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Description

Having dealt with the invasion of vanillite as best as she could manage at the moment, Ari dumped her gear, left some notes on the desk along with some of the broken parts, and went off to a hot shower…

Also, Crush (who belongs to Darin-Wafflex ) gets a quick mention!

Part 1: Testing the Prototype

Next time I decide to mimic a character’s handwriting, I’m giving them doctor chicken-scratch instead of Ari’s precise mess. That took me much longer than I expected. The circuit on the schematic I traced from one on Wikipedia . It’s for a crystal diode AM radio, which is about as far as my actual electronics experience ever got. XD

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Ari’s Journal (792 words)| January 14th, Year 1

I’m an idiot, forgot I don’t have the egging filters... Between that and the power-sucking tauros-pockey vacuum tubes, getting this heavy hunk of junk to do anything useful was impossible… If I ever see another Arceus-forsaken snow cone…

I need a hot shower.
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If I thought life on Steam would be easier than Fall City, I'm not really certain where my brain was. It’s got all the problems of a city, but somehow being adrift in spacetime has caused Steam to be extremely unstable aetherically. True ghosts are an annual event, and now we’ve had an invasion of purposely-created vanillite. Creating one or two intentionally might be possible back home, but seriously, this one man managed an army.

It’s probably a good thing I got my prototype styler into something approaching a functional state last week. I’d planned on conducting a few more tests to make sure the power transfers were all within reasonable parameters, and then perhaps finding someone’s well-behaved pet to practice with, but my cursed luck struck again. An Army. Really. As in enough to get the lake guardians up in arms. The ghost invasion a year ago didn’t even manage that.

The locals were actually handling it rather well. This city seems to be proof that people will adjust to just about anything, and there were several groups out in the street, and even heading up into the mountains, to collect the invaders. I probably would have left my untested problem at home… but then I noticed that not all groups were simply collecting the cones… I saw a zangoose gal eating one, and I knew we needed to be collecting them faster before anyone else got ideas.

The good news is the prototype worked as expected. The first few minutes of enthusiasm that this patched-together heap of components actually can make a capture was enough to gather a few vanillite as I headed down the street.

What I should have expected was that it would fall apart the first time one of them attacked first.

My prototype styler is necessarily a very stripped down version compared to the one I carry at home. The technology here is, on average, nearly as advanced as home, but the two styles have diverged considerably and I’m still not entirely certain I understand the local variant of electronics. Because of that, I wanted my first prototype to be as simple as possible so it would be easy to debug. Also, vacuum tubes and channeling facets are heavy. I don’t think it’s possible to make a full-function styler in a handheld size with the local capabilities.

Today I learned firsthand why Prof. Hastings added emotion filters and resonance breaks so early on in production, and why rangers have to reach a fairly high rank before they’re allowed to disable those capabilities. It's really, really hard to communicate any sort of empathic desire for friendship when the foremost thoughts in your mind are about how you wish to defenestrate the device on your back at your earliest convenience.

I got hit by an icy wind, got annoyed, and suddenly the pokemon I was attempting to catch was furious. Before long, I was covered in ice and electrical burns, my styler had blown two tubes, and I had resorted to cleaning up my mess with my styler from home, and then sticking with web traps for the rest of the day.

Not that the filtering issues were the only problem. I’ve also got some power-balancing to do. I blew out a few tubes, but overall, I was barely able to keep the system charged. Maybe avoiding the feedback I ran into will keep the power-draw down a bit, but I’m still going to have to figure out something better for batteries. Also, idiot that I am, I forgot that snow and ice are just names for cold water. Punching the metal shell covering the main tube assembly full of holes was a brilliant idea as far as a heat sink, and without it, the system would not have stayed functional as long as it did. However, with all the ice flying around, the holes also let a problematic amount of water into the electronics. One good thing about Steam tech is that it handles overloads much better than solid state, or I’d have to replace more tubes than just the two.

As much as I want to get this localized styler up and running so I don’t have to keep risking breaking my original in a place where I can’t repair it, I’m not taking that prototype out of the room again until I get the filters figured out at least… Oh, and figure out how to waterproof the thing.

Description

Having dealt with the invasion of vanillite as best as she could manage at the moment, Ari dumped her gear, left some notes on the desk along with some of the broken parts, and went off to a hot shower…

Also, Crush (who belongs to Darin-Wafflex ) gets a quick mention!

Part 1: Testing the Prototype

Next time I decide to mimic a character’s handwriting, I’m giving them doctor chicken-scratch instead of Ari’s precise mess. That took me much longer than I expected. The circuit on the schematic I traced from one on Wikipedia . It’s for a crystal diode AM radio, which is about as far as my actual electronics experience ever got. XD

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ari’s Journal (792 words)| January 14th, Year 1

I’m an idiot, forgot I don’t have the egging filters... Between that and the power-sucking tauros-pockey vacuum tubes, getting this heavy hunk of junk to do anything useful was impossible… If I ever see another Arceus-forsaken snow cone…

I need a hot shower.
--------------------------------------------------------
If I thought life on Steam would be easier than Fall City, I'm not really certain where my brain was. It’s got all the problems of a city, but somehow being adrift in spacetime has caused Steam to be extremely unstable aetherically. True ghosts are an annual event, and now we’ve had an invasion of purposely-created vanillite. Creating one or two intentionally might be possible back home, but seriously, this one man managed an army.

It’s probably a good thing I got my prototype styler into something approaching a functional state last week. I’d planned on conducting a few more tests to make sure the power transfers were all within reasonable parameters, and then perhaps finding someone’s well-behaved pet to practice with, but my cursed luck struck again. An Army. Really. As in enough to get the lake guardians up in arms. The ghost invasion a year ago didn’t even manage that.

The locals were actually handling it rather well. This city seems to be proof that people will adjust to just about anything, and there were several groups out in the street, and even heading up into the mountains, to collect the invaders. I probably would have left my untested problem at home… but then I noticed that not all groups were simply collecting the cones… I saw a zangoose gal eating one, and I knew we needed to be collecting them faster before anyone else got ideas.

The good news is the prototype worked as expected. The first few minutes of enthusiasm that this patched-together heap of components actually can make a capture was enough to gather a few vanillite as I headed down the street.

What I should have expected was that it would fall apart the first time one of them attacked first.

My prototype styler is necessarily a very stripped down version compared to the one I carry at home. The technology here is, on average, nearly as advanced as home, but the two styles have diverged considerably and I’m still not entirely certain I understand the local variant of electronics. Because of that, I wanted my first prototype to be as simple as possible so it would be easy to debug. Also, vacuum tubes and channeling facets are heavy. I don’t think it’s possible to make a full-function styler in a handheld size with the local capabilities.

Today I learned firsthand why Prof. Hastings added emotion filters and resonance breaks so early on in production, and why rangers have to reach a fairly high rank before they’re allowed to disable those capabilities. It's really, really hard to communicate any sort of empathic desire for friendship when the foremost thoughts in your mind are about how you wish to defenestrate the device on your back at your earliest convenience.

I got hit by an icy wind, got annoyed, and suddenly the pokemon I was attempting to catch was furious. Before long, I was covered in ice and electrical burns, my styler had blown two tubes, and I had resorted to cleaning up my mess with my styler from home, and then sticking with web traps for the rest of the day.

Not that the filtering issues were the only problem. I’ve also got some power-balancing to do. I blew out a few tubes, but overall, I was barely able to keep the system charged. Maybe avoiding the feedback I ran into will keep the power-draw down a bit, but I’m still going to have to figure out something better for batteries. Also, idiot that I am, I forgot that snow and ice are just names for cold water. Punching the metal shell covering the main tube assembly full of holes was a brilliant idea as far as a heat sink, and without it, the system would not have stayed functional as long as it did. However, with all the ice flying around, the holes also let a problematic amount of water into the electronics. One good thing about Steam tech is that it handles overloads much better than solid state, or I’d have to replace more tubes than just the two.

As much as I want to get this localized styler up and running so I don’t have to keep risking breaking my original in a place where I can’t repair it, I’m not taking that prototype out of the room again until I get the filters figured out at least… Oh, and figure out how to waterproof the thing.