The consequences of me not quite thinking that one entirely through are a bit of a chuckle here on the forums. :) Were the lads up in the Celestial Bureaucracy to actually fumble the ball on that one, things would probably proceed somewhat differently...

Chejop Kejak was not a happy man.

"Correct me if I'm wrong, gentlemen, but was I or was I not present for each and every department meeting on this project?" He surveyed the assembled team of programmers, holy men, and shamans (in one case, all three, but Pathik was generally considered to be pretty weird) with a gimlet eye.

"The operational spec clearly called for those prayer strips to grant Tomorrow's Son the auspicious powers of the Handsome Boy Eyes Prana, scope of all of Midgard, triggered any time he meets a new person governed by fate of the -appropriate gender and sexual orientation-. Mind telling me how we left that last bit off, and how it survived three debug passes and actually got uploaded into the World-Engine? And why, instead of it providing him with near-total immunity to Muspelheim's latest bout of asshattery, Mister Ravenhair's entire romantic destiny -instead- went into a loop snarl that threatened to overrun its buffer?" His eyes shifted to the Project Lead, seated immediately to his right. "Gorodo?"

Gorodo the Red (Programmer First Class, Bureau of Destiny, Futures and Fates Department, currently Project Lead for the Tomorrow's Son Labyrinth Entanglement Undertaking), white-scaled and scarlet-feathered, managed not to cringe back from his boss, clacking his claws on the conference table. He'd managed to sublimate quite a lot of his draconic heritage to the needs of the job, but 'when in doubt, go on the offensive' was a hard habit to break. So he coiled himself up angrily, and retorted, "With all due respect, sir, it -happens-. We're crafting destiny by committee here, boss!" Pause. "Really, it's nobodies fault."

"Oh?" Chejop raised an eyebrow. "Would you care to try and sell that line to Skuld?"

This time, Gorodo didn't manage to not cringe.

Kejak gave the team one last good glare, and then sighed. "Recriminations later. Business now. Fortunately for you all, I've managed to stopgap this entire debacle temporarily by assigning Mister Ravenhair his father's destiny, which is similar enough to his own to adhere at least temporarily." Relief rippled through the room.

"BUT."

And then promptly ceased to.

"The nightly cleanup routines are going to notice that there are two of those running at the same time and collapse the one without the proper timestamp on it. When that happens, Mister Ravenhair's own destiny will snap back. So you have... a little over twelve hours to fix this." He favored the room with a small, humorless smile. "And I'd recommend taking less, because the Midgard-Knight is scheduled to have a romantic encounter with a 74% chance of sexytime with Skuld sometime in the next forty-eight hours, so unless someone would also like to volunteer to explain -that- after it happens..."

One of the junior programmers in the back raised a timorous hand. "Sir, who will be handling the infovores while we're getting the protective destiny entanglement properly functioning again? They're not going to be fooled by a simple duplication; these are class fives, and they have Lord Corwin's scent already. We think one of them might have already devoured the set of potential destinies involving him, Kaname Sterling, and snowball fights; we're double-checking hers right now."

Chejop Kejak sighed, and rubbed his neck. He'd been safeguarding destiny since doing so meant going to Midgard and walking two thousand li across Diqiu with nothing more a begging bowl, a set of prayer beads, and an iron staff, scattering salt mixed with the blood of gods into the ocean in order to ensure that demons did not crawl up between the gaps in the strands of fate where the sea met the land.

Things had changed a lot since then. He didn't carry a begging bowl anymore, but the first coin ever dropped into it, a copper tael he'd kept, had been melted down to form the contact points on his cervical-spine interface jack. His prayer beads had been cut apart to form the wooden inlays on the cyberdeck that the Norns had presented him on the occasion of the three thousandth year of his service.

He still had the iron staff, though; always close by. His hand closed around it now. He stood up, popped his neck.

"I will enter the World-Engine and deal with the infovores personally."

Hell, he needed to get out of the office more anyway.

-Merc
Keep Rat

(I've probably stepped MASSIVELY outside the boundaries of proper behavior for a guest in this house; originally this was just going to be a quippy response to Ben, and then this... thing insisted on dropping out of my head. I blame society.)