This story refers to the Lunar Experiment that occurred on May 19th and is also relevant for the plan to Contact Nera tonight (June 2nd) at 8pm ET.

For background, the two links below might be useful before reading on:

“The Arbiter’s Stylus”: http://forums.play.net/forums/DragonRealms/Events%20and%20Happenings%20in%20DragonRealms'%20Elanthia/In-Character%20Event%20discussions./view/1204

Experiment Event Log: https://elanthipedia.play.net/Lunar_Experiment_and_The_Arbiter%27s_Stylus

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OPTIMIZATION

The room has the man, the messenger, and the woman. The man sits at his desk, slowly scratching his quill across parchment. The messenger waits nearby, hands clasped obediently behind his back. The woman sits in the corner. She is tied tightly to her chair.

The scratching of the quill stops. The parchment is rolled up. Red wax is poured. Stamped. The finished scroll is added to the pile of others and the man stands from the desk.

He hands the pile to the messenger. "Deliver Willowbrook's first. She’s closest. Then the others. A report on the Stylus Experiment."

The messenger takes the scrolls with a nervous bow and moves quickly toward the opposite end of the room. He keeps his eyes cast downward toward the floor, as if not looking at the woman will make her disappear . . . or maybe just so he can sleep a little better tonight.

He shuts the door softly behind him.

The man leans heavily on his desk with a tired sigh. "One hundred and ten times," he starts slowly. "I've stood in front of that woman Willowbrook one hundred and ten times . . . and do you know what she says every time?" He turns to the woman with a curious eyebrow raised.

She assumes the question is rhetorical. The cloth around her mouth would have made it hard to respond if it wasn't.

He continues: "She says to me, 'Profits are not all measured by mere material wealth. Sometimes you can strike deals which gain you other advantages and extend your sphere of control and power.'" The woman watches his face melt into a maddened grin. "How right she was, after all."

She notices how as he says this he absentmindedly taps his fingers on the small, clear glass tessera cube that sits on the edge of his desk.

"Ironic, then, that the deal I'll strike is the one she wants no part of. Willowbrook, Kworlin, Ansprahv . . . none of them do," he says bitterly. "These matters of magic hold little interest to them."

"They still think this is all about pouches. About coins and gems and glittering things. But these are but shadows on the cavern wall," he says with a dismissive wave of his hand. Then his voice hardens with determination: "I seek the flame that casts the shadows, the origin, the noumena . . . And the Experiment has shown me the path to these."

"You should have been there for it, the Experiment," he says excitedly. He stands straight and faces her. "It didn't work - well not the way we had intended, anyway - but They did come, the Negotiants. And the things They showed us . . . equations and functions, as beautiful as they were terrifying." He walks toward her chair.

He finally pulls the cloth down from her mouth. "And do you know what those equations showed me?"

"I have a feeling you're going to tell me," she says angrily through clenched teeth.

"That we are at a local minimum. A Pareto equilibrium, where nothing can be gained without one party making a sacrifice. No more freebies."

"We stand in the valley of optimization . . . can you see its rolling curves? Its gigantic mountains where the error terms are so vast and the orthogonal shocks so persistent that convergence is but an unimaginable rumor, and chaos reigns?"

"And here we lie in our shallow hole," he says with mild disgust, gesturing around him. "A place only slightly better than the mean, and so we are content to call it optimal." He scoffs.

"But somewhere . . . somewhere out there," he casts his eyes into the distance. "Is a massive trench waiting for us. Where the residuals are minimized and every observation lies on the fitted line, a predictable result of accumulated experience. The equilibrium state. Convergence."

"That’s what the Negotiants showed me." He was staring into thin air at equations and relationships and theorems that she could never even begin to comprehend, even if she could have seen them. "The others didn't see it . . . don't see it . . . that's why I MUST be the Stanchion."

"Or you're just nuts," she says defiantly.

"But don't you see that if we just try, if we just put in the work, we can--"

"--can get out of the little hole we're in now and roll into a deeper one across the valley. A better optimum. Reduced error. Yeah, yeah, I get it, enough," she says mockingly.

The man pauses as if taken by surprise. A curious expression on his face. "What a novel thought," he says, contemplating. "I hadn't thought of that."

The woman is clearly confused. "Then what are you . . ."

"Flattening the valley," he interrupts her. Then he plunges the Crystal Dart into her heart.

*

When the struggling stops, the clear glass tessera cube on his desk chimes softly.

As he picks it up and closes his eyes, its surface frosts over with a chilling blue glow. He raises it to his lips and whispers into it: "The Contract remains as intended. This Stanchion remains . . . tell the Arbiter they are reaching to Nera."

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Maybe interested in this storyline? Join us tonight (June 2nd, 2019) at 8 pm ET as Moon Mages Lenaea and Aaoskar execute their plan to contact Nera, in order to learn more about the Arbiter in Darkness, Its Contract with the Trader’s Guild, and more Lunar magic mysteries.