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Turning from the latest putting out of fires, Cauchy took a moment to relax, only to find a note in his pocket, which was odd, since he didn't wear pockets. The enclosing envelope bore only his name and the presumable author's: Metarch.
Manifesting a cup of tea and a plateful of shortbread sugar cookies, he opened the envelope.
Reading the note didn't take terribly long, but he found it quite involving nonetheless. It related that this Metarch knew Cauchy's nature and actions and thought that he's been doing a great job of things, encouraging him to keep it up. Following his signature were the letters RDM, with a parenthetical note that read “Retired Dungeon Master.” After that, he had added a P.S. about “the Space Orc thing ”; he thought that the Cthulhu schtick was a bit O.T.T., but was a huge fan of the Fourth Doctor — and then there was a P.P.S. asking if he had been keeping abreast of the Zelda and Peach situation.
Oh, this was interesting, and interesting was always fun ! It wasn't often that anyone left him notes. Honestly, there just weren't all that many people who even had his address.
He consulted an Encyclopædia Krustallosica. Finding nothing was hardly a surprise. They were very late editions, even his earliest copy, and were typically fragmented accounts with little correlation between them. Yes, he had arranged for these to be consolidated, but they really were still rather limited in that they tapped into low- and mid-level sources — Æsir, Grey, Kryptonian, Anunnaki, Jötnar, Nephilim, Titan, Avatar, and so forth on the one hand; Atlantean, Deva, Asura, Lemurian, O̅kami, et cetera on the other. Fairly well read in every case, of course, and you could never tell what local sources might turn up, but still very small ponds.
His comprehensive Trantorica bore nothing either though, and that bore some consideration. Being a hacked copy of the comprehensive version should make everything available of the entire Imperial Trantoric data, after all, right down to the metadata histories. This carried all of the material up to the last femtosecond of the Golden Age, and linked to each moment of the period, that of the Ringworld Engineers.
Querying the Encyclopædia Psionica, he ran into yet another wall. Very interesting indeed. There was only one version in existence, as there ever had been and ever would be, and very little was hidden from it, even the secrets of the Thoan monad engines. In fact, only Ljósálfar should be able to remain obscured, and even then only those of the events long ago in the distant future that isn't.
In each case, the informational reach was orders of magnitude greater, but this also served to make the research exponentially more of a pain.
At last, he dug through the Encyclopædia Akashica, this not simply woven into the fabric of existence, but in fact being that very existence itself, bearing witness even to the “first eternity” of the Qhalqhal time before time and more, beyond even the Principalities' multiversal cognition, accessing instead the “Big Omega” — or at least the Hilbert streams of Tào Dreamtime, which were as near as to amount to the same, and well past aleph two, several iterations deep in the analogy of a topological Long Line (a long line of long lines of long lines of...). Dredging forth the entry, Cauchy was stunned. Undated (this wasn't entirely accurate though, as the timestamp wasn't exactly a blank entry as such: it read “Pancakes or waffles? ”) — a literal physical impossibility, even for a Ljósálf — the entry on Metarch stood at a single sentence: “Mostly harmless.” In fact, leaning closer to sniff at it, it didn't even bear the same subquantum signature as reality, that certain something that all things shared on a sliding — other than Yggdrasil, of course, with its reality factor being mathematically half a speck of Cantor dust greater than anything else in reality, than even that of reality itself for that matter — as if this entry itself were outside of the range of reality factors of all things (again: excepting Yggdrasil, the reality factor of which this entry apparently was beyond as well); moreover, the very handwriting, as it were, didn't match that of the rest of the Encyclopædia.
Pausing, he reached for the note that had begun this wild goose chase — or red herring chase, more like.
Sure enough, the scent and handwriting were a perfect match for those of the entry, right down to the smiley face at the end. It also now ended with “FNORD,” which he was quite certain hadn't been there before.
Well played now. Very good indeed: the game was afoot! ☺️
O ~~~ O