Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

Wait, what? Zach and Zorian shared a shocked glance, not having expected this at all.

"A memory bank…" Zorian repeated slowly.

"Yes," the Guardian confirmed. "You should be able to sense an empty space inside if you focus on the Key piece correctly. Simply focus on the memories you want to store in the bank and push them inside. Once inside, they will persist from restart to restart and be available for viewing at any time, unless you choose to delete them at some point. Keep in mind that this ability only exists inside the time loop – once you leave and this reality permanently collapses, all of the memories you stored inside the Key piece will be similarly destroyed. Make sure to refresh on anything important you placed there before you leave."

There was a brief silence as the two of them digested this information.

"I guess we now know what that mysterious empty space inside the orb was," Zorian finally said.

"Yeah," Zach said distractedly, lost in thought for a second. He then took a deep breath and turned to Zorian again. "It sounds very convenient."

"Yes," Zorian agreed. The ability was a little redundant to him, what with his ability to create memory packets, but he could imagine that an average Controller would find the ability absolutely invaluable. It was almost like having a notebook that carried over from restart to restart, only better. "Guardian, is there any limit on the amount of memories this bank can hold?"

"There are limits to everything," the Guardian told him. "But you are highly unlikely to ever reach these particular ones. Even if you found a way to store your entire memory and did so in every single restart, you would not come even close to filling the available space inside the memory bank."

Good to know. This gave him some very nice ideas… after all, if he could unload most of the notebooks had he kept in his head into the orb, he could really go wild in recruiting experts and having them continue their work across restarts.

"Do you think the other imperial artifacts have similar abilities?" Zorian asked Zach.

"Probably," agreed Zach. "Hey, Guardian! What about the other pieces? Do they all give us an ability related to the time loop?"

"To find out about the other pieces of the Key, please bring them to me for inspection," the Guardian answered.

Zorian snorted in amusement.

"Yeah, dumb question, I guess," Zach said, clacking his tongue. "But I think they probably do all give an ability. No reason for the orb to be the only one. Now I’m even more anxious to get my hands on these things…"

"No wonder we haven’t been able to find a way to place temporary markers or remove people from the time loop," said Zorian after some thought. "No doubt those two abilities are also tied to imperial artifacts. Probably the crown Quatach-Ichl is wearing and that dagger that is in Eldemar’s royal treasury."

Zach gave it some thought.

"You may be right," he eventually said. "Which do you think gives what?"

"Well, purely thematically speaking, I’d guess that the knife is what removes people from the time loop," said Zorian. "Which would leave the crown as the artifact that allows for the placement of temporary markers."

"Hm. It does make sense if you think of the temporary markers as subordinate to the main one," Zach mused. "The main marker is the ruler, and the ruler needs a crown."

The Guardian of the Threshold remained silent during this conversation, giving no indication it had heard anything. Pity. Zorian had hoped it might react a bit and therefore indicate how close they were hitting to the truth. He really wondered how that thing was made. It appeared to be a mindless automaton, but some of its responses were sufficiently lifelike that he had trouble treating it as a purely mindless thing.

"Guardian, will you remember that we’ve already brought you this piece the next time we visit or do we need to bring all five pieces simultaneously to get higher authorization?" Zorian asked.

"You must bring the entire Key if you want higher authorization," the Guardian said.

"Damn," Zach swore.

"We suspected it would be like this," Zorian sighed.

They spent another hour pestering the Guardian about the orb and the memory bank it contained. They didn’t find out anything terribly important though, so they eventually disconnected themselves from the Sovereign Gate.

Unlike the first time they had gone here, this time they’d made much more thorough, sophisticated preparations. As such, they didn’t find their bodies catastrophically damaged by the time they were ready to leave. Quite the contrary, the researchers left them well enough alone with no mind magic necessary. This was partially because they’d brought much more intimidating forgeries of their credentials and partially because they were trailed by two massive bodyguards that kept watch while they were communicating with the Guardian. The bodyguards were, of course, just particularly lifelike golems that Zorian had made for the occasion. They were actually pretty terrible as far as golems went, but they looked human enough to fool casual inspection and that was the only thing that mattered. Their only job was to follow them around in utter silence, looking all grim and intimidating.

They didn’t immediately leave the time magic research facility. They had come here not just to have a chat with the Guardian of the Threshold, but also because they wanted to make use of the Black Room for the restart.

However, they had made a mistake this time – they decided to bring the orb of the first emperor with them into the Black Room.

It was a tempting idea. If they could bring a portable palace with them into the temporal acceleration area, then it didn’t matter much that space was so limited – they could bring everything they needed, even people, inside the orb. The main limitation of the Black Room would be broken. Sure, they still didn’t know how to actually enter the pocket dimension contained in the orb, but neither of them thought the procedure would forever elude them. And besides, they didn’t need to be able to enter the orb to test the viability of the idea. All they had to do was bring the orb with them into the Black Room and see what would happen.

Well, what happened was that the Black Room shut itself down almost instantly after initiating temporal acceleration.

After an hour of analysis and heated discussion with nervous researchers, Zach and Zorian found out that the price of temporally accelerating an area of space was based on the volume of space being accelerated. By bringing a palace worth of space inside, even inside a pocket dimension, the two of them massively inflated the mana cost of the operation procedure. Not to mention that the facility itself was not designed to handle that kind of strain. As such, the Black Room ran out of mana in less than a second and immediately shut itself down. The researchers, though still somewhat intimidated by them, gave them a severe tongue-lashing for even trying the idea without consulting them about it beforehand.

Oh, and they were really interested in studying the orb. Zorian actually considered letting them do so, just to see what a group of dedicated researchers like this could tell them about the artifact, but refused their request for the moment. He had to set things up very carefully before giving them the orb, or else he would simply be handing it to the Eldemarian authorities and starting a manhunt for the two of them.

"I wonder if this is true for the time loop as well," Zach mused later, when they were out of the facility. "If we create our own pocket dimensions here, aren’t we also increasing the volume that needs to be temporally accelerated and thus creating a strain on the system?"

"Probably," Zorian said. "But the time loop reality is so huge that even if we increased its internal volume a bit by opening additional pocket dimensions, the added power drain should be pretty miniscule. The problem with the Black Room is that it’s pretty tiny. The space inside the orb is actually many times larger than the Black Room itself. As such, bringing the orb into the Black Room is like trying to transport an elephant inside a tiny, one-man boat. No matter what clever method you use to make it fit, it still weighs so much it would sink the whole setup. I fear this idea is dead in the water."