A History of Sparkspell's Robots
Jun. 30th, 2016 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonmagitechSparkspell’s collective obsession with the combination of magic and technology to create sentient life began with Jillian, the eldest child of the clan’s founders, who built his own familiar and got into some slightly shady old magic books with interesting results.
During this time Jillian was running the lab with slightly excessive enthusiasm, with the result that everyone kind of had to work toward his sentient-life goal. He did a lot of shifty experiments and took a lot of notes. His notes were…not great, but since he was really the only one bothering to write anything down at this stage most of them were stashed in the library, and survived the storm. More on this later.
Happily, I wrote a compilation of Jillian’s work roughly a year ago when it was still relevant to anything I was doing, but basically the clan used to do robots in two ways: the layering of spells on a machine to give at least the appearance of sentience, though Jillian was never satisfied that this was true sentience; and summoning a wandering consciousness into a machine. Examples of successful applications of both of these methods were present in the lair for quite some time, but they’re both gone now, although I think they both had full bios and so they’re probably somewhere on my blog.
Eventually Jillian left, partly because there was no part of the lair he hadn’t blown up at least once and partly because of the first change in leadership. He was succeeded by Jacobin, who chilled the fuck out and mostly let everyone do what they wanted.
Jacobin did have a team working on magically-created life, however. Jillian took the books he’d used for the spell-layering with him when he left, so this team was using the method of attracting a wandering mind to a shell. And then a couple of apprentices accidentally summoned a demon and destroyed half the lab again, at which point the sentient-machine project was shelved indefinitely.
Wade joined the clan some time after the storm, during which the entire science department disappeared or died, because he heard they were in need of engineers to help with the rebuilding. He was already in the habit of making weird little automata, but while cleaning the rubble out of the library he found Jillian’s notes.
What Wade is doing is…something else. He is definitely imbuing his creations with sentience, and his methods are at least partially based on Jillian’s work. But they explode a lot less. More important: Jillian’s notes are written with the assumption of a background in magic, which Wade lacks, and the presence of a number of materials that were lost either when Jillian left or during the storm. Which means that Wade’s interpretations of Jillian’s instructions are rather more guesswork than anyone is comfortable with.
Whatever he’s doing is certainly working–he builds the machines such that they would be able to function regardless, and then points some really vague slightly related magic at them and hopes it produces the desired effect. This is the reason for Victoria’s minor personality inconsistencies and Samovar’s less independent behavior. [On the other hand, it seems likely that Samovar won’t remain that way. Wade found some older papers about something called accumulated life that seem like they might be important.]
During this time Jillian was running the lab with slightly excessive enthusiasm, with the result that everyone kind of had to work toward his sentient-life goal. He did a lot of shifty experiments and took a lot of notes. His notes were…not great, but since he was really the only one bothering to write anything down at this stage most of them were stashed in the library, and survived the storm. More on this later.
Happily, I wrote a compilation of Jillian’s work roughly a year ago when it was still relevant to anything I was doing, but basically the clan used to do robots in two ways: the layering of spells on a machine to give at least the appearance of sentience, though Jillian was never satisfied that this was true sentience; and summoning a wandering consciousness into a machine. Examples of successful applications of both of these methods were present in the lair for quite some time, but they’re both gone now, although I think they both had full bios and so they’re probably somewhere on my blog.
Eventually Jillian left, partly because there was no part of the lair he hadn’t blown up at least once and partly because of the first change in leadership. He was succeeded by Jacobin, who chilled the fuck out and mostly let everyone do what they wanted.
Jacobin did have a team working on magically-created life, however. Jillian took the books he’d used for the spell-layering with him when he left, so this team was using the method of attracting a wandering mind to a shell. And then a couple of apprentices accidentally summoned a demon and destroyed half the lab again, at which point the sentient-machine project was shelved indefinitely.
Wade joined the clan some time after the storm, during which the entire science department disappeared or died, because he heard they were in need of engineers to help with the rebuilding. He was already in the habit of making weird little automata, but while cleaning the rubble out of the library he found Jillian’s notes.
What Wade is doing is…something else. He is definitely imbuing his creations with sentience, and his methods are at least partially based on Jillian’s work. But they explode a lot less. More important: Jillian’s notes are written with the assumption of a background in magic, which Wade lacks, and the presence of a number of materials that were lost either when Jillian left or during the storm. Which means that Wade’s interpretations of Jillian’s instructions are rather more guesswork than anyone is comfortable with.
Whatever he’s doing is certainly working–he builds the machines such that they would be able to function regardless, and then points some really vague slightly related magic at them and hopes it produces the desired effect. This is the reason for Victoria’s minor personality inconsistencies and Samovar’s less independent behavior. [On the other hand, it seems likely that Samovar won’t remain that way. Wade found some older papers about something called accumulated life that seem like they might be important.]
