names I receive will be listed and turned over to the Provost as contacts for next steps, once the information has been compiled.

Given no significant setbacks, I intend to have this information compiled and ready to set before the Provost within a month. While I welcome any and all contributions, it would be best they come sooner than later.

Thank you for your assistance, Riftwatch.

Comments

[bouchonne]

Why ever would you defer to others' expertise about Thedas?

[aberratic]

What?

[ sorry byerly, she's absolutely forgotten your voice. it takes her a second to place who she's talking to and what he's referring to. ]

Oh. Well, because I'm only an expert in my own region, obviously. The very remote one you wouldn't have heard of, with no academics to speak of save my father.

And our library.

[bouchonne]

[ fukkin rude ]

Yes, yes, the library. The place you're from is very humid, is it not? How do you keep the books from molding?

[laruetheday]

You want a list?

[ a lot of it's going to be food, just for the record ]

[aberratic]

I would appreciate a list very much, yes!

[ please include recipes, ness is not a cook!!!

[laruetheday]

Tacos. Hot chips. Ranch seasoning. Oh, guns.

[youwonscience]

If you successfully recreate Jude's cookies, I will personally make up some sort of cross-division award to give you. [Not a joke; those cookies were amazing.]

And if you want to get some time on my schedule to talk about the stuff I can offer from my personal world, let me know. I've handed off "the merits of soap" and "germ theory" mostly to our head healer, [enjoy that, Stephen] but I've got a few other ideas that have been in the mix.

[aberratic]

[ this is, without exaggeration, the best and quickest way to get ness to do literally anything. someone get her gold star stickers, she'll be happy for the rest of her life. ]

I'm sure the recipe must have been left with the rest of the Cultural Exposition items, it shouldn't be so hard. Most difficult will be acquiring chocolate, I think, but if a Division Head were to approve the expense...

[ help her earn that award, cosima!!! ]

I would definitely appreciate some time with you, especially regarding the microscopes—though that's more personal curiosity than needing further explanation, truthfully. I'm also very interested in Doctor Strange's idea for a "live blood transfusion", which sounds very exciting, but I'll talk to him about that.

[youwonscience]

I'll be sure to start brainstorming compelling scientific reasons we need the chocolate, sure.

[A joke. Unless...]

And always happy to talk microscopes. Honestly, I'm game for making them more widespread in Thedas; there's people besides us who could benefit. It's a shame we don't have the right kit for blood typing to go with transfusions, but blood cells are a reasonably interesting microscope demonstration, if you're already thinking about it with Strange. Synergy.

[tadpoled]

Back home we traveled via sigil circles. I don't see why that can't be replicated here.

[aberratic]

You're also familiar with sigil circles? I wonder if we were from similar worlds in our past lives. Is the name Candlekeep familiar to you?

To your point about the circles, though—to my knowledge, true teleportation as we would understand it isn't possible in Thedas. I've read some about gates that require traversing a Crossroads, what you may know as a kind of demiplane, but they aren't common here by any means, and recreating that magic would be taxing to say the least—not necessarily something we have the resources to work on at present, unfortunately.

[tadpoled]

I know of Candlekeep, but have never visited. I'm from Baldur's Gate, myself. [He thinks.]

I suppose there's not as many planes here than back home. There's no chance at all to make a sigil circle?

[grindset]

Good afternoon, Ms Tavane. You mentioned reference to the Exposition—have you been given access to the report itself?

[aberratic]

[ brightly, ] Oh, hello Viktor! I have been, yes, the Provost gave me access to the report. I saw your and Messere Talis', ah, [ checks notes to get this right, ] Thau-mo-sphere? It sounds fascinating! Do you still have it somewhere?

[grindset]

We do,

[sounds a little hesitant up top.]

It's just... well, in a manner of speaking, yes.

[ipseite]

( thoughtfully, ) The Seneschal has correspondents at the university, if I'm not mistaken,

( she's unlikely to be, )

and I have found him to be particularly deft in the handling of academics. ( he's like catnip to those people. )

[aberratic]

The Seneschal—Enchanter Julius? I do think I saw his name in connection to one of the names of possible contacts here, somewhere...

[ the sound of rustling papers as she goes through her notes to try to find it. ] Which is the proper title, is it Enchanter or Seneschal?

[ipseite]

While both are correct, Seneschal is more appropriate.

[allthatgleamsisgold]

It is a pity I arrived through the rift and not an Asura of even middling talent. Going by the -

[taste]

- feel of the magic here, much of the magitech of my world could feasibly be replicated. Airships, transport gates, waypoints, mist-cooled tripartate thautmatium energy weapons with lead tracer arrays...

[aberratic]

[ a what of middling talent? magi-huh? tripartate thought-ma-ti-what???

slowly, ] I am going to need quite a lot of that explained, I'm sorry to say.

[allthatgleamsisgold]

Ask whatever you please. I have no idea what is or isn't a constant across worlds.

Besides, it seems, humans.

[undergrunn]

I'm an engineer and mechanic, at home. What sort of technology are you looking for? There's... ( she exhales, a non-verbal "where do I start?" ) well, there's a lot.

[aberratic]

Oh, I can see how that would be too broad a question for you. Hmmm... Maybe, the technology you had in your previous life that was so omnipresent, you didn't even think about it? The givens that made life so much better but you hardly even thought about them because they were just always there.

...I'm not sure how helpful that is, really.

[portalling]

Oh, thank god someone’s picking this up, I kept never getting around to it, and if anything I have more ideas than time to put into practice—

I like to think I made some strides at the Riftwatch Cultural Exposition, but I’ll get you my presentation notes and I can run you through the context. On the medical front, I’ve been trying to convince the locals of:

• Germ theory and boiling water.
  
• Soap and cleanliness.
  
• Plaster casts for more sanitary healing of broken bones.
  
• As Niehaus says, blood typing and transfusions.

( This is over the sending crystal, but somehow he enunciates this punctuated list anyway. )

The Provost and I have some wishful thinking about recreating penicillin; it’s a bacteria incredibly useful for treating various infections. I don’t think we really have the laboratory conditions or manpower to monitor vats of mould in large enough quantities to make a difference, but if you wanted to flex those Diplomacy skills and sweet-talk some of those university academics, convince one of them to come here for a period of study… perhaps I could show them the theory in small-scale, and they take it back to Orlais and work on it themselves. You’d probably need a lot of fermentation tanks and research assistants, both of which we’re, y’know, short on.

[aberratic]

That's exactly what I'm here for, Doctor! [ give ness all the ideas you don't have time for, she'll take 'em all, even if it means she never sleeps again!

pen scritching noises intensify, oh man— ]

This is perfect, we can meet about it as soon as you have a free moment. I've been working on the germ theory and all already, but I think getting the micro-scopes out there would be the best bet on that front, right, because if people see them for themselves, it becomes much easier to believe. While we work on finding people to produce those en masse I can work on networking for someone to come out here for the penicillin—oh, this is so exciting. We could make a real difference with things like this.