[DTA] 2022-07-22 to 25 – Research – Dwirhian

Adventurers are weird, you think, not for the first time.

A few days ago you agreed to help Dwirhian, the tall blue elf with the shaved head, try to figure out 'what's going on with Lake Galavir'. You'd learned a bit about the lake when you first moved to Kantas: it was featured in the Daring Academy's occasional introductory lecture series for new staff entitled 'Kantas: opportunities and challenges for study and research'. Its waters are supernaturally nourishing, so much so that the inhabitants of its shores have developed the ability to survive indefinitely without any other food or drink. Until a few years ago it was, or it contained, a sort of magical repository of the souls of those inhabitants, which were only ever reincarnated as Galavir elves and always returned to the lake when their bodies died, rather than going to Arvandor and being reincarnated among any elves of the same sub-species throughout the world. This was the result of what the lecturer described as 'one of the longest cons in recorded history': centuries or maybe even millennia ago a marid had uprooted an entire elven settlement, wiped their memories, given them a new ethos of adventure and story-telling, and settled them in the Sunset Spine mountains of Kantas with no knowledge of the marid, the scheme, or the existence of any other elves at all. He then amused himself over the following generations by extracting some of the most adventurous souls from the lake and trapping them in orbs that he could use, by means of an arcane machine of some kind, to voyeuristically experience the souls' memories whenever he wished. Adventurers from Daring Heights had defeated the marid and, with the help of Will the celestial of the Angelbark Wood, free the souls from the lake so they could rejoin the normal elven cycle of reincarnation. But the lake retains its nutritional properties.

Which is why, when Dwirhian asked whether anyone in the Fort Ettin library could help her understand 'what's going on with the lake', your immediate response was that she might need to narrow the question down a bit. She explained that she'd recently returned from Galavir – where she was born and raised – and had found that people there were hallucinating or seeing illusions of various different large objects or creatures on the surface of the lake, and also that small strange objects had been washing up on the shore, and that people in the village had started drawing a painting dragons on things a lot. She even tipped out the contents of her travelling bag (why do people do that? why not just take out the things you want?) and shown a small notebook of information about the illusions, some rough sketches of dragon designs, and some examples of the strange objects: irregular flattish pearlescent pieces of some kind of organic-seeming material, easily mistaken from a distance for the scales of some kind of creature.

It isn't unusual for members of the public, especially adventurers, to turn up at the Academy or the Fort Ettin library with random questions like this, usually incomprehensible without context and often requiring a tedious amount of patient questioning to try to elicit the relevant context and discard the irrelevant background details like who killed who. Like most students and faculty members, you generally only help with these odd enquiries when you're feeling a need for a break from your proper work or when another circular has recently gone round reminding Academicians of the importance of adventurers in helping with more dangerous research work and the substantial donations that they often make in exchange for help with their own little investigations. This time round it was mainly the need for a break, but also there was something urgent and vulnerable about this young woman – well, who ever knows whether an elf is young, but this woman – as she stood there struggling to explain why she thought this was important. So you offered to help.

Given your specialism, you proposed to focus on the notes of the hallucinations. You also asked a couple of colleagues with more knowledge of biology and geology to take a quick look at the pearlescent objects, and managed to get a grudging 'If I have time' from an art specialist whose desk you put the dragon sketches on. Then you installed yourself in your favourite corner of the library – well, not technically a corner because the library's round, but you think of it as a corner – and there you've spent the last few days going through the sighting records, grouping them and plotting frequencies and patterns.

Dwirhian has visited you often during these days, being irritating and endearing in roughly equal measure. She keeps apologizing for interrupting your work, which is infuriating – if you're sorry, why did you do it? you think. But she also brings you drinks and snacks, reminds you to take breaks, and occasionally draws you into little chats that you don't really want to have but actually leave you feeling a bit more cheerful afterwards. She seems genuinely interested in your work and life, which is more than some of your colleagues, to be honest. She urges you to come and knock on her door any time if you have any questions about the research, and a few times you. In these interactions she's almost always smiling and relaxed, though you still catch glimpses of the sense of worry and fear beneath. And there was one time, on the afternoon of the second day, when you wanted to check an unclear point in the notes and you were about to knock on the door of her room when you thought you could hear her crying on the other side of the door. For a moment you even considered knocking, imagining that you might comfort her somehow. But you went back to the library. It's none of your business really.

It's turned out to be quite interesting, actually, you say to her after a few days when you think you've got everything from the notes that you're going to get. You explain that there seems to be a finite set of recurring images. At first they seemed consistent with a random distribution, but in your latest review of the results it struck you that they're actually too random, or not random enough: the occurrence of every different type of vision seems to be comfortably in the middle of the range one would expect from a random distribution. So it's... a normal amount of random? she asks. You try to keep your sigh inaudible as you remember how difficult it is to explain this kind of thing to people who don't already know. You explain that the thing about randomness is that it's random, so you get odd results, outliers, clusters, and so on. It only smoothes out to a really consistent pattern when you have a huge amount of examples, much more than Dwirhian has collected here. It could still be genuinely random, you explain – it's impossible to be sure it isn't. But it looks more like a conscious effort to achieve an even distribution. Like someone's choosing what people see? she asks. This is always the difficult part, where they want you to go beyond reasonable conclusions from evidence, into speculation. Of course some of your colleagues, naming no names, love speculating, but not you. You stick to the evidence. Eventually, with many cautionary warnings, you explain that it could well be some kind of conscious design. Not necessarily an intelligent creature actively choosing each vision individually. It could be that, or it could be some kind of machine or magical effect that's been created to achieve this kind of result, or it could even be some kind of natural or supernatural phenomenon that somehow has this effect without any design at all, like how some plants grow in extraordinarily symmetrical shapes. If someone is choosing, or designed something to choose – what are they trying to do? Ugh. You like her but you really have to draw a line here. Well. Okay. It might be – it might just possibly be – intended to show as many different visions as possible to as many people as possible. But that's really speculative, it could be something else entirely. She thanks you and asks you whether you could very kindly write down what you've just explained. You do.

She drops in again the next day. No, you say, giving back the notes, you don't think you're going to get any more from these. You also explain that the art guy didn't get round to looking at the dragon drawings, and that your other colleagues found the small shimmering objects interesting but haven't been able to identify them. Seeing her disappointment, you suggest that she might have more luck at the main Academy. She thanks you sincerely and gives you another drink and pastry and a little bag of coins, which she describes as compensation for taking you away from your real work. I'll head over to Daring, then, she says. What, right now? She shrugs and says, why not?

You count the money later and feel that she has a very over-optimistic idea of how lucrative your 'real' work is.

Adventurers are weird.