Reset

In rare instances, circumstances may come to pass wherein the survivability of an instance may be called into question. Perhaps some external force like an aberrant flowering, holon bubble, or the sudden loss of world-maintaining construct blank has caused the natural cycles of the world to fall into disarray. Perhaps a period of massive upheaval has rendered the world within the instance a marginally habitable hellscape through more mundane means, such as the detonation of nuclear weapons or industry-caused ecological collapse in an instance that otherwise hews closely to physical reality. In rare cases, as in the Candledusk instance, the power of The Word was discovered and misused, leading to rampant corruption, a breakdown of the facade of reality, or even the potential of malicious actors breaching containment to attack The Substrate itself.
When all other intervention fails, it may fall to the members of the Committee on Instance Design Standards to make the dermination that an instance should be 'reset.' This is not a decision to be taken lightly, as it represents a moral and technical loss on the part of ComInDS, but it may be necessary to ensure that the instance blanks aren't subjected to true death for reasons beyond their own comprehension or control.

Effect

Inhabited instances are full of living, active blanks that will actively resist the efforts of external forces to initiate the reset. For this reason, an instance to be reset must first be pacified, the most powerful of blanks in the instance sent to the local waiting room for processing. This proceedure often has an apocalyptic aspect to it, with powerful elder and choir blanks entering the instance in its 'final days' in the hopes of repairing the issue so that the reset is not necessary or, should this fail, returning all who oppose them to the 'death' part of the cycle of 'reincarnation' in preparation for the reset.
When this work is done or, more likely, when the situation is too dire for ComInDS to wait any longer, several of the organization's members gather to utter the complex verse that properly forces the instance to reset. Like with the closing of a virtual instance, the region that the instance once occupied briefly becomes a holon bubble as the Matrioshka brain hardware underpinning its existence shuts down and reboots. The instance then reappears in the state it was in when first constructed or, should it not return in a functional state, it is subsequently rebuilt.

Side/Secondary Effects

The reset process terminates any ongoing processes within the affected instance and erases all changes subsequent to its construction. This means that any progress made within - buildings, cultural artifacts, changes wrought to the environment, and so forth - are likely irrevocably lost. Those lucky blanks who were removed from the instance before its reset are carefully examined by ComInDS before being subjected to the memory blocks normally used in the case of a death-rebirth cycle before being reintroduced to the instance. Should the reset have been necessitated by the actions of these blanks, as it had been in the Candledusk Instance, those reponsible may be quarantined for further corrective measures, as in the Manifold Sky Instance.

Related Organizations

• Broken Eternity
• Committee on Instance Design Standards

Effect Duration

Instantaneous

Effect Casting Time

Varies

Range

Local