It was almost frustrating how, during the golem fight in the daily mission at Elvenhome, the Minor ring of Protection had been so useless as to not even resist one single hit from the stone monster. It was time to upgrade it, Albert thought, and since it was now so useless the ring would also be the right item to test the limits of [Magical Item Creation] on. Yet another thing to add to the ever-growing list of things to do.
The rest of the night had been frustratingly unproductive, too, meaning that the coming day was colored by a background level of frustration and restlessness that was becoming dangerously frequent as magic became progressively harder to master. A quest had been triggered between rounds of failed tampering with Albert’s body and failed locating of the area of the brain involved with learning, when he decided to manhandle the elven seed and blast it with magic to see what happened.
[New quest: Iperborea reborn.]
* Revitalize the Iperborean seed and grow a new Elventree.
* Reward: Spatial Storage ring.
This was beginning to feel very much like one of those MMO games where there are simply too many side quests to handle. Was this a test from the system, or was having endless possible paths actually what the system was going for here? Because it was not doing a good job at it!
Needless to say, no matter how enticing the reward was, Albert was in no condition to actually do anything about the seed. He was tired from the bad night of sleep, frustrated by the subsequent night of magical failure, and the alarm on his clock was about to go off and occupied the same space in his mind that a ticking time bomb would. The incoming looming block of not-free time that was college made his mind unable to act, and he decided to quit.
[New quest: Daily Challenge.]
* Complete the daily challenge: Patience training.
* Reward: 150$, 3 minor health potions, 3 minor mana potions.
“Patience?!?” A deep sigh, then came the almost lunatic attempt at speaking with the system itself. “Can you fucking stop for a moment? I have more quests to do than fucking minutes to live!” Which was not a lunatic attempt at all since the system had proven, and actually stated out loud, that it could indeed hear him.
Seeing that he burst out against the system, right when the system gave him the sassiest quest called patience training, Albert also decided that it was high time he went to his grandpa, after class of course, because living inside his mind was quickly turning into a nightmare.
Meditation, it goes without saying, had been left behind and forgotten about. As it always is in these situations, the best tools one has to deal with a problem are also the ones that need the problem not to be present in order to be cultivated and developed into actually usable tools. [Mental Fortress III], paradoxically, was making the situation even more difficult to deal with, by lessening the emotional plasticity of Albert’s brain.
The thing is… it is easy to lose track of life. It is easy to forget how special a gift is. Albert, at this point in time, did not see see how lucky he was. He could, if he only set his mind to the task. He could realize that there is no need to rush things – at least as far as he knows – and that the quests are there to give guidance and to outline a path, not to put pressure on him. But he saw none of this. He only saw the pressing desire to have everything and to have it now, and the more quests there were the more he felt like he was overwhelmed with things he needed to do.
Which was true but not in the way Albert thought.
There is a difference between need and desire. Another difference still when one thing is neither a real need nor a desire, but the manifestation of a deep insecurity within one’s mind, an insecurity that becomes a need stronger than any real need when the subconscious can no longer keep it at bay. For the subconscious is our way to survive, and when it feels like something is amiss, it leaves no room for thoughts. It just manifests its needs under the threat of death unless those needs are met.
That is why it is so important to recognize one’s own inner conflicts and work on them. So that the subconscious becomes free to pursue higher goals, and to aid the rational mind instead of derailing it in its quest for survival.
Albert needed to deal with such matters before life became too hectic to leave them any space.
***
Cold, snapping wind lapped at Samantha’s face, wetting her tense eyebrows. She towered over the hunched technician examining the cache at the base of the Pylon, while a few inches away the shimmering containment field of the Exclusion Zone around the former village of Tryte was like a sheet of dark yellow mustard smeared on a pane of glass. There was a sandstorm raging inside the cut-off section of space-time, and the radiation was high enough to kill a person within seconds. If it wasn’t for the fact that the temperature, pressure, or toxic air would be a quicker death than even that.
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“I want to know what happened here, and if it was indeed PsyOps who sabotaged the cache.” She said, shouting to let her voice reach the ears of the technician.
The weather event caused by the Tryte Pilgrim incursion was weakening, but the effects of this change were not visible due to another event taking its place. It was the wider scale effect of the presence of the Eggs on the surface of Earth, destabilizing the prime material. The weather phenomena were just the tip of the iceberg, and she dreaded to think how far down the slopes of the icy metaphor the world would be allowed to slip before the higher-ups stepped in. Actually, Samantha didn’t know whether it would be a bad thing or a good thing if the unknown variable of the HDF did step in.
Then there was her gut telling her that perhaps it was not so bad that the people in charge did not seem to care about the events going on here on Earth, because if they did…
She banished those thoughts from her mind, wiping a stray drop of condensation before it rolled into her right eye.
“It was PsyOps.” The tall, lean man with an unusual pretty face for a technician said. He was of the nerdy type but he was confident and calm even in her presence. She respected that. “He damaged the cache… the sabotage could have cost us the whole fence if someone hadn’t intervened.”
No fence meant that the resulting nuclear blast from the missiles she herself had ordered to be launched would have destroyed Temalas City like it was made of hay and wood. The technician didn’t know who fixed the cache, of course, and in all fairness neither did she.
“How was the cache fixed?” She asked. “What was the exact procedure?”
The technician shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. There are traces of pure, raw magic. It should be impossible, and yet…”
“And yet there it is, staring at us in the face.” Lloyd was not capable of these feats. Just like her, he was not a magically gifted individual. Not that it mattered, when it came to actually wielding power, she knew that her family was much more suited to the task than the actual mages and psychics and whatnot. All illusionists they were, without a spine each and every one of them. “Let’s head back.”
The interior of the truck was laden with screens and consoles, plunged into the deep blue glow of machinery. It was a mobile extension of the Quadrangle, one that was deemed necessary now that Samantha’s space mage was out of commission in the CARF.
“Remind me to schedule a trip to the CARF as soon as the psycho lunatic wakes up.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Her secretary replied. She took on the role of the Quadrangle when Samantha did not feel like talking to a synthetic sentient building.
“How’s the weather?”
The technician took over. It was a different guy, with none of the charisma and composure of the other man. She wondered where he had gone.
“It’s uh… spreading.” The sentence ended like a question for some reason. “32 states have issued yellow weather alerts, and we are encouraging people to stay indoors and to prepare for an anomalous arctic current. It’s… uh… ma’am, I think we can use the fact that a similar weather event happened last year to buy us more time before people realize it’s anomalous.”
Samantha looked at the almost shaking man with renewed respect. “Great idea. Do it.”
He nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
She crossed her arms and watched the technician type in the number for the press office on his work phone. She listened in, half her mind wandering about other things. She thought about the higher-ups, whoever they were, and what might happen should they decide to step in. Then, her mind presented her with the usual problem that had been robbing her of her sleep the last several days, and was also the reason why she was barely ever at home anymore: what to do now.
What on Earth could she ever do to prevent a global disaster?
Finally, she resolved to make the phone call she dreaded doing.
Or perhaps not yet. No. Not yet. It would be a mistake. She still had time.
***
“I couldn’t even focus on classes. I just… couldn’t. usually I would just daydream about magic, come up with interesting ideas to try out when I get home but no! This time I literally dreaded the possibility of my mind wandering into magic territories without my consent because then I would start to sweat, to ache, to itch, to fidget, to—”
“Albert!” Lloyd snapped. “Deep breath. Focus. You’re hyperventilating.”
“You’re right. Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” The old man said, sprawling himself on the sofa. “Want a beer?”
“I could use one.”
“Go fetch it, then, you can teleport.”
Albert’s eyes narrowed. “Where? The fridge?”
“The corner store at the end of the road.”
“The corner store? There’s a freaking storm going on outside, didn’t you see?”
Albert’s clothes were damp and cold from earlier when he walked all the way to his grandpa’s house, and his coat was dripping on the floor from where he hung it.
“I might have noticed,” Lloyd said.
Albert sighed. “I don’t have a teleport point in the store.”
“Then it’s high time you create one. Go on, and then you can tell me all about your teleportation skill while we drink a nice cold one.”
The refreshingly cool liquid flowed down Albert’s throat. Despite it being cold outside, the fizziness and the sweet taste of the soft drink together with its arctic-cold temperature were like water poured onto a fire. Lloyd was disappointed at him for choosing to drink non-alcoholic beverages, but the frown lasted less than a second.
“Why did you really have me go all the way there? To grab a drink?”
Lloyd shrugged. “How do you feel now?”
“…better.” Albert reluctantly admitted.
“There ya go. See? I had beer in the fridge already, but you needed to clear your head and realize how silly you have been behaving lately.”
“You don’t get it! I—”
“Ah, ah, ah!” Grandpa held up a finger. “Don’t work yourself up again. Chill. There’s no need to go hyper.”
“Hyper?” Albert massaged his temples.
“Yeah, isn’t it how you youngsters talk?”
“Just… it’s fine. You don’t need to bother with that. And no, we don’t talk like this at all.”
Lloyd smiled. “You’re laughing. Busy inside your mind lately, am I right?”
“You have no idea.”
“I know the feeling. You need to deal with this shit, boy. With all of it. Begin by reminding yourself of just how special a hand has been dealt to you. From there, remember that nothing in life comes for free, and when it does… it’s suspicious.” Lloyd paused. “At the very least, struggle builds character. Find your demons. Fight them, talk to them, seduce them… I don’t care how you do it, but do it.”