50001
if anyone cares here’s the expository passage:
Navigating Grozenstradde is, as would be expected, a nightmare, as somehow the self-driving algorithm used by the JunctCar taxi system is just as bureaucratic as the rest of the planet. It is true to say that the car was headed towards Unredbloom Station and would eventually reach its’ destination. It is also true to say that the magnetic propulsion would send them there in the most efficient way possible without crashing into any other JunctCars. The trick is the algorithm the cars use to ensure that traffic jams never form. This algorithm always succeeds- technically.
The revolutionary aspect of the JunctCars, at least according to the company which provides them, is that they can prevent traffic jams by allowing cars heading to the same destination to stack on top of each other using advanced magnet systems on the back of the cars. This legitimately powerful system of traffic avoidance has the slight disadvantage of delaying absolutely anybody in a stack when they actually reach their destination, because thanks to the Grozenstradde municipal administration’s sporadic approach to safety regulations, being on top of other cars means that you will actually be allowed to leave the car faster. The fall risk posed by the descending cars means that the doors will not open while cars are above you, so the system only opens the doors once all the cars have unstacked. Except it’s somehow worse than that, because of the way the cars are unstacked.
When a car arrives at it’s station, the car on top of the stack leaves first, magnetically crawls down the sides of the other cars to the amusement of all small children nearby. But its’ doors can’t be opened yet, because of the fall risk posed by the simple fact that the car next in the pile will descend from the tower on the same side. So that car travels down onto your car, and now there are two piles. The system then removes that car, but for the same reason that car can’t open its’ doors yet, because the next car is going to slither along the roof of that car along with yours, and so on. The second to last car is the first one to open its’ doors, since it’s the first car to be placed on the ground level to not have another car travel over it. Unfortunately for anybody in the mood to actually travel throughout the city, the time this wastes is rather sizeable, because each car in a queue only opens their doors after the previous ones close and the car moves, in order to prevent the newly emerged passengers from being hit by a car, which would be the only possible way to make the experience of getting out of a JunctCar worse.
Obviously, this obnoxious system of queuing in which the second person in the queue is actually the first person to exit the vehicle is a known issue. But this created the design flaw that Wilhelm was about to exploit. Rather than simply abandoning the stack idea entirely, the designers instead thought it would be a good idea to make it so that when stacking the cars, the car which set out for the destination first always ends up being second from the bottom, therefore opening its’ doors first. Needless to say, this was not a good idea.
Wilhelm had not chosen a random station. The magnetic section of the road outside the coffee house is thin- too thin for the cars to reverse order to place his car on top of the hunter’s car. As it happened, the most direct route from that shop to Undredbloom Station that had a wider section of road that would allow the cars to switch order and thus “stack to avoid traffic” passes through Saltskae Outpost Station, making it a simple matter of stopping early to reach the actual destination while obfuscating your travel plan, a trick that Wilhelm learned when he was younger and wanted desperately to avoid meetings.
a terrible system of self-driving cars created thousands of years in the future that i’m using as a premise for a bizarre action scene
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i attempt to write books, yes
i’ve never actually done a serious RP although I really would like to some day
