Hibernation Pods and Growth Pods

All right, you little shits, listen up. It seems like some of you weren't paying enough attention in school, and people keep asking why they can't use “the pods” to skip the reset. Some of you idiots apparently joined the military because you thought that would get you a spot in line. That's completely wrong, and you've all gotten annoying enough that we've agreed to explain it again. I got elected because of a bunch of stupid reasons. I lost a bet. Not important. I'll start from the beginning.

By the time of the Last Raid, the entire planet was covered by the Jungle. Completely. You think it's bad now? It used to be worse. So much worse. Now, the Jungle is quiet. Resting. It used to be that you could see the vines reaching forward, minute by minute. More trees were monsters than not. And fire? Fire just pissed the Jungle off.

The point is, when a few hundred idiots ran into the final boss floor at the top of the Tower, all that was left of the human race was clustered around the base of the Tower. There were a few thousand of them, I think. Maybe more, but definitely not as high as a million. Things were looking grim, even if everything went perfectly.

Well, it didn't go perfectly. Only eight of us survived the boss fight. We wished to be immortal because it seemed like the best of a bunch of bad options. We figured out that it would make us immune to the solstice reset. We thought that if there were eight immortals guiding everyone, we had a real chance of reclaiming the world.

The problem was, when we came out of the Tower, we found everyone dead. EVERYONE. There was, and I cannot emphasize this enough, not one single human soul still alive on the planet besides us.

I'm going to be honest, I thought that was the end right there. Four men and four women can't repopulate the human race. It's just not possible. The gene pool would be too small to do anything but stave off crippling inbreeding for a handful of generations. Tyrus showed me the math once. It wasn't pretty.

Credit where it's due: Elizabeth the Healer was the one who found the answer. Now, the rest of us are what you'd now call naturalborn. Born from two parents doing things the old-fashioned way. Elizabeth, though, was one of the first podborn.

See, thirty or so years before that, a famous Crafter usually just known as the Mechanist invented this new thing people called a “growth pod.” It was a non-magical device that could grow a full baby from DNA samples. One sample, two, or as many as you felt like mixing together. The “Mechanist Cradle” was a huge hit. People used them for all sorts of reasons. Because they couldn't have babies naturally, because they didn't have time to be pregnant with the whole death of civilization going on, whatever.

Elizabeth knew that the Mechanist had stashed a bunch of his pods in the camps around the base of the Tower. He went up to the Final Raid with us, but he died there. God, I didn't even see how it happened.

...

Uh, anyway. We found his growth pods, and used those to grow the next couple generations of humanity. After all, there were a lot of DNA samples to find among the ruins. The pods will accept basically anything, and it doesn't even have to be fresh. As long as it's human and not too degraded, it will produce a baby.

Oh, and to correct that old myth: No, the first generation were not clones of all our dead friends. Leaving aside that we couldn't find enough pieces of most of our friends to clone them in the first place, we decided not to use the cloning function of the pods. Every podborn is the child of at least two DNA samples, no exceptions.

Now that we're well above replacement levels, the pods aren't entirely necessary. They could be shut down without impacting population percentages by more than a blip. We keep them around out of tradition, and switch off use. One year the pods make a hundred brand-new people made from random DNA samples from dead people. The next year, the pods are rented to parents who can't have children of their own. Same as before.

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I know what you're thinking. “Oh, Felicia, you didn't mention anything about the pods interacting with the reset!” That's because these pods, the Mechanist's Cradles, do not interact with the reset. At all. Can't emphasize that enough. There's always some idiot who thinks if he hides in a pod during the reset, he can dodge it. Nope, not possible, that's not how it works.

However, the Mechanist did make other pods.

Called “hibernation pods,” or “solstice pods,” these are the things that finally saved the world. Remember, the reset isn't new. It was there from the very start. Now, in the beginning it wasn't a big deal. This was before my time, but in the first few years, monsters were spawning below level 8. They were dangerous, sure, but the threat seemed mostly contained to the area immediately around the Tower, and the dungeons. Which were also much more rare, and universally low-level.

Most of you probably haven't even seen a monster below level 8. Well, it's just a couple steps up from harmless. It's basically as strong as a normal animal, just more aggressive. Don't get me wrong, a level 7 rabbit monster can absolutely kill someone. But it doesn't have spikes or spines or fire jets yet.

So it was pretty easy to keep ahead of the monsters, in the first few years. There were countless citystones scattered around, so quests were plentiful. Experience flowed easily, monsters were rare, and you could go the entire year without seeing one.

But the dungeons kept popping up, the monsters kept spilling out at the end of every year, and the Jungle just kept growing. The magic got thicker and thicker, and the monsters got stronger and stronger.

I'm not going to go over the full history of the fall of the human race. You should have learned it in school, anyway. But around the time level 40 monsters were becoming common—which, not coincidentally, is around the point where mundane weapons are pretty much universally useless against them—people realized they needed to find a way around the reset. It was becoming harder and harder to keep up the levels, even with the quests.

I don't know how many people tried to find a way around it. God, plenty of them probably had better ideas than the Mechanist. Ways to become completely immune to it, like me and the other Eight Immortals are now. The Mechanist's idea was a simple loophole, based on the exact wording of the System announcement. His theory was that, if you could somehow dodge the day of the reset, then you could dodge the reset itself.

The hibernation pods were kind of a hilarious answer to that question, honestly. Those things can operate for a thousand years. Put someone inside, they'll wake up right as rain a millennium later. Except, of course, no one needed to sleep for a millennium. Just for a little over twenty-four hours, to sleep through one specific day.

The hibernation pods weren't anything like the growth pods. These were a completely different technology, and in fact were full-on magitech. Without the System's assistance we have absolutely no idea how to make more of them. We have one, exactly one, hibernation pod still functional. We've been studying it non-stop in the hopes of finding a way to replicate it without a Crafter class.

See, the problem with magitech is that, like most magic, it has a cost. This used to be common knowledge, when there were Enchanters on every street corner convinced that they had made a perpetual motion engine. The short version is that each hibernation pod can only be used once. Then it has to be re-enchanted.

They worked perfectly. Even considering how expensive they were, the Mechanist made as many as he possibly could, and they were worth every penny. It helped that they were cheaper to re-enchant than to build from scratch. We used them as much as possible, building up levels over multiple years until we were strong enough to fight even on the highest levels of the Tower.

I was level 128 when we went into the Last Raid. Most of us were about that level. Even in the Tower, it was hard to find enemies of a high enough level to gain real experience at that point.

One of the things we hunt for, out in the Jungle when we're blowing up dragons, is more hibernation pods. The Mechanist made a lot of the damn things, after all. We've found a lot of used ones, and a lot of dead ones. We've never found a live one. Tyrus says it's a fool's errand. That without a human inside them, or at least interacting with them, the magic will fade after a year or so. Same with any other magic item.

Still, hope springs eternal. I know Elizabeth thinks we'll find one with a person inside. Maybe someone who can make a bloodstone that will change things. I think she's crazy, but then I thought she was crazy when she recruited me to the Last Raid, too.

Got it? Now stop bothering us about this.

– Recorded speech of Felicia the Knight, the Fourth Immortal, to a barracks of City military trainees, year 32 After Fall