Before leaving to find a place to settle into what would be (hopefully) a life that had nothing to do with villains, heroes, dark lords, wars, army movements, drone dodging, quests, or anything that was the normal daily grind for a traveler of the cosmoses, --seriously, the first sign someone had rats in their basement and would give her a sword if she cleared them out, or, 'hey, buddy, can you deliver this sketchy-ass looking package to this spaceport for a friend of mine?' Max would lose her shit-- she wanted to make sure that the place she would respawn was a safe place. How novel. Having a place to respawn.
In safety.
Not being flung into a new place with a new body.
Stability.
Shit’s fuckin’ wild, man.
After having an entire seemingly infinite existence of actively trying not to hope for the best, and loudly yelling “I fucking called it” when the worst happened (usually through red teeth and bloody gurgles), her past was quite conducive to Max’s ability to plan. Max had only stopped planning thousands of lives ago for good things, after seeing the worst come to pass over and over and over again.
The bad stuff? It was not only planned for but expected.
She should have asked Miles to smuggle large quantities of rock and rubble from the dead planet in his system inventory (which kinda defied logic, an inventory stored in an inventory just broke physics laws, really, but the whole concept of system storage, to begin with, was absurd), but they couldn’t make sure that none of it was contaminated with the stupid curse that had wiped out Miles’s origin world. She did her best to clear his body, which was made from heavy adamantine metals (which were smuggled in, and in large quantities), then gilded in gold and gems (also smuggled in vast amounts) for bling. She wasn’t worried about the metals hanging on to a curse because those used were mostly null metals. The gems would hold anything purposely cast into them, but a passive curse wouldn’t be an issue.
Hopefully.
Maybe.
Probably not.
Anyways, Miles’s intended planet's people were all idiots. Really, most folks just could not be trusted with a bit of unexpected magic. Or tiny inklings of power. They always showed their remarkable selfishness and idiocy from the first gasp to the last. Gods-damned imbeciles.
Yes, she was being a hypocritical jackass and probably irresponsibly flippant with the whole ‘World Ending Curse,’ but no one was around to call her on her bullshit but Miles, and he was of the same thinking as her. So fuck it.
It didn’t kill her, yet, didn’t kill the cavern moss, and the bats hanging out at the top of the cave were fine, and the curse was visible via a gray miasma and it wasn't showing any signs of popping up, so it was fine. It’s all fine. Everything is fine.
Max used the rubble she could find in the gargantuan cavern to wall off the echoing room that held the node. She did her best to flatten out and clear the space where she had landed, assuming it would be the place she 'respawned'. They would presumably only see this place again after they returned to the living after getting the absolute shit knocked out of them. It would have to be a real monster to kill her because her regen was borderline obscene, especially without any levels. It might make Max reconsider the anchor if anything was behemoth enough to do it—and using the dead guys in the room over as a metric, apparently this world had some monstrous heavies that could make life here a bad idea.
After that was done, and after considering they didn’t really have anything they were willing to leave behind, Max and Miles decided to survey the valley and get their bearings on where to go from there. They still had no idea what this world was like, and both were anxious to start their new adventure.
Not an adventure, adventure.
No quests. None of that.
Just.
Life. They were ready to start their new lives.
Before leaving the cavern, the node, and the ability to peek behind the curtain of their new world, Max made sure to grab a sliver of the broken opal. Not a shard that was big enough to hold the entity that ran the system, but maybe enough to contain a remnant of it. If she could make the whole of Miles into a demigod spider, maybe she could make a lesser friend out of the tiny portion of what was left behind of this one. She was in no hurry to do it immediately, but she’d like the option for the future.
She also double and triple-checked the world's status page. Making sure all the bullshit was turned off. Making sure she didn't miss anything that wasn't subtle or hidden.
When Max looked out of the mouth of the cavern, she could see down into a lush valley. The cavern opening was close to the precipice of a mountain. From this height, she could see no buildings, or settlements, or smoke on the horizon, or anything like that. Which was novel, as the caverns that landings happened in almost always thrust Max into an immediate "get to know the world" phase by having a very close town.
Miles had said the flags and portents and obvious omens were a function of the system's logic system, and thus, since it was offline, no narratives or quests or breadcrumb trails were laid to follow. Just a normal existence any regular jagoff would have when waking up in a cavern full of world-ending dead monsters. Weird.
What they did see was a tower on the peak of the hill that was facing them. A radio tower? Power lines? Who knows? It had a blinking red light at the top at night. It seemed like, at least, a place to investigate. Thinking about it a bit, there was probably a maintenance road somewhere in the vicinity so the people who set it up could fix it if there were problems. It was a basic answer to the question of which direction to go or where to head.
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They waited until late morning the next day to depart.
Climbing down a large incline and climbing back up an even bigger incline wasn’t trouble for Max, what with all the indecent stats she was rocking. Miles had wrapped around her neck and upper torso. He looked like a delicate necklace, with his glinting gemstone eyes taking in the surroundings, looking out for trouble, looking at the beautiful green sky, taking in the verdant vegetation. Any time a bird cried, or an insect called, or a tree rodent (squirrels? Those are squirrels...) moved, his eyes narrowed, and he flinched and his legs briefly tightened against Max's neck. The poor little guy was overstimulated; he had obviously been stuck in a lifeless wasteland and would need time to adjust to a living world.
Seeing his struggle, Max did her best to fill in the silence with banal facts of flora and fauna across planes she'd seen, and what seemed to be relevant to this one-- what a squirrel was, yes, that’s a bird, that's a bug, those might be rain clouds, and that’s scat. It only took maybe two, two and a half hours to get to the tower and see what they could find out about their little blue-green skied world and the civilization that lived on it.
When they approached the tower, which was made out of some cheap, but heavy, metal that was rusting and the paint layer over it was cracking, Miles scurried down Max's body and scuttled over to it. He placed a golden arachnid leg on the tower and looked at the middle distance again.
“My targeting of this world was excellent. It has a wire-bound, proto internet. It was what I expected from the tech level, but there aren’t even any high-level firewalls around it. Not even any password prompts. It is all just open...” Miles gasped. “Anyone could just walk up and access it. There aren't even that many viruses. This just doesn’t make sense. The world’s cumulative knowledge is all right here. There are hundreds of libraries here! You’d think they’d guard it better!” Miles was outraged.
“If they did that, we’d not have the access we have now. I’m glad they’re throwing it all out there, making it accessible to us, who are basically intruders. At the top of a small mountain. In the middle of nowhere.Right outside the dead monster cave.” A pause, a scrunching of eyebrows, and a frown. "Where we can research and plan and steal what we would need to infiltrate them. This seems like it would be a flag. Why aren't I thinking clearly? This is obviously a flag! Are the novel landing and novel species and novel classes making it to where I can't recognize a flag? What the ever-loving fuck is happening right now?”
Miles hmmed and considered a moment. "If this is a flag and we are to be thrust into madness, we can always cut and run. Or just refuse to play. The Logic Script isn't booted. This may just be a preset quest that’s running on automatic settings. The system is dead. Remember always that we have an escape plan. We aren't trapped here. At all. We have, how you put it, modding abilities."
"Okay. I trust you for some reason?" Max's eyebrows were still very low. "I don't know if that is a flag too, or if it isn't?" She asked the beautiful spider, but the spider had no answers. "I'm really not liking this at all. It doesn't feel right."
Max picked out a drying leaf that had found its way into her hair from the hike through the valley. A tree must have shed it as she passed underneath. The sun was waning toward afternoon, not quite afternoon yet, but not directly overhead anymore, and the summer breeze felt like a playful caress on her surprisingly-not-sweaty skin. She made a decision.
"I'll trust you for a little while. Honestly, I just want a place where I can exist in safety and try to be a person again for a few centuries. I want you to be able to be trusted because I want to not endure alone anymore. Even if you end up being truly evil, I'll be okay with that as long as you don't drag me into it. As for me, I think I want a shop in a city where I'm not remarkable, where remarkable things do not happen, and maybe a not-remarkable pet. I just want to not do what I have been forced to do. I can't..." Max's voice cracked and her chin quivered and she closed her eyes, "... I can't lose anymore for a little bit. The cave on your world was the longest I've gone in recent memory without forcing a re-landing. I just want it to stop.” She gasped, “All this hope is really a dreadful thing. I'm being crushed by it. I don't know if all this luck is real, or if it's all just some cruel joke." She sniffled.
"We'll figure it out, Max. We will have the life you envision. Just give me some time." Miles ran his glinting, gold leg through the long strands of hair that had battled with the leaf that had fallen into her hair. It was comforting.
Miles continued: "I will refrain from any notable evil impulses I may have, but I will have to do some minor larceny and wire fraud. Is that acceptable? I don't want to start out without resources— and if this world, with all its cumulative knowledge, is going to put access to banking and financial markets on the internet without password protection, I will make it so that we benefit. I can resist a lot of things, but ignoring the urge to profit off of massive stupidity is beyond my abilities."
Max breathed deep, let it out, and nodded.
"Okay. But. Do me a favor-- let me research the people you are going to rob, first. I don't want to feel bad because of it if we randomly clear out a force for good. Also. It’s happened to me too often not to vet the income stream. We don’t want to bite off more than we can chew if whoever it is we are gonna clear out is evil and can wreak vengeance.”
"Done."
Max sat down with her back propped up to it and laid the back of her head against the tower. I hope there's not a tetanus bacteria here. She was given access, too much access, to everything she wanted. It was definitely a flag. She was going to ignore it.
Ding! You are now Level 1. All stats distrib....
Max dismissed the notification. She was too... too... something right now. Raw. Excited. Wary.
"Let's also research and see what this place has to offer. Maps, languages. Memes are good, it'll make us understand slang faster. Monetary systems. Governments. Local history and cultures. Let's try to learn as much as we can before we move on. I can make a lean-to here so we can have shelter. I refuse to go back to the creepy cave. I missed sunlight."
"Agreed."
They talked into the late afternoon and early evening about what their dreams of this life would be. They researched the nation they were in. The cavern was in the ass-end of a national park, which is why everything was humanoidless.
The more they talked, the dreamier the dreams became. They always were of what they would do together, how they hoped that things were boring, and what their favorite small predators were, so they could adopt a pet when they got their store. Maybe adopt. Maybe a pet. They were undecided.
Early evening, Max left Miles on the leg of the tower so he could web surf and she could gather a few fallen trees from the valley (that that str, though!) and she set up the jankiest lean-to that ever existed, anywhere. It was here for a good time, not a long time.
Don't judge.
They hammered details into a plan they would set into motion the very next morning. Miles fell asleep around Max's neck, and she, too, slept a sleep that was not of the dying, not of the landing, not of bloody heads, or fires, or loss, but of an unremarkable person planning on doing unremarkable things.