Ms. Hand, I don't feel so good...

 [Originally written September 19 2020]

Alright, so my account of what happened in this session is going to be rather confused, because of unintentional time travel shenanigans. You have been warned! My first order of business, before the time-space continuum unraveled, was to bring Lucius back into the world and put him through his training. He learned his verbs just fine but when it came time to take him out to the drive computer, he got pulled into a large flock of Norns, making it incredibly difficult to get him to follow me.

Thankfully, he was perfectly willing to follow Greg, who always comes when called. Thus, the Grendel led the young Norn on his rite of passage journey, and as per tradition, assisted in educating him.

And with that out of the way, it was go time. I prepared both the remaining genomes and re-imported Verania. Julia went and threw a wrench in my plan by getting pregnant while I was trying to juggle the complicated maneuvers – thanks, Julia. But that just meant I had to act before the new egg arrived.

I put one egg in the incubator and hovered nearby with the next, ready to drop it in immediately. Sidonia arrived in the world, I dropped the egg onto the incubator and… it dropped to the floor. The doors had closed almost instantly. Dangit! Well, Augustus will just have to wait. I stashed his egg up by the beehives and began attending to Sidonia.

She learned her verbs just fine, and at least would look at objects, but when faced with food and told to push it, she’d just repeat “food.” Verania was getting around the world but still not looking at anything but herself and the teleporters, which she used to hop in and join Sidonia. It was remarkably depressing as I hovered there, my pleas to push food falling on two sets of deaf ears.

I gave up for the time, and went to see Julia, who had laid her egg in the tunnels beneath the island. Her life force was dropping lower and lower, so I tried to convince her to eat something, but she stubbornly ignored the updated coconuts. Instead, she and Flavia took the lift and then the boat over to the dock by the Grendel Tree. There, I continued trying to coax them into eating, and finally had some success.

The egg beneath the island was undisturbed, and soon hatched. I exported little Marcellus to keep the population under control. I don’t think I’m going to separate generations, just have a queue and cycle them in.

I returned to Sidonia and tried to coax her into eating again. This time she cooperated, and the garden had cleared out a bit, so I took her through the teleporter and down to the second computer. “Scared” was quite appropriate, but hiding behind the column wasn’t going to protect her from the disaster that loomed on the horizon. 

Suddenly, the game window closed. The kits were left open and attempting to close them produced error messages, so I had to kill them with the task manager. Disoriented, I tried to figure out how much had been lost.

Verania and Sidonia were back in the verb computer room. Marcellus’s egg was unhatched. Julia was back on the island. But Sidonia and Quintus had suffered a rather unusual rendering problem. The former managed to re-collect her molecules after a moment, but the unfortunate Purple Mountain Norn was a little worse for the wear. You can’t run from sprite issues, Quintus!

Marcellus got stuck hatching a second time, but exiting and reentering the game fixed that. I exported the duplicate and went to attend to Julia, who had been thrown back to before she’d recovered her life force. A few coconuts later, she was on the mend.

Meanwhile, Greg had made his way over to the lighthouse, a road rather uncommonly traveled. He must have found the trip rather exhausting! Quintus finally put himself back together and went off on adventure with Tiberius, while Gaius made the rare trip up to the treehouse.

I checked in on Verania, who had traveled all the way to the submarine bay on the island. For a Norn apparently incapable of perceiving most things, she does manage to move around the world quite a bit. I’ve also noticed her shivering from time to time, though I don’t remember her having any sort of mutation that would cause that. The one mercy in her situation was that she apparently doesn’t feel hunger – it was only after I’d started updating the genomes that I realized the mix of PMN and standard genomes could result in a broken hunger system.

Edit: I was wrong about this; PMN do not use the updated life kit genomes, so something else caused this.

I suppose as I cycle Norns in I’ll have to verify they have the complete set of updated digestive genes. Hungry or not, she did still need to eat, so I resumed the impossible task of trying to get her to look at food. Meanwhile, the Banana Norns gathered on the beach above, apparently in preparation for a party I hadn’t been invited to, as a few moments later every creature in Albia was on the island!

Julia apparently had developed a mean streak, as she kept hitting poor Greg and hiding behind him where I couldn’t scold her. I managed to get a few disciplinary smacks in and extract the poor Grendel from the area by lift. He was thankful for the rescue, but needed a little reassurance after the trauma.

Unfortunately, the game crashed again, throwing me back a good five minutes. At least now I could tell Sidonia and Flavia apart until the former reassembled herself. This behavior started when I added my updated herbs, hootch hider, and underground mushrooms to my main game, so I removed the latter two in the hopes of ruling out the culprit. We’ll see if the game continues to give me trouble.

I repeated the last five minutes of progress, and Julia apparently decided she wanted another egg, so she joined the Banana Norns and introduced herself to Lucius. Hopefully this one won’t end up having to hatch twice!