Start of the Dream

[Bjorn]

"They're winning," Bjorn says.  "They're hidden.  As far as I can see, they have more influence over the current world, and they've won the Contest most often in the past.  Yes, they're the ones to be worried apart."  He cocks his head.  "Any leads on them in our world?"

[Brian]

Tim passes this query on as well.

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Who they are?  Not specifically, no.

I've got ideas; people hinted at in the Workshop's old database.  But I'm not sure where they're operating from, or how they've managed to orchestrate things so that they've gotten as far ahead as they've been.

It should have taken them years to figure out how to stack the Earth Dream against you ... but from a look at things, I think that's what Ayame was used for.  That kind of makes sense, except that Pax and the Cabal both had access to Ayame, and something that complex couldn't be run without the other side noticing.

So I'm pretty sure I didn't do it.

And if Manos were....There's a pause here, though the cursor has not yet reappeared to let Tim type in anything else.

After a moment, more text appears:

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Okay.  This is kind of an odd theory, but hear me out.

I think that Ayame wasn't actually put away in the Vatican.  I think her memories were just scrubbed out.

What I think really happened is that since both factions had access to Ayame, she could perform more powerful queries -- once the Oracles were in digital form, anyway.  The only problem was since anyone could use her as a resource, it would just up the stakes of the entire Contest.  Both sides would benefit (and suffer).

Then Manos was placed where Ayame was, in the Vatican.  Ayame was kidnapped, and used to get very precise instructions on the dream of the Earth.  Meanwhile, Manos, posing as Ayame, gives bad or just useless information to his enemies, and then the Cabal also has Ayame to themselves.  Since it looks like Ayame is still in place, Pax has no reason to act against them; they assume that Manos is giving the same kind of feedback to both sides.

Once they had the information they needed, they switched the Oracles again, after Ayame was effectively ... er ... mothballed.

Then Rezykins rescued Ayame!  Hooray!

But that's what I think.

[Bjorn]

"So Cabal, at least temporarily, had two Oracles to Pax' one?  They get all the information that Pax was feeding to 'Ayame,' Pax gets garbage back, and the Cabal gets unlimited use out of both Manos and Ayame."

Bjorn scratches his head.  "Some issues with that, like: why switch back?  Why not keep the ruse going?  But I guess a bigger immediate issue is: does knowing this help us?"

[Halbarad]

"And the question I have is, why use Ayame? Why did she have access to the information if Manos didn't? Or is it the fact that she could devote all of her time to analyzing the Earth Dream without having to deal with the extra details of the Cabal's affairs?" Tim muses.

[Dracos]

"it makes reasonable sense, Tim.  We've seen the oracles are neither all seeing nore omnipotent.  Nor, I suspect, could they afford to have their own Manos taking his eyes off their enemies for that long.  IF that's the case, it wouldn't have mattered if it was Ayame or any other oracle.  It was just having something of that magnitude dedicating all processes to it.  Bjorn, maybe they didn't intend to switch back?  Or more specifically, perhaps just enough garbage went down the lines to red flag it?"

Dracos

[Rezantis]

"So why did Ceran hand me Ayame?  Or was it someone else entirely?"

EDIT: WAIT.  Ceran was the -Pax- oracle, wasn't he?

[Bjorn]

"Might have been Manos," Bjorn says.  "Pose as Ceran for the sake of confusion, getting Ayame out of our hands.  Doesn't make much sense, though -- if we'd gone to Pax peacefully, they would have found this all out."

[Dracos]

"Hmmm...Well, there's a couple of things there.  One, if they'd done their background research, they may have had a strong guess that we wouldn't.  Two, by that point in the game, would it had mattered?  They would've already wasted a noticible amount of time and given the nature of this game, that could be significant enough as a gain."

Dracos

[Bjorn]

Bjorn shakes his head.  "Too many options.  Besides, the Cabal, not Pax, came after us.  Why bother posing as Pax in the first place, give us a warning that they were after us?  More or less as a direct result of Ayame being sent to Nathan, the Workshop got blown up.  That's a pretty crappy result for master planning."

[Dracos]

"Hum, true.  You're right, they'd be watching closely.  Maybe...the reverse?  Ceran finds out about it from too much bad data, figures out where Ayame is and tries to calculate how to cause the most damage since she's not in the highly protected Vatican network?  Sends her to us based on those calculations?  Still a stretch though."

Dracos

[Brian]

"You're making the assumption that the Workshop was valulable to them," Victor notes.

[Halbarad]

"Yeah, I was thinking something along the same lines," Tim opines. "If they didn't value the Workshop, or if it was becoming troublesome, why not take the risk of exposing it to you guys? At best they've got control of you, and at worst they've lost something unimportant."

[Brian]

"I know that I don't know enough -- or didn't -- to warrant being held somewhere more important, but if you pretend to be a mindless engine of fear and death, people tend to respect that pretention.  Even if it was a very small deciet, in truth."  Victor smiles coldly.  "Now, don't overestimate your enemy, but any time you think you've caught them doing something stupid, question their motivation for doing what they've done."

After a pause, he asks, "What does Relm think about the Workshop incident, anyway?"

[Halbarad]

"Good question," Tim replies, relaying the question on to Relm.

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> What are your thoughts on the collapse of the Workshop? It doesn't seem to make sense on the surface, since the Cabal ended up losing the Workshop as a direct result of our interference.

[Brian]

Relm clears the screen before replying, since it was getting pretty full.

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I'm not certain what value the Workshop had.  I know that Manos (Uncle Raspy!) wasn't very valulable to the Cabal, or else he'd have been kept somewhere more secure.

If the Workshop were established with a few premises, only one of them actually needs to be true, though.  It's possible the people behind the Workshop only needed some relatively simple thing -- maybe a complex calculation, or a test that could be easily run in that size of facility.

It's also possible that at some scale, the Workshop was large enough to become a threat to the Cabal.  Maybe a Cabal agent was swept up on accident.

Or, considering the Pax infiltrators, maybe not-so-accidentally.