Swarthy sailors with muscles as coarse as the ropes all over their ship half prodded and half dragged the prisoners below decks. Gimmons knew it was bad business, but he wasn’t one of the sea folk; he couldn’t just slide over the ship’s rail and hope to survive the swim to safer shores. None of the crew of the Hip Shot were sea folk, and that should have been his first clue that things were not as they should be.
Gimmons had learned to hang back, be quietly pleasant to his fellows, and did most of the work of sailing without complaint. Most of all, he kept his mouth shut and his head down. The bosun at least appreciated his mild ways and let him be one of the last when it came time to take up cutlass and scrum hook and go board their victims’ ships. Sadly, today that meant he had been too close to the captured prisoners and not close enough to the loot that needed relocating into their stores.
They took the prisoners down deep, past the cargo holds to just above the ballast cavities. There, as far down as it could be buried without being under water, was the Hip Shot’s Heart Room. The lighting along the way changed from the mage lights the First Mate, and their only mage, had to maintain to a seeping glow that crawled out from the Heart Room.
Beyond fear of Captain “Ruthless” Vinard, the “heart” within that room terrified Gimmons. It was also probably his only hope to avoid a noose should he be so lucky to be captured away from the Hip Shot. Somehow, Captain Ruthless had managed to install a dungeon core in the Heart Room, and had gotten it to bond with the hull of the Hip Shot, which made the ship’s walls nigh impenetrable — and the vicious egotist was keeping it caged.
Gimmons had heard that the Horaffee peoples practised the dangerous and profane idiocy of chaining dungeon cores. Despite the frequent dungeon breaks and despite the twisted abominations such chained cores created, the Horaffee claimed that they knew when to replace their enslaved cores — and that there was no shortage of new cores to subjugate. They pretended that their idiocy was worth the loss of their dungeon towns when the dungeons inevitably broke their chains.
It took a depth of depravity the rest of the world rejected to make such a claim. Not surprisingly, Captain Ruthless, though not a Horaffer, openly admired their ways.
Gimmons didn’t know when the “Heart” was first installed. It had been before his time. Old Lillu was the only sailor on the ship that dared to openly speak about the “Heart”, and they sailed in Northern waters, up near the Belt of the World. Every sailor knew that if you went further north, you’d return to seasons, though there were rumors they were all backward. You’d also sail into seas claimed by the less hospitable of the sea folk, and impenetrable hull or not, no ship crewed by mankind survived crossing the Kraken’s Divide.
Days had lost meaning for Gimmons some time back, and he had lost count of the ports into which they had sailed since he failed to ask the right questions about hiring on with the Hip Shot. There had been two others brought on at the same time, another sailor and a cabin boy.
The cabin boy was fed to the “Heart” when he was caught trying to run away at their first port, and Captain Ruthless had slave branded every sailor and officer of the crew after that but for the First Mate. Bims, the other sailor, had tried to mutiny during the next boarding and been cut down for it, his body dragged below decks and never brought back up. Just like they did with all the dead.
Just as they were doing with the prisoners.
That the ship’s “Heart” had never yet spawned more than rats played into Gimmon’s fear. What abominations had it got tucked away out of their sight?
All those thoughts flitted through the reluctant pirate’s mind. Better to focus on his own fear than what awaited the prisoners.
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The woman currently answering to N’kieran sa Volmar desh Idahl kept her chin up and her spine straight as the pirate scum of the Hip Shot led her and her surviving guardians down into the depths of their rat infested plague of a pirate ship. That was in part because the Halo assigned to her body by this world’s PLOT required her “noble spirits” and in part because she was looking forward to her death.
N’kieran was the (current) heroine of this Story World’s main PLOT line, and it had taken the transmigrated Agent of Cosmic Order quite a lot of conniving and scheming to get this close to breaking the original PLOTted progression.
Most naturally spawned Story Worlds broke apart on their own because the key aspects of the Narratives that seeped out from the Prime Realities and the surrounding Story Worlds which formed them rarely aligned well enough to retain cohesion. It was mostly when those weird time looping Narrative aspects got entangled that the naturally spawned Story Worlds got stuck in stagnating spirals and Cosmic Order had to step in. Rarely, however, a Storyteller who was unaligned with the organization of Transcendental Immortals invested in keeping the mana flowing would ask for their aid.
This was that rarer case, and after careful review by one Cosmic Order’s Storytellers, Actor Agent 4643-Prime, with Systematic Assisting Agent 4643-Aide, were dispatched to turn the main heroine — N’kieran — into the Male Lead’s “White Moonlight” — that unobtainable first love who would serve to haunt the (new) lead characters’ Grand Romance until the Male Lead figures out how much better the (new) Female Lead is for him.
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Cosmic Order’s Storyteller had helped this world’s original Storyteller work out several dynamic PLOT lines to effect that change, and Agents 4643 had been handed the preferred order of those PLOT lines.
The Male Lead had already foiled two alternate PLOT lines by saving her from a rare poison, and then suppressing a rebellion against her father’s rule in order to save her from the rebells who had kidnapped her. If that Villain had just monologued a little less, she would have had her throat properly slit already and been free of this assignment.
Death on the High Seas as she was shipped off to form a marriage alliance with another nation had been much harder to arrange, but had the benefit of removing most of the Male Lead’s ability to interfere. It was also the one with the most gruesome potential death, but after having to live through being courted by the muscle brained Male Lead, Agent 4643-Prime could think of worse ways to go — mostly all of the PLOT lines that required her to suffer being the Male Lead’s wife.
Ah, but now! Now! She was so close to being free of this assignment she could almost taste the sweet vacation she and her Aide had earned! They were still bickering good naturedly about whether to go for a Space Opera vacation life or maybe get in some cultivation time on one of the Cultivating to Immortality vacation worlds Cosmic Order maintained for their agents. Aide always wanted to cultivate, but Prime felt like exploring could be more fun.
She was jarred out of her pleasant meditations by the rapidly growing cloud of suppressed mana they were being led into. The only person from this Story World who seemed to notice was the pirate mage, and that she saw amounted to just a shiver and a grimace. That made a kind of sense, though. He was only able to manipulate magic because of this world’s Class System, known to the scholars in N’kieran’s native Lusfal as people’s “inner oracle”. Without any actual understanding, he was as blind as the other souls stuck in their meat puppet shells.
What did not make sense was this pocket of dense mana.
Unless …? Could there be an independent Breaker around, hoping to gnaw on all the side-lined segments of this Story World until it all collapsed? Had their interference with the original PLOT brought them to cross paths with this Breaker?
Technically, this wasn’t one of Cosmic Order’s Story Worlds and so not much of their business if that was the case. Unless the originating Storyteller turned the world over to Cosmic Order’s management, it was the originating Storyteller’s responsibility to police (or not) the elements that snuck into their Story Worlds.
That did not mean the Agents 4643 couldn’t nudge the Breaker along. In fact, if they seemed somewhat competent, there was always work to be done around the multiverse, and Cosmic Order wasn’t shy about doing what needs must to keep the mana flowing.
Now intrigued by the thought, Prime asked Aide, «How strong is this mana field?»
Aide sounded ambivalent as they answered. «The intensification is following an exponential curve. From the information I’ve hacked out of the World System, that’s either one of the World Wyrms or one of the mana filters the Storyteller appropriated from the ‘Dungeon Core’ Narratives.»
«How big are the World Wyrms?» Prime asked.
This time, Aide shared the emotion of amusement. «However big they want to be.» More seriously, they added, «They’re only marginally physical, to be better deal with multiverse denizens sneaking onto the world.»
A Breaker that could pose as one of the World Wyrms would definitely be an entity to keep track of. That suggested a level of rationality and subterfuge few Breakers had attained. Infiltration tended to be a back-line skill for void-making pits of hunger.
Prime didn’t have a lot of time to consider that before they were thrust into a room thoroughly over saturated with high-order mana. She felt her grip on the (current) heroine’s body start to slip, but managed to hold on enough that the PLOT’s Female Lead Halo couldn’t coerce out some inordinate fighting luck. It wasn’t enough to suppress an outraged, “Do you know who I am?” from escaping her lips.
The pirate captain grinned, moving his cutlass from the casual ready position he had been holding it to lifting her chin up with the flat of the blade. “Oi! We got some fight to you yet, eh? Listen up, girly, I don’t care if you think I’m stupid enough to deal in hostages, or leave survivors. A man with his head in the hangman’s noose can’t spend gold, now can he? And that’s where hostage dealing always ends. So claim to be the Mad Reaver’s Bride for all I care. Your ship is just one of so many lost at sea every day. In fact, iffin’ you are someone special, that’s just more reason for me to kill every last one of your crew. So, you special? Eh?”
Agent 4643-Prime felt the PLOT’s Halo struggling to summon some kind of intervention. She didn’t spot a Breaker in the room. The source of the mana density, as far as she could tell, was a weird glowing gemstone about a thumb’s width in diameter, hanging from the ceiling of the room in a convoluted contraption of a rainbow metal filigree interwoven with crystal threads. The gem seemed to act as a light source, as well, illuminating the contraption, which in turn magnified the light into something almost tangible.
«What is that?» Prime asked Aide, even as she wrangled her way back into full control of her body.
«That, I think, is a dungeon core. It looks like the pirates have somehow hijacked one of them and plan on feeding us into it. That could be bad.» Even more worrying than the warning was the way Aide had cut off the emotional connection, leaving their words to echo in the Agents’ connection with a false sense of clinical dispassion.
«Maybe I should have asked more about these dungeon Narratives, because that doesn’t look like a torture instrument or something kinky.»
«Dungeon cores are mana conditioners. They have minimally sentient spirits guiding them in the ministration of their duties, among which is the duty to churn out the monsters Meat Head keeps bringing back to show off his prowess. I’m ramping up all of our defenses in case we get pulled into its conditioning process.»
Prime didn’t have a moment to ask Aide for more explanation. The pirate captain sneered. This Villain, at least, didn’t monologue. He thrust his blade into her neck and sliced out the side.
It was one of the faster deaths that the Agents 4643 had experienced.