AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 273
ARES III SOL 270
Blue light lashed out, and a segment of cave wall two hooves square, made of a milky reddish substance shaped vaguely like a waterfall, peeled away and floated over to where the unicorn and dragon stood.
“Why are you cutting that?” Fireball asked. “There’s a lot more good crystal than that agate. Agate tastes like mush.”
“It’s not for you to eat,” Starlight Glimmer said, using her hoof to draw precise geometrical shapes in the dirt floor of the cave. “I’m making dice. Those computer dice give us nothing but bad numbers. So I want my own.”
“Really?” Fireball asked. “Aren’t you the one who always says our supply of magic is too small to use on anything that isn’t absolutely necessary?”
“This is necessary,” Starlight insisted. “It’s totally necessary to kick Mark’s flank after the humiliation he put us to last night!”
“Really?” Fireball’s eyeridges went up in mock surprise. “So, how did Mark make you preach the glory of Rocks all night? Or maybe the great god Rocks isn’t so good at boosting dice rolls?”
“That was role-playing,” Starlight grumbled. “It’s a thing you do playing O&O. Some of us, anyway.”
“Hey, I did plenty of role-playing last night,” Fireball insisted.
“I don’t think shouting ‘Who brought the marshmallows?’ every combat counts as much of a character,” Starlight pointed out.
“At least mine’s original,” Fireball said. “You just imitated that rock-hound friend of yours. Can’t you do a character that isn’t one of your pony friends?”
Starlight flinched. “Yeah,” she said. “I can do ‘Starlight Glimmer the Cult Leader and Insanely Vengeful Sorceress.’ But the hard part with that one is quitting the role.”
Fireball cocked his head, giving the unicorn a most peculiar look. “With anyone else that would be a threat,” he said. “But you say it like it’s an apology.”
“Maybe,” Starlight admitted. “So… wanna hear more about the glory and wonder of Rocks?”
“No,” Fireball said bluntly. “I wanna hear about when we’re going to cut my rocks. For my next month’s meals. Like we’re supposed to be doing.”
Grumbling, Starlight stamped a hoof on the pattern she’d drawn, and it flared to life. The sheet of agate she’d harvested split into fragments, large chunks falling away to reveal a cluster of about a dozen smaller crystals. With a flash of light Starlight carved little numbers into each of them, then scooped them together with a forehoof, separating them from the rubble.
Fireball picked up the double handful of crystal chunks in his claws and looked them over. “Huh,” he said. “You know what?”
“What?”
“All these funny shapes you made, and I think each side of ‘em is exactly the same as the others.”
“That was the point.”
“Yeah, but, y’know, that’s really fascinating,” Fireball said. “Lots of triangles, but there’s this one made out of pentagons. And of course a cube. I wonder if you can get more sides than this one on a shape.”
“Yes and no,” Starlight said grumpily, even as her inner Twilight rose to the surface. “Five of those are regular polyhedrons. That means all the sides, all the faces, and all the angles are the same. The ten-sider is a cheat- the sides are the same, but they’re offset to make it roll better. Anything larger than the isocahedron there,” she pointed to the twenty-sider, “requires the angles to be different, or the faces, or the sides. And you can’t get a shape like that where the faces have more than five sides without mixing and matching different shapes.”
“Really?’ Fireball looked at the newly made dice again. “It seems like you could make anything with triangles.”
“Nopony ever taught you geometry, did they?” Starlight asked.
“Nope. I had to learn some trigonometry for space navigation- crash course- but nothing about all these shapes.”
“When we get home I’ll get you a book. Right now, please give me my dice.”
“Fine. I just thought it was neat.” Fireball dumped the dice into an old food pack pouch Starlight had brought for the purpose. “Now can we get something for me? I’m almost out of smoky quartz for my seasoning…”
“ARGH!”
Two ponies and a dragon were surprised to see how quickly Mark scooted back from the table.
“These dice HATE me!” Starlight shouted. “I shouldn’t be surprised, since I made them from Mars rock, but STILL!”
“But they made from rocks,” Spitfire said in her slow-to-improve English. “They touched by your god’s hand. They a part of him, right?”
“I’m seriously considering the benefits of agnosticism,” Starlight muttered, reaching for her computer and pulling up the dice-rolling app.
The blood-red agate dice sat in the middle of the table, untouched, for the rest of the session. Starlight fancied the little chunks of crystal were sneering at her.
Mars is pleased, for the interlopers have answered its command:
Di! Di! Di! Di! Di! Di! Di! Di! Di! Di!...
This whole dice thing reminds me of the web comic "Full Frontal Nerdity" where one of the characters had a cursed die that always rolled ones.
There is one point we can get from this: Starlight is not cheating. Nopony with rolls that bad could be cheating.
Yea, honesty. Now can somebody drag me out of this pit and make with the healing potions?
It occurred to me just now...
Assuming they're all camping out in the Cave full-time for the time being, where are they going to the bathroom? There wasn't any mention of bringing along a privacy curtain, even if they utilize a section of the Cave that's very very far from where they're staying, and far from the sections of the Cave where Fireball is getting his food from...
Granted, adding fresh manure directly to the Farm while it's still warm would only help, but it would be particularly disgusting, since they're unable to leave the cave to escape the smell.
Martian gem dice. I bet those would sell for a whole lot if they make it back home.
One more reason for Lazybug to get up, she can sweet-talk the dice into betraying Mars...
Fireball's education may be lacking, but it's really heartening how he got interested in the concept of regular polyhedra, and it'd be cool to see his reaction to being shown how geodesic polyhedra are constructed, after his guess about triangles. It's heartening, in fact, to see him being interested in anything.
That's interesting about triangles. I remember being told years ago that you could make anything out of enough triangles. Mind you, I think that it was a justification of a graphics engine...
8976578 They only stayed overnight in the cave the one night. Since then it's the Hab except for the daily farm work and magic medicine for Dragonfly.
Some games have "Luck" stats that determine the likelihood of various things in the game. But people often forget that they have a luck stat too, and it's usually much less forgiving than the game's.
8976600
Ah, ok. I thought they'd brought a bunch of supplies, and we're staying in the cave to reduce wear on the suits.
8976599
You can, but they wouldn't be all equilateral/ the same shape, which is what Starlight means right now. Even though you can make a teapot out of triangles, you cant roll a teapot and get a fair dice result.
Poor Starlight.
The Dice Giveth, and the Dice Taketh away. Yet one must not get to angry at the dice, and praise be unto the neutral dice gods, whose wisdom and power are as magnificent as they are terrible. Fickle is the will of Nuffle, and yet to curse him is to bring his unholy wrath upon you.
Learn thy the sacred rituals, how to store the dice, how to praise them. Find out if the Dice gods like your touch, or if they prefer that of a dice rolling tower. Learn the sacred substance (be it metal, plastic, wood or gemstone) that the dice gods think you are worthy of touching, and the beautiful designs that they view you need to see. For dice have something to teach each of us, and Cthulhu dice will roll well for some, while barrel dice will roll better for others.
Shake with holy vigor and not the madness of need or desire, for those who need and beg and plead to the dice gods, will find themselves abandoned by them.
And always remember, any dice that rolls 3 1s in a row either hates you, or has had its bad luck burnt out, so its either going to roll really well, or really terrible next roll. It is up to you to see which Nuffle has gifted you with.
Maybe a little perchlorate spice could help Fireball's attitude? Shame Starlight couldn't transfigure some capsicum from potatoes. After all, peppers and potatoes are related as members of the nightshade family?
Yeah. I wimped out and left early with my loot. I'd been wanting the first book of PITW for a while, setting on the shelf. Good luck with the rest of the con and get rested, too.
8976575
Now, there is absolutely no evidence that she isn't cheating.
She could just be very bad at it.
Ah, dice hate- always funny when it's not happening to you.
8976599 Any two-dimensional shape with no curved sides can be reduced to triangles. That's the core of it.
Reminds of this thing I read where one of the players had a d20 with only 1s on it.
One of the (trivial) reasons why my group tended to stick with d6-based systems (Traveller classic, Hero system, GURPS, Star Wars d6) was we could threaten our dice with banishment to Monopoly or (*shudder*) Yahtzee. You can’t do that to a misbehaving d20.
The problem with most die rolling programs is that they work by using a seed to determine where to start pulling bits out of memory as a pseudo-random number. Same seed, same sequence of "random" numbers. You want real random numbers? Use a Geiger counter or a cosmic ray detector; there are even some online.
Now, if Mark were clever, he could hook the particle flux instrument (of course the Hab is going to have one, since Mars lacks a decent atmosphere and magnetic field to fend off CMEs) to a laptop and use it as the random number generator…
I thought point of using agate was for dices not to be crystals.
If he means "more faces", then there are two obvious infinite families (dual to prisms and dual to antiprisms) plus some of Catalan solids
i1.wp.com/www.joedubs.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Catalan-Solids-900x506.jpg?resize=810%2C455&ssl=1
I'm not sure what book Starlight want to show him: the fact itself she can just tell him right there, the proof is not elementary and he's definitely not going to read through it.
Maybe now Mars will give them a break. It gets the pleasure of killing them, over and over, without the death being permanent.
8976682
Any Powered by the Apocalypse in there or nah?
8976707
Or you know use system nanoseconds as a seed. For programs that's not good enough, because you "could" figure out the seed by when the program started and how long it's been running. But if every dice roll is triggered by a human + nano time is a good enough for any dice program (I don't think even starlight could time her roll so well enough to cheat)
But I like the particle flux instrument idea more.
PS: that threat/apology was great.
8976724
Only if they kept using the dice, though.
8976610
Oho, a challenge!
In this one instance, I understand Starlight's pain far too well. RNGesus doth hate me much. I've been told by multiple people, from around the world, that I have the worse dice rolls they've ever seen. Real dice or computer based. In fact when I played D&D, my dice rolls were so bad my DM got fed up and took over rolling my dice for me.
8976612
Oooh, barrel dice. I haven't thought of those in years! Boy, were they crap!
of course the dice are trying to kill you.
8976680
yes Luke from Grand Line 3.5 and his 'diplomacy die'
8976724
The difference between simulation and reality is the level of detail.
Mars craves the visceral, not the virtual.
8976648
If I remember correctly, and it has been some time, the claim was that with enough triangles small enough, you could make something that you couldn't tell wasn't curved. Mind you, this was the PS2 era, when they were using triangles for everything... 🙄
8976633
8976601
8976575
My guess is beings of Equus are heavily dependent on the very real power of Destiny and the effects of magic on space and time. A lot of the stuff they do back home is very luck dependent. They aren't used to planning for probabilities and backup plans.
8976747
I got curious once (I think that I was playing Warhammer 40K) and recorded the results of all my dice rolls over the course of the game. I came in just under the statistical average. Not high enough to win, but not so low that I'd know for certain without going to that effort.
8976762
I wish mine were just below average. As I said, my DM got so fed up with them he started rolling for me. It's gotta be pretty damn bad if the DM won't let you roll your own dice because of how consistently bad they are.
8976762 8976786
If you use the same cheap plastic dice for a while, the edges and corners start to chip and wear, skewing the roll probabilities. To say nothing of unevenly applied paint in the pips or numbers on the faces minutely throwing off a die's center of gravity.
"Try these, Starlight. They've got the 1s pre-rolled out of them."
8976747
My rng woes are more video game based. FTL IS A LOT OF RNG. So I kept coming against ships with three rockets and my ship had no drones. Got wasted on sector one.
Starlight even knows the English translation for "agnosticism" now? Did she memorize the whole dictionary?
...Wait, don't answer that.
I see Starlight has my luck in this world... she can keep it. That universe's version of me is more than happy to be rid of it
8976902
Same for me. I started using an improvised dice cup; since any dice i roll by hand, seem to be cursed to produce lousy results, roughly 4 out of every 5 rolls.
8976579
Especially with the "Manufactured by magic unicorn! Used in the first RPG ever played on another planet!" angle to have up the price. Starlight could make a killing on eBay.
I like this story.
I imagine her rolling 1s for stuff like using a spoon.
This was both sweet and interesting. Both from what they were saying about geometry, and in the dynamic between those two. Fireball's observation about how Starlight's line would be a threat rather than an apology from anyone else was lovely. I'd like to see more of these two. This was a good chapter, in that it gave us some insight into the individual workings of a group dynamic. Seven seasons of TNG, and this is more than Worf and Geordi got.
Then Spitfire delivered a single line and upstaged everyone
At least Mars hasnt made the dice so evil theyre like the Cubes from Terrahawks.
Sneer, sneer, hsssssssssssssssssssssss.
BOOM.
she can always cheat at the game if she wanted to.... just put a little gum on one side
8976715 Agate and its cousins are composed of billions of microcrystals, but you're right that it's not the same thing.
And Starlight doesn't have a proof on hand (proof on hoof?), but she did have basic geometry in school before she embarked on her crusade against cutie marks. Fireball's education comes from random books in his grandma's hoard plus whatever Ember demanded he learn to become a rocket jock.
8976756 No, Mars (at least in Dragonfly's perception) just wants the trespassers gone. Preferably permanently.
8976994 Shipping costs would eat Starlight alive.
8976579
Museums would pay a pretty penny for one that’s for sure.
She has angered the dice gods, no good rolls shall come to her.
I dunno. Hasbro could mass produce them. Agate isn't all that expensive.
"Unicorn Cut Cursed Red Agate Dice
Designed to look exactly like the dice used by one Starlight Glimmer on Mars, these dice are perfectly balanced, but always seem to herald disaster. Beat the curse! TM
Uncursing kit available whenever we figure out how. Not responsible for curse perpetuation or the actual potential existence of curses. If a plague falls upon your house, consult your local priest."