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eirikaanemo · 3 years

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Can You Keep A Secret?

Warnings: imprisonment, mentions of starvation and sickness

Note: I haven't actually played Dvalin's quest but I tried to keep it as close to canon as possible. Feel free to leave a comment or message me if you see something wrong.

Venti x GN!Reader

1.9k Words

Your soulmate is secretly Barbatos... now what?

Everyone has a soulmate. And everyone is born knowing your soulmate's biggest secret. For most people it’s really unhelpful, but for some people it helps them find their soulmate. You’re in the latter group, because yours gives you a name.

You've known your whole life that your soulmate is secretly Barbatos. It's… interesting, to say the least. Of course you'd never dare to tell anyone. Thankfully, asking someone what their soulmate’s secret is isn’t very common. It’s considered to be very rude, so no one asks you what your secret is. They'd think you're crazy!

Barbatos hasn't been around for centuries and you're a mortal. This is the sort of thing you would read about in trashy romance novels! But even though it’s crazy and kind of overwhelming, you know it's true. You don't know if he'd ever accept you or want to be with you, in fact, you’re pretty sure he won’t, but you want to try.

Once that’s settled, you just have to find him. If he's anywhere, it's probably the city of Mondstadt. That’s where he seems to have shown up the most in the past, after all. So you move to Mondstadt. It’s a nice place and the people are friendly. Finding a job with the Knights of Favonius was fairly easy and it paid pretty well.

Unfortunately, the 'Storm-terror' problem starts shortly after you move. He throws the whole city into chaos the first time, and then proceeds to keep doing it regularly. The fear is all encompassing, but that's fine, you try to convince yourself. It will all be worth it when you find him. ‘If you find him’, your traitorous mind whispers.

It's been months, a year even, and you're starting to lose hope. How were you expecting to find Barbatos anyway? Shout from the rooftops for him to reveal himself and whisk you away? He hasn't been around for a long time and you knew that. And to be honest, at this point you've given up.

Going home is the logical thing to do, it’s where your family is after all. But you stay because you made yourself a home here. You have friends: Jean, Lisa, and Kaeya. You have come to love the city: music, freedom, and camaraderie. Well, you love the city except for the 'Storm-terror' attacks. Those aren't very lovable.

What concerns you the most though is that 'Storm-terror' is a dragon. And dragons trend to be important (like, archon important). But no one seems to remember this one. So you research. You visit the cathedral and speak with some nuns. You dedicate some time to listening to bard’s tales, asking them if they know any songs about dragons. One does, and it's surprisingly informational. You spend time at the library, pouring through book after book. And after all this investigation, you've come to the conclusion that 'Storm-terror' is actually Dvalin of the Four Winds. Not that anyone actually believes you

It didn't stop you from telling people your theory though, and being more respectful in how you refer to him, despite all the damage he's caused. Eventually they do start considering it and the city starts catching on. If you keep doing this, you may be able to change the city's perspective of and reaction to Dvalin.

The abyss mage catches on to this, and he just can't let that happen. It could compromise the whole plan. So one day he has Dvalin abduct you and locks you up. And true to your luck, this happens out of the blue while you’re taking a walk that you’d finally convinced Jean to go on with you. Which, of course, reverses all your progress and makes the situation even worse than it was before. Incidentally, this also does the exact opposite of what you’d been trying to do by stressing out poor Jean more.

The abyss mage doesn’t care about anything other than making sure you’re not able to go back to Mondstadt. The mage does not care about human necessities. Who cares if you die? Not him. He hates humans. It's kind of part of his job description.

Your prison is where Dvalin retreats to when not attacking. And the mage has to go report to someone else sometimes, giving you opportunities to speak with Dvalin. He never responds to you, but you can tell he eventually starts listening. You start by rambling about various subjects; then talking about how you know he's Dvalin, and that you're sorry he was being treated like he was, once you know he is listening. Because while you don’t know the whole situation, you know that he feels hurt by how humans have treated him.

After several days of talking to him, he slowly starts warming up to you. It’s a strange sort of bond that grows stronger as time goes on. He starts responding and the two of you actually have conversations instead of just you talking. Eventually you even mention how you know your soulmate is actually Barbatos and that you've kind of given up finding him.

He gives a thoughtful hum, lets you vent out your feelings, tries to think of an appropriate response, then allows you to drop the subject once you’ve worn yourself out emotionally. It’s becoming obvious that your health, physical, mental, and emotional, is degrading faster as time goes on.

One day Dvalin and the mage both disappear for longer than usual. After the mage makes sure you won’t be able to escape, of course. It’s not like you would’ve been able to leave anyway. At that point you’re not able to do much at all.

Little did you know that only Dvalin would be returning. They ended up facing the traveler and their companions in battle, and Dvalin was freed from the mage’s influence. The first thing Dvalin does is take them to help "the one decent human, that he actually cares about". You're in bad shape at this point, starving, sick, and weak. But you’re aware enough to hear Jean call your name and feel someone gather you in their arms before blacking out.

When you wake up you're at the cathedral and are feeling much better. Certainly you are not fully recovered, that will take weeks. That one bard who was able to play you a song about Dvalin is always there. You vaguely remember him being there when you were found. He doesn’t really interact with you much, he’s just kind of there, but he does play peaceful music that helps you fall asleep when you’re struggling to rest.

Then the day comes for you to go home. They’ve done all they can for you and you’re past the worst of it. But you’re well enough to be out and about. “Now you take care of yourself,” Barbara lectures you. “Don’t push yourself, get plenty of rest, drink lots of water, and eat three square meals a day, got it?”

“Got it,” you confirm. “Thank you for taking care of me, I really appreciate your help.” She smiles, wishes you well, and returns to the cathedral. You take a moment to breathe and just appreciate being back home, free of your prison and the small cathedral room they’d kept you in while treating you.

Taking a deep breathe you start on your way home. “Hey!” You hear someone exclaim behind you. “Could you hold on a second?” Turning around, you see the bard quickly excusing himself from a street performance before running to catch up to you. Once he’s caught up, he gives you a smile.

“Hi! I’m Venti the bard! Would you be willing to speak with me about something? It’s kind of private so we would need to go to windrise or something, but you’ll want to hear this, I promise.” He says. “Alright,” you agree, “but I can’t make it all the way to windrise. Would my home do? I live alone so we’ll have privacy.” He nods, “that’ll work great!”

The walk home is quiet but comfortable. The bard’s content to hum a tune as he follows you through the streets. Soon you’re home, unlocking the door to let you and your guest in. You lead him over to the couch where you both sit down. “So,” you say, “what did you want to talk about?”

“Well, I was talking with Dvalin a day or so after we freed both of you and he said you mentioned you came to Mondstadt searching for your soulmate. And that you said your soulmate’s biggest secret, the one that you know, is that they’re Barbatos,” he explains. You feel a pang of betrayal at Dvalin’s actions and some guilt for sharing your soulmate’s secret in the first place.

It probably showed on your face because he quickly spoke up again. “He didn’t just tell me for no reason though. You see, I am Barbatos. I’m your soulmate.” Your head, which had been drooping with the weight of your emotions suddenly shot up as you fumbled for a response.

Apparently that showed too because he continued, “And I’m sorry I made it so hard for you to find me. I’m sorry I almost made you give up on me. Most of my waking time is spent incognito so I can watch over everyone while not being put in a position of authority. I didn’t anticipate meeting you ”

There’s a moment or two of silence as you gather your thoughts. “It’s okay,” you assure him. “I understand why you did what you did and I’ll never hold it against you. How were you supposed to know I was even born yet, not to mention that I’ve been in the area searching for you.”

You take another moment or two to gather your wits. “I will also understand if you don’t want to do anything about this,” you state. “I don’t want you to feel forced into having a relationship with me if you don’t want to. The last thing I’d want to do is be responsible for making you miserable. And that’s not to mention how you’re an archon and I’m just a mortal.”

Your talking speeds up as you start rambling, losing control of the conversation as you feel more and more nervous. Once you realize you’re rambling you shut your mouth with a click. “Sorry about that,” you mutter. “I do that sometimes when I’m nervous.”

When you chance a glance at him, he honestly looks a little offended but mostly just really sad. “Is- is that really what you think I think about this?” He asks softly. “Because it’s not. I absolutely want this. I absolutely want you. I’ve been looking forward to this moment for millenia and I wouldn’t give this up for the world.”

He reaches over and slowly, hesitantly, so as to give you time to escape if you want, gathers you into his arms. You realize that he’s the one who picked you up to bring you home. Your ear rests against his chest as lean against him, and his heart skips a beat as you gently grab one of his hands and kiss it. “I’m glad,” you breathe. “I’m glad too,” he voices softly.

You yawn, feeling the exhaustion from your journey home and the rest of the day hit you. He pulls you close and whispers in your ear, “Sleep well, my cecilia, I’ll be here when the sun comes up and when you wake up.” You fall asleep to the sound of his heartbeat.

#eirika writes #venti x reader #genshin impact x reader #genshin venti #venti #soulmate au

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entergamingxp · 4 years

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Mathematicians tried to prove how hard The Witness is

“Each clue type ended up offering a whole interesting problem to study.”

The Witness is a curious, persnickety game. On one hand, it is heralded as a champion of pretentiousness. On the other, it is widely lauded for its mathematical complexity. The Witness’ rules are mapped by symbols on its chessboard grids, and although they look quite simple, there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye – so much so that some study what exactly makes The Witness’ problems difficult at a doctoral level.

Erik Demaine, a professor in computer science at MIT, primarily focuses on research and teaching, and often combines the two by tasking students with solving open problems in groups. To do this, Demaine uses a highly collaborative style of research called supercollaboration.

According to Demaine’s site – linked above – supercollaboration is an innovative research method where researchers solve complex problems without concern over authorship or ego. It is, quite literally, supercollaborative, in that positive and effective teamwork takes precedence over individual input. If you’re especially interested, I’ve embedded a video of a class taught using a supercollaborative model below.

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Demaine was one of the main authors of a 2018 paper called Who witnesses The Witness?, which provides an exemplary case of supercollaborative research while simultaneously extrapolating what makes The Witness a game worth studying for doctoral mathematicians and computer scientists: primarily, its difficulty.

For those unacquainted with the term “witness” in a maths context, it’s a specific value subbed into an existential statement – basically, it is an entity used to differentiate between something existing, something existing in at least one case, and something existing given certain conditions. In the case of The Witness, the lower-case witness has to do with the ways in which puzzles are actually solved – it’s about which strategy is successful, and what path(s) through a grid represents that.

So, who witnesses The Witness? As it turns out, it is remarkably difficult to tell – and that’s why it’s so academically enticing.

Demaine’s team often studies games in order to search for efficient algorithms, and to analyse computationally-intractable problems as a means of tracing innovative solutions that are often derived out of left-field.

“In general, we wanted to try to delineate the boundary between computationally easy and computationally hard aspects of The Witness’ puzzles,” Demaine says. “Some puzzles use one clue type, while others use a mixture of clue types. We wanted to understand which mixtures make puzzles that are hard for computers to solve, and thus probably [also] difficult for humans, and which are actually easy for computers to solve – though that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily easy for humans.”

“The latter is rare in general when analysing puzzles in this way, so the monominoes case was pretty exciting,” he adds.

Hardness proofing is one of the key aims of Demaine’s research and teaching. The art of proving hardness is difficult: it involves finding a proof for why a problem is difficult by transforming or reducing it into a separate problematic form. Along the way, interesting algorithms that can be applied elsewhere are discovered – grappling with the computationally difficult begets solutions for simplication, which means arriving at something that is ultimately easier to use by further complicating what’s under the hood.

Adam Hesterberg is another researcher credited on Who witnesses The Witness? Although he was a PhD student in maths at MIT when he started working with Demaine, he now studies computer science at the post-doctoral level. To him, The Witness looked “computationally interesting”.

“I hadn’t played The Witness until we decided to work on its computational complexity, although I do do similar logic puzzles,” he tells me. “I like board games, either German-style economic resource management games like Gaia Project or anything by Vlaada Chvátil, after whom I named my apartment. Our research group occasionally writes papers on other games.”

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Demaine’s group started work on Who witnesses The Witness? in 2016, two years before it was published as a FUN (from the International Conference of Fun with Algorithms) paper in 2018. It would eventually culminate in a full journal paper co-authored by 10 academics from across three departments at MIT, and one university in Germany.

They’re not solely focused on The Witness, though: Demaine’s group grapples with computational systems in a variety of other games, too, usually applying the same hardness proofs in order to prove difficulty and discover alternative algorithms.

“The computational complexity of games and puzzles is a topic dear to my heart which I’ve been studying since around 2000,” Demaine explains. “My first paper was about Clickomania, which we recently revisited.”

Demaine points to his papers on Tetris being NP-complete – meaning it can be solved by a restrictive class of brute force search algorithms – and Super Mario Bros. being PSPACE-complete, which is a lot more complex – as some of his most popular achievements in the field to date. But what makes The Witness stand out? “When The Witness came out, it seemed like a natural game to tackle, offering a variety of different puzzle/clue types within it,” Demaine explains. “Because part of playing the game is figuring out what the clues actually mean, we first warned the group we were going to study The Witness, and encouraged those who wanted to avoid spoilers to play the game and figure things out for themselves.

“A couple of weeks later, we jumped into analysis, and each clue type ended up offering a whole interesting problem to study.”

Jeffrey Bosboom, who has been a PhD student at MIT since 2011 and co-authored Who witnesses The Witness?, first encountered The Witness when it was brought up during one of the team’s weekly supercollaboration sessions. “That means I was spoiled about most of the puzzle types,” he tells me. “But I don’t feel being spoiled reduced my enjoyment when I played it; the intro puzzles in each area are didactic anyway, and it was still fun to feel the transition from explicit knowledge (being able to tell someone the meaning of a symbol) to implicit knowledge (looking at a puzzle and immediately recognising what the solution must be).”

One of the most unusual things about The Witness’ puzzles is some are Sigma_2-complete, Demaine notes. For those who are a bit unsure what that means – which I certainly was! – Sigma_2-completeness refers to a point in the polynomial hierarchy, which features a variety of different levels of problem-solving complexities.

NP-completeness involves solving problems using brute force; Sigma_2-completeness is a step up from that; and PSPACE-completeness is more complex yet again, having to do with polynomial time (the amount of time it takes for a computer to solve a problem) and time complexity (the computational complexity of the amount of time it takes a computer to run a specific algorithm).

It’s a little difficult to parse, but according to Demaine The Witness’ puzzles – at least the ones featuring “antibodies,” which I’ll get to in a minute – are planted firmly in the middle of the three, existing as “a level up from the usual NP-completeness, while being far below PSPACE-completeness common to puzzles that require exponentially many moves – like sliding blocks or Rush Hour”.

Rush Hour is the classic traffic jam logic game.

The clues labelled as “antibodies” in the paper, which are the logic rules that cancel the effect of other clues in the same region of a given puzzle, have an inherent “necessity” qualifier that requires a slightly more hypothetical approach to problem-solving. This increases the computational complexity and provides an interesting array of problems that can be transformed into one another in order to come up with new, efficient algorithms (transforming one problem into another form is also a quality of Sigma_2-completeness).

“Another unusually interesting case was The Witness with just monomino clues,” Demaine adds. A monomino is a single square of a polyomino, which is a shape formed by stitching equally-sized squares together. The Witness features grids in both forms.

“[It] reduces to hexagons on the boundary of a puzzle, which both turn out to be solvable by an efficient algorithm,” Demaine adds. Reduction is the transformation of a problem into another, more complex variant of itself, and is often used in the study of hardness, whereas “hexagons” refers to edges or vertices that must be visited to satisfy a solution. As Demaine notes, this is an important stage of discovering and defining algorithms.

“In such puzzles, the goal is effectively to find a path visiting specified vertices and/or edges on the boundary of a planar graph, which is a kind of subset Hamiltonian path problem,” he says. “Our algorithm to solve this problem is of interest beyond just puzzles.”

“Subset Hamiltonian path fits into the broader field of graph algorithms (not puzzle analysis), so it contributes to that broader field,” Demaine adds. “We were originally just trying to solve a fun puzzle – monominoes in The Witness – and we encountered a graph problem of broad interest, and then solved it because we wanted to solve the puzzle.

“But the contribution ends up being much broader than ‘we solved a puzzle’ – we also came up with a graph algorithm that might help solve other problems.”

“My favourite puzzle in The Witness is the audio-less audio puzzle in the anechoic chamber room in the town,” says Bosboom. “It’s an easy puzzle, just checking you understand the correspondence between the two different types of audio puzzle panels, but it’s the puzzle that gave me the most pronounced feeling of thinking along with the puzzle designers.

“In terms of my academic career, The Witness is a very rich source of interesting problems in computational complexity, that is also popular and interesting to many other people,” he adds. “It’s a very good – [but] not perfect – game. There’s nothing mystical about it.”

In Demaine’s eyes, most games are sufficiently interesting to hazard study from the perspective of computational complexity. “Even games with minor amounts of puzzling can be pretty interesting,” he explains. “For example, two of our co-authors on The Witness wrote another FUN 2018 paper about how cooperation in games like Team Fortress 2 or Super Smash Bros. or Mario Kart makes these games computationally very, very difficult.”

“It’s hard to formalise what it means for a game to be ‘fun,’ ” he adds. “But I think one reason people like playing games is because they’re challenging, and this research formalises what it means for a game to be challenging, so we get at some fundamental aspect of fun in games.”

According to Demaine, there are researchers who complain that studying games is recreational, with the implication that the field is a waste of time.

“But I think recreational computer science research is an important avenue of study,” he says. “In particular, it gets students excited about doing research, and it makes the research especially fun to do.”

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/07/mathematicians-tried-to-prove-how-hard-the-witness-is/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mathematicians-tried-to-prove-how-hard-the-witness-is

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