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QuestionText:	Hello! Popping back in to check in about what Science Cabin might learn next in their Katalyth studies. Bricks, Jayce, Pal and Viktor have all been working on a schedule to try to unravel its 'words' under the microscope. No big rush on this since June is event month, but if it's possible for them to make some progress by July...<br><br>THANK YOU AGAIN
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AnswerText:	Apologies for the wait, wanted to get through this properly....<br><br>Having delved so unwisely and so bravely into the Katalyth-language is bearing its unfortunate fruit. The line between something being 'magic' or simply 'magical' is a faint one, but the essence they've been studying lays within the former. It is a form of magic on a conceptual level, concentrated into a shape tangible and visible.<br><br>It's both naturally-occurring and absolutely not. Whether it was ever intended to have a consciousness is difficult to say at this point, and its origin in the world is similarly unknown. But it would be possible to discern that <i>something</i> happened in the past to provoke it into spinning itself into being- something quite distant in time. Magical carbon-dating, in a way... as there's fragments in the language they're constructing that are <i>old</i>, things that it's been murmuring to itself for over a millennia. It is older than the crisis on Pathos, certainly. <br><br>And yet its current rampant agitation <i>is</i> new, relatively speaking. It's been getting louder, and as a consequence, has been creating ever more Katalyth in the environment. Even so, the way it is building, replicating, composing itself is as 'natural' as anything like it can be. It's magic in some pure, cancerous form, writing its hopes and fears out in individual notes.<br><br>And the more the science crew pieces together its 'language', the more patterns emerge that <i>are</i> quite like 'notes'. Studying it at this point will reveal sound amidst the language, as though it's being whispered out to them, its pronunciation carved directly into their brain. What exactly it <i>sounds</i> like is different for everyone, as if it is being personally translated, or otherwise filtered through a character's particular experiences. It can resonate with anything and everyone, but in so doing changes itself to be understood. Not in words, precisely- though the group might imagine phrases or lines that have meaning to <i>them</i>, though it's really an effect of it melding itself to them in a way they can understand. <br><br>But it's melodic, haunting, dirge-like. While not traditionally 'catchy', it <i>catches</i>, and the scientists studying it will find that it lingers in their heads, no matter where they are (though it <i>is</i> far more muffled within the Karterian barrier, or near other devices made to filter out the radiation). They might hear it in places they shouldn't, its patterns played on the radio, or in birdsong, or in ambient conversation. <br><br>As arcane radiation is everywhere, and they now know what it sounds like. Katalyth can't help but produce it, and it can't help but inflict itself on everything around it. It's emotion, twisted and miserable and alive, talking to itself in a language it created, trying to understand, to <b>live</b>. <br><br>So Katalyth, all on its own accord, is constantly 'singing' this dirge, burning itself and spreading its hopes and its fears and inadvertently poisoning everyone who 'hears' it. This is why the Augmented feel miserable around it, to the point of hallucinating terrible things. Even if they can't quite <i>hear</i> it (apart from you all who have been deliberately tuning into it), its meaning is being conveyed all the same. Un-Augmented humans are ruined by it instead, torn apart by the weight of its terror and grief.<br><br>The wildlife and native plants have adapted better to it, though they generally don't like hanging around large amounts of Katalyth either. But the language it speaks to them doesn't inflict quite the same despair. The Augmented, as an odd half-way point, have the protection that animals and plants do, while not being spared the emotional consequences (or the mutations, if they're being reckless...).<br><br>(It is also quite possible that the wildlife of Pathos are inherently depressed. Not so much as to give up on living, or to drastically alter their behavior, but they might all be beset by a nagging sense of: <i>what is it all for?</i> But they, by and large, lack a developed language of their own to ponder this question. The emotional corruption is conveyed through their bodies instead, spurring them to mutate and develop into something <i>different</i>, something that might solve the crisis that they lack the words for.<br><br>But the birds don't sing quite as sweetly as they used to. It would be a difficult thing for the Augmented to notice, being as they've never heard birds in the old days.)<br><br>Also, if it weren't already apparent: the process of Katalyth giving off arcane radiation (casting its magic into the world, in sad notes at a time) also gives off energy. Quite a bit of energy, so if you have the means to capture it, it's a fantastic way to power almost anything. Trying to do so makes it replicate <i>faster</i>, so if it weren't for the whole... everything about it, it'd be a perfect fuel. Burning despair to generate electricity.<br><br>So this is, generally speaking, the current consequence/reward for all that misery the science cabin has been putting themselves through. Earwormed (not literally) by Katalyth. It's an old problem that's getting worse very quickly, it is half-way conscious and becoming more so as it continues to write itself a meaning, brute-forcing it though endless attempts at it. It is possibly making the birds sad.

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