New blood, new problems

 [Originally written September 7 2020]

In addition to the 8 Norns examined last time, I want to introduce one more. See, despite having a good mix of Banana, Horse, and Purple Mountain Norns, there’s one more breed I wanted to introduce that I never got the chance to in my last population. So before I began the process of bringing everyone back into the world with corrected genomes, I hatched one additional child – welcome Julia the Pixie Norn! I injected her straight from the Genetics Kit, so she has no mutations. 

There’s a catch though – with Julia added, the Norn count goes up to nine – and I believe the incubator closes at eight. However, there is a small grace window after hatching the eighth Norn where you can bring in a ninth. Since we have three male Horse Norns, I designated Augustus as the last to come back into the world – the one who will have to wait if I miss the window. Thankfully, I don’t have to worry about the incubator closing after that because my plan is to export babies rather than leave the eggs sitting around, so I can just leave them to hatch naturally. That means I won’t have to worry about being on egg patrol duty either!

For all that he seems bothered by the Norns at times, Greg seemed quite happy to see them return to the world. His name sticks out a bit now, but it could be short for Gregorius, which is a perfectly valid Roman name, so I’m not changing it. At any rate, he insisted on escorting Julia up to the computer and assisted me in teaching her.

After I’d taught her what she needed, I moved on to the task of bringing the others back into the world. Tiberius turned out to be a little troll! When I tried to bring him to the adjectives computer, he raced onto the lift and hit the button before I had a chance, going in the wrong direction, and giving me a cheeky grin the whole way up. Thankfully I was able to redirect the lift before he could get off on the top! Greg was apparently not happy about being left out of this Norn’s initiation, since he came down the other lift of his own accord soon after Tiberius began his lessons.

Boy do they grow quickly! Julia had grown into a child by the time Tiberius finished learning his words, which apparently tuckered him out quite thoroughly! When he woke, I realized there was something important I’d forgotten to teach them – so I brought them back to the kitchen to show them how to get food from the cheese plate. At that point I discovered a minor bug when I accidentally picked up the plate, which isn’t supposed to be possible. 

After quickly fixing the attribute flags and reinjecting the COB, it was back to business as usual. Greg had decided to part from the Norns and was wandering the underground tunnel, so I dropped a few pieces of cheese down there for him, which he happily ate up. I’ll have to make a COB to put some food down there – maybe some edible mushrooms growing in the shaft under the incubator?

Things had gone smoothly up til now, but it all came to a screeching halt with Verania. The attention lobe mutation that I’d dismissed as probably having no effect turned out to be much, much worse than expected. She sat in front of the incubator, doing nothing but looking at herself. Experienced Creatures players will recognize that as a red flag right off the bat. 

Tiberius wandered over, curious about the newcomer. It would have been a cute meeting, under other circumstances, but my heart could only sink as she failed to react to him. In an apparent attempt to snap her out of it, he slapped her across the face, and she flinched back with a cry… only to settle back into the same position. Then, to my delight, she suddenly got up and started moving, and I intercepted her with the elevator. For a brief moment I thought perhaps everything was fine; that she’d just needed a moment to reboot her little brain…

Unfortunately, she walked right past the computer and sat down on the balcony and continued to not look at anything. She wasn’t listening to the computer either, presumably because she was outside. She occasionally got up to move around the upper level, and did respond to the computer when she was in earshot, so I skipped through the vocabulary to “look” in the hopes that maybe this word would help direct her attention. I plopped a honey pot next to her and told her to look, but got no response. By far the worst part of all of this is that I hesitate to label her a Child of the Mind Norn, as she’s not completely incapable of looking at things – I nearly fell out of my chair when she suddenly looked at the teleporter! Indeed, she seemed to like using the teleporter!

But this, too, was only false hope. Though she’d occasionally look at the teleporter and even use it, I could not get her to look at me, other Norns, or food. She didn’t move much either, preferring to sit at the teleporter and occasionally pass through it to sit apathetically on the other side. I couldn’t deal with her special needs while trying to bring all the other Norns back into the world, so I decided the best thing to do would be to export her until just before the rapid-fire hatching of the last two to be reintroduced. 

Although I’ve commented that they looked like twins, Verania and her brother Quintus could not be more different. He was smart as a whip, going straight for the honey pot before I had a chance to turn the computer on. He learned his words quickly, and when I brought him out to the garden on the way to the other computer, he made a beeline for the herbs and started to stuff his face with those too.

I had quite a difficult time getting little Gaius to learn his adjectives – not because he was giving me trouble, but because every other creature wanted to be part of the lesson! I had the hardest time trying to get them to stop crowding the poor boy; every time I managed to separate someone with the lifts, they’d come back down on their own. Eventually I got Greg and Julia to stay up in the temple, and I decided that having Quintus along for a second lesson was fine.

With everyone enjoying the party over in the temple, the kitchen was a nice, quiet place to introduce Flavia to the world. She learned her verbs and a few basic nouns without much trouble, but that was when Albia decided to throw me another curve ball!  Gaius was marked as being sick in the observation kit.

I hoped that Gaius had just eaten a weed, but no, he was sick alright. There were two saving graces that kept me from worrying too much, though. The first being that Gaius’s life force was up at 100%, so I expected he would have little trouble fighting off this illness. The other was that no histamines were present, so it wasn’t contagious.  

I did notice that his antibody level was flat – something I saw in Beth long ago when she took forever to fight off an illness. Back then, quitting the game and re-entering had “unstuck” the antibody level, so figuring this was the same glitch, I exited and relaunched, and sure enough, Gaius was fighting off the infection in no time. With that crisis resolved, I went back to teaching Flavia her vocabulary.