#anyway I'm having a lot of thoughts about computer programming allegories and will likely continue to do so

[high-voltage-rat]

Aequillibria as what seems to be a debugging algorithm or antivirus is honestly really fascinating to me ngl. especially given that it's seemingly the source, or at least distributor, of all mana and thus all life on lore.

When it said "assessing the state of the shell" it obviously meant Lore, or perhaps the universe/reality at large. but a shell in the context of computers is the part of the system that allows other things (programs and users) to access the operating system.

So how I understand it, mana is the operating system. the universe is the shell. Every individual on Lore is a program (or user) that is accessing and modifying the system via that shell.

In a bunch of quests during the Maleurous questline, we ended up doing text-based adventures where the entire game briefly became a command line interface, which is one of the ways a shell can be presented, the other being a graphical user interface. If we think about the idea of the universe being a shell, reality as we typically know it would be a GUI. That we briefly entered a CLI at multiple points makes me think there was some next-level reality-bending taking place that will probably have even more relevance than it already seems.

I'm mainly just thinking some rather sad thoughts about the ways that this could wind up being a "it was all a dream"-level bit where the events of dragonfable, the entire Reset, only really happen as a simulation on the computers of The Mage. After all, how is a computer actually supposed to reboot the entire universe? The closest it can get is creating a bunch of programs so sophisticated that they simulate the people they were meant to be all the way down to believing they're alive.

Then again, it could also all just be one big fourth wall reference- acknowledging that this universe takes place in- is- a computer game. That seems pretty in-line with the AE style of things.