Noah moved over to record the process, it may be important later. "Literally baking code as you go, friggen brilliant." Having the twin doppelgangers there may imprint some ideas on them as well. "Nice man, it will let you isolate direct ID memories and you can just identify her by your interactions with the Null entry."

He walked over to a dry erase board and wrote out "Null - value access/ Fought in battle X". "So long as you keep adding or subtracting Null value you can have a near indefinite number of them and still contain them in a framework that wouldn't break."

He reestablished the update but set it at an increasing percentage. Restart slow and ramp up to normal. "Doing good scar. Just a bit more and we can piggy back on Mistrals work and get you up and walking around."

 The rest of the download went off without a hitch and finally Scar's backup patch was completed.

Noah gave one final nod to Grey and started spooling the transfer. "Right, remember that a body upload is half falling. When in the digital stream roll onto your back and you should land in your body just fine. You'll need to spend some time recovering so we can compile a new archive for you." With that he flipped the .exe and moved over to his body, he smiled at Grey. "And now we commit to the wonders of life. CLEAR!"

 Scar jolted back to his body and groaned. It was the first time you'd actually seen him express pain. "Ungh, I feel like I've been stabbed repeatedly. May I have an asprin?"

Noah smiled as he started picking through his library of chemicals. "Asprin, morphine, hell I am sure I have some weed somewhere if you want it. Badass gets what badass wants." He pulled out one of his pain inhalers and trundled over to Scar. "You did get stabbed. They used hedge weapons so it stabbed beyond the flesh. In our case it was rotting at our minds. I saved a few thorns to make sure next time we could fight fire with fire."

 Scar took the asprin and struggled to sit up on the bed. He was working his arms, legs, fingers, and toes, checking to see if everything worked properly. "Is that what it feels like to die?"

Noah sat down in front of Scar. Putting a claw on either side of him to make sure he had something to brace on. "No sir, this is what surviving feels like." He smiled, "Gotta say man, you're the first to come back from something like this. It will take a bit but we will unlock that last two weeks once you have had a chance to recover."

"But I gotta ask. Any near-death experience on the other side?"

 Scar continued to work at his body. It looked like a person waking up and "working out the kinks" but it was actually a diagnostic function. "Near death experience?"

Noah nodded, "You have a soul. I partly expect you would have ended up in the prime with the angels as your soul is made of prime. Though this is a level of metaphycis that is well over my pay grade."

"A near death experiance is when a person is able to retain information from an experiance when there is no physical means for them to retain such information. There have been a number of studies done on it, the longest record outsdie of religion being nine consecutive hours of total cardiac failure."

"Do you recall anything prior to the brain dance?"

 Scar blinked a few times but shook his head. "I remember getting stung by &%*##$ and then waking up."

 Instead of the word "fairies" or "pixies", only garbled mechanical noises left his mouth. It seemed that Scar still had some memory corruption.

Scar had been brought back online, and so Mistral quietly stepped inside the Faboratory door and watched him getting his bearings.  She chimed in, "'Faeries' is the word you seek.  If it is any consolation, Noah roared hundreds of these into inexistence before Grey buried many more in asphalte bouillant."

Mistral dropped as much of her obfuscation magic as she could, then hesitantly approached the recovery bed.  She stopped a little behind and to the side of Noah,  looking curiously to Scar for any signs of recognition.  At last she said, trying not to look as uncertain as she felt, "Bonjour, Scar.  I am Mistral.  Enchantée."

 Scar tried repeating the word but only garbled machine language came out. "I seem to be suffering from some memory corruption. I was forced to set many memory identifiers to null in order to reboot properly."

 Scar looked at Mistral, furrowing his brow as he listened to her speak. ^$#^&*@, was it? my name is Scar... have we met?

 As with the word "Faeries", Mistral's name came out as a garbles mess.

Noah kept his mouth shut as this was something that was massively important. He did, however, take the sculpture of mistral and put it in Scar's hands. One of the main ways normal minds interact with their own inner mind is physical activity that has meaning to it. He then sat back and quietly monitored Scars' data stream.

Mistral held Scar with her level gaze, wondering if he recognized when his speech came out as garbled static.  At length she answered, "Oui.  We have.  Now we meet again."  She paced the room slowly, pensive.  She was normally glad to be forgotten, an anonymous background extra to all who encountered her.  Being forgotten by a friend was harder, though she knew it was not his fault.

Mistral pulled up a chair by the foot of the bed and took a seat, folding her legs knee-over-knee.  After another pause she said drily, "I held a blade to your throat at our first meeting, so perhaps it is not the worst thing to have une recommencer.  A do-over."  She shrugged and added, "Perhaps you have also forgotten my ingratitude."  She wrung her hands and added in a low voice, but earnest, "You have stood by us through nightmares and risked yourself to protect others, sans plaintes.  You were nearly destroyed protecting bébé Alex, and only then did I realize I took this for granted.  So I will say 'merci,' Scar.  Je me souviens de toi."

 Scar took the vase that he'd crafter and stared at it as though it were foreign to him. He tried to speak French but the entire phrase came out a garbled barely recognizable mess. Then he switched back to English. "I... can't remember. It feels as though I am looking through fog and everything is indistinct."

 Scar looked down as the vase and then back up at Noah, Mistral, and Grey. "I seem to have forgotten some very important things."

Mistral frowned and nodded in understanding, though she wasn't quite sure what to say.  She shared a glance with Noah and asked, "The restoration process completed, non?  Can we account for what has gone missing?"

The technological side of synth consciousness was Noah's domain, but there was also a supernal side.  She'd originally studied synth minds for the purpose of sensory manipulation, but in the process had learned something of their workings.  Mistral focused and then opened her third eye to the complex, ever-shifting resonance of consciousness.  She viewed the arcane signatures of Scar's mind and drew upon her understanding to examine its supernal structure.  Where had it broken, and in what ways?  Was the memory data corrupted, missing, or simply inaccessible to him?

After she'd begun Mistral considered that she perhaps ought to have asked Scar before picking through the workings of his mind, but by then she was deep in study...

 Mistral had studied synth minds but she had never studied a damaged synth mind, so what exactly was wrong would be hard for her to say (roll Intelligence + Computers). However, what she could see was that Scar's mental resonance had holes in it... literal holes as if they'd been cut away. A human with this much mental damage would normally be a vegetable but Scar was awake and seemingly functional to some degree.

Noah frowned for a moment before he set his slate aside. He reached over and picked Mistral up by the hips and brought her in close. "Please tolerate me a moment love." If so allowed he would wrap his arms around her. Drape his wings over her shoulders. Rest his chin atop her head. and even wrap his tail around the both of them. He then performed a working on the fly, all to hide her aura and her nature behind his own.

He had the prime, he had the exact opposite of her occult invisibility. The least he could do was to try to veil her hidden nature for a moment. Here in this place, without eyes to see her beyond a friend.

3 successes to attempt to hide her aura and its forgetful nature behind his own aura so Scar may see her.

"This is the beautiful magess Mistral."

 Scar looked at the two of them, though there was little additional recognition in his eyes. "If you two are about to become intimate, could you unplug me first? I would rather not be a captive audience."

"Hm.  Much remains missing from his psyche.  A humain mind so perforated would be incapacitated, but I would suppose that synth memory is compartmentalized from basic functions."

Mistral humored Noah with his probably-unnecessarily intimate will-working to circumvent her occultation.  After Scar commented on his discomfort, Mistral vanished from Noah's grasp and reappeared on the other side of the Faboratory.  She said levelly, "No need for that, Monsieur Scar.  Noah only attempted to remove possible obstacles to your remembering.  It was not merely an excuse to grope in an inappropriate situation, certainement."  Mistral gave Noah a momentary dirty look, but then said.  "He sees me now well enough.  The issue is that the memories have been excised.  The data is lost."

Mistral pondered, and then wondered aloud, "Grey keeps records, does she not?  I would imagine her memory is of a far greater fidelity than any of ours.  Might she be able to reconstruct the missing portions so they might be patched back in?"  With Grey's seemingly boundless mastery of the workings of reality, odds were that she stored everyone else's memories in addition to her own.

---

Not bad on the Computers roll:

• 13:42, Today: Mistral rolled 3 successes using 5d10 with the World of Darkness nWoD system with a target of 8, rerolling 10s with rolls of 6,10(+9),3,7,8.  Int + Computers.

 Grey looked at Mistral and tilted her head. "Well, yes and no. I don't have yours but I have Noah's, Promethius's, and all of the synths though because they've all interfaced with me at some point.

 … but I've already reconstructed his memories once during his brain dance. His hardware is corrupted. The only way to fix that is to replace his hard drive... and that would effectively kill him and replace him with a new synthetic in this body."
This message was last edited by the player at 03:29, Mon 13 July 2020.

Noah smiled wickedly at Mistral before nodding once. "Right, seems like I need to set you up with a defrag module and I think you are in line for a black card vacation. Feel like visiting a few places? I hear Dresden is the pottery capital of the world."

 Scar looks at Noah and blinks a few times. "Yes... I think I would like that very much."

Mistral considered and then wondered aloud, "With time, his conscience will account for the damage, non?  Create new pathways, as do human neurons?  If one can learn anew, then recovery is possible."

Seeing Scar excited for a vacation, Mistral cracked a faint smile and said, "I've not visited Dresden, so to create un itinéraire direct would take some time to develop.  I did travel to Frankfurt once in my youth, however.  Travel there would be facile à faire.  I could have you there within the hour.  The distance to Frankfurt is less than five-hundred kilomètres, so perhaps a journey by vehicle on le Bundesautobahn would be in order?"

 Grey nodded. "Well, yes to some degree. He'll never get back his old memories but he'll be aware of their absence and that we were involved in them. To make it easier, you may want to give him something else to call you by."

 Scar, for his part, seemed in no rush. "Part of having a vacation is the journey, isn't it? I think I'd much rather buy an economy ticket and ride in a plane. I've always wanted to fly."