[Player Log Start!]
[Log Holder: Verity Monroe]
[Level: Invalid]
One moment, Verity was trapped in the mindless limbo that she was sent to every time Lucinda took over her body, and in the next everything was solid, and she was retching, and thick, clear liquid was being forced out of her eyes.
It only got worse from there. They were trapped, and planning a last-ditch attempt to get out, and Lucinda was free now, apparently, and they needed Verity to go back to her Harbinger file. Of course she agreed to it, in the short span of time she had to make the decision. This was the only thing she was good for, in the long-term. And now…
[Rebooting Last Registered Location…]
[You have Entered The Hub!]
[Realm: L-33 | Prime Realm]
The box was slightly greyer than usual. She waited for a second, waiting for any other prompts to come out. When nothing did, and the box just quietly dissipated, she instead decided to take a look around.
She was in a corridor. Small and cramped, walls made entirely of metal, and the floors squeaky linoleum she had only ever seen in Terry’s convenience store. The air stank of sterile cleaning products. The whole place felt familiar, though she couldn’t remember where this was.
It had to have been the last place she had been while still a Harbinger, right? Then something about this exact spot must have significance to her. She turned around slowly, and her eyes landed on the one door that seemed to hold any use here. Sample Storage.
The door wasn’t even locked, opening easily when she pushed at it. She poked her head in, looking for anyone inside. Not a single soul. Just a long, long hall lined with shelves of cabinets. She groped around for a light, looking at the mysterious system used to label these things. The room was designated as sample storage, but samples of what?
She peered into a box marked ’12-29-2025-L31-AZ’, and cold air drifted out. Inside was a green-grey human hand, severed crudely a few inches down from the wrist, yet still twitching and alive. A zombie hand. Verity snapped it shut and continued onward.
So, the number accompanying the ‘L’ in the code denoted the realm which the sample had been collected from. Could she use that for anything? No, best to keep looking.
The next room she found was an Archives. Again, there was no security. The entire place felt dead. They truly did not expect to ever have someone with malicious intent glitch a way inside, did they? Inside the Archives, Verity was able to locate a computer. Though, its only function seemed to be searching and displaying files extracted from the System, not actually being able to change anything. The cursor blinked in the search bar. She hovered her hands over the keys, trying to find a way to prioritize.
First, she needed to find out what the situation in Delica was like. Lucky and Tench had gotten out, but Terry and Asadullah were still stuck there. If whatever madness had struck Paterson had spread to the other folk staying there, then she would need to extract them. She searched for Delica, hoping to not be overwhelmed with results. If anything, she was underwhelmed.
Her eyes skimmed over the two files that came up. One described it as a ‘possible target for continued expansion’, but then a red pen had crossed that out and said that it was now serving as a containment chamber for a target. That was where the second file came in. The personal file of Peter Paterson, an early recruit for the ‘Harbinger Program’, and known associate of one Eleanor Monroe, once a helpful ally, now disgraced criminal.
They knew her mother. These people knew Verity’s mother. She had to look it up on this computer, she had to chase this lead-
No. Absolutely not. Time was of the essence. She needed to check up on the others. But one little peek?
Her self-control lapsed for only milliseconds, and then she found herself poring through the file for Eleanor Monroe.
Except, there was no File file for her. There was simply a text file debrief of her background and abilities. The System didn’t have an actual file on her.
Which was weird. Slightly less weird, when Verity read a few lines down where the writer of the document credited her for translating the System into something within human comprehension, and developing tools to allow them to manipulate and write their own rules into it.
Verity’s mother was responsible for all of this.
She was fuming. Red was leaking into her vision. Verity forced herself to close her eyes and think exceedingly calm thoughts.
Forget that. Check up on teammates first. She looked each of them individually, and the System happily delivered their information to her. Their names, their ages, their stats, their locations – not exact coordinates, just ranges and Realms. Verity already knew all this stuff so it wasn’t exactly useful. But it also told her which of them was dead. By nature of the dead’s File being nowhere to be found.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
She put that particular tidbit together when Ben didn’t show up when Verity searched for her, despite Jared showing up just fine. So did Lucky, and Tench. And Terry, though his had a big red ‘CRITICALLY INJURED’ on his file. Michael was gone, too. Asadullah… wasn’t here either.
Dammit. They had lost nearly half their team. It wasn’t fair.
Something scraped a few feet behind her. Someone dragging something along the floor, and the sound of footsteps wasn’t far off. Her senses flared, and she whipped around to find…
“Asad!”
Asadullah had his hands up defensively, drawing Verity’s eyes to the arm Console strapped over his bangles. And into them? That must have been what had allowed him to get inside.
It would make his powers weaker, too. She could easily reach out now and go for his neck-
She recoiled at the thought. Where had that come from? Right… Harbinger mode was back, stronger than ever.
“Vera.” He nodded quickly. Even though he was standing in front of her, the footsteps still hadn’t ceased. She gulped and pulled them both down, behind the desk, just as someone walked past the open Archives door.
The footsteps paused, and a voice scoffed under their breath, “Brutes can’t even keep a light off. Minefield isn’t making enough energy for this wastage.”
The two held their breath as the lights were turned off and the door was firmly shut. Verity refused to let her guard down even then. She felt like she was on a live wire. Like she was on attack from every side. The nonchalance of the person who walked past them infuriated her.
“Damn, they really don’t think they’ll ever be attacked.” She giggled bitterly to herself. Asadullah nodded, pulling himself upright and going for the computer.
“Hey, is this the part of the place where we can change the files?” He asked, already searching for Terry’s file.
“No changing, only viewing.” Verity told him, angling away from him while beating back the instinct to tearandclawandbite away with a stick. He grumbled under his breath and put the keyboard aside. She peered over his shoulder to look at the exact same file she had checked not five minutes ago, “Why do you want to change Terry’s File?”
Asadullah looked away guiltily, “His Man-Eating Mold. It- it infected him. I need to get to his file and change it. Give him a status boost, or a fungus immunity, or something. Vera, I have to save him.” He said seriously, the stress curling his fingernails into razor sharp claws.
Verity hesitated for a second, and then glanced at the screen of the computer, where she had been reading her mother’s file. A developmental tool that can rewrite reality itself, translating everything as computer code understandable to the human mind.
“There’s something on this Level that will do just that.” She promised him, unsure where this confidence was coming from, “I’ll help you find it.”
His eyes glazed over for a second, and then he did a full body shudder, his tail and ears warping and… folding in on themselves?
A black lump lined with yellow pulled itself out of Asadullah’s bracelet, big eyes doing a facsimile of blinking, before squinting into a smile, “No need. I can feel it from here.”
“What the hell is that.” Verity growled, baring her teeth. Finally a creature her instincts were latching onto that she didn’t have to feel bad about.
“This is the djinn. Babur. He’s been around… for a while.” Asad explained sheepishly, “I forgot you didn’t know each other. Guess it’s been a while since we last saw each other, huh?”
Too long, in her books. But she had a bigger concern, “What do you mean you can feel it from here?”
Babur looked at her drolly, “The magic, Harbinger. There’s an impossibly dense signature coming slightly from our left, at least two stories down. Just follow my lead.”
Verity didn’t like it, and she certainly didn’t trust this inkblot creature to lead them the right way – call her a bootlicker, but if something was locked away into a set of bangles, it was probably for good reason.
But nevertheless, both her and Asadullah followed after the beast through stairwells and corridors.
The whole place was so… normal. Like a sitcom office come to life. Where people clearly worked and had lives outside of, judging by the calendars marked with national holidays, and a few desks with sentimental keepsakes all over them.
It was also abandoned and dead, with only a stray pencil pusher passing through to deter them from their path. It would’ve been great if her bloodlust activated around them, but for some reason, she felt almost… bad, at the thought of murdering these random no-names. It was frustrating, where this unbidden thing was coming from.
In other news, it turns out that their Abilities did work in the Hub. Verity realized this when she had to employ Deception to walk past a particularly stubborn worker who refused to move out of the way for them to walk past.
Finally, they came to the door that Babur was leading them to. It opened out to a platform, which was halfway up a large circular room with a high vaulted ceiling.
Most of the space was taken up by a giant glass tube that stretched all the way from the bottom of the room, to the very top. And inside the hefty column, there was… Everything.
That was the only way to describe it. It primarily seemed to be green light at first glance, but if she thought about it for any longer, her brain would try and tell her that it was every color in the rainbow. It appeared to be lightning, perpetually flowing all around the containment chamber, but watching it made you realize there were animals in there, written words from every alphabet under the sun. A ship was flowing on stormy seas one second, only to then transform into an owl and fly to the ceiling, where it was then sent tumbling back down in a shower of flower petals.
It was Everything. You could tell, just by looking at it.
“What is this?” She asked, just in case Babur had more insight on the topic.
“Purest Magic.” He explained somberly, “The closest any mortal magician can ever get to the Tongue That Commands The Laws of The World.”
It was all clicking in her mind. They were translating everything using the Purest Magic as a template, which converted all the inputs to reality. All the Consoles were connected on a network to the translator that went through here. So where was this column being connected, exactly?
Thick cables were plugged in at the base, and the midway point at which they were looking at it, and also presumably at the ceiling, though she couldn’t see that high. Now that she was looking at where they led, she found that most of them were climbing upwards, connecting maybe to some type of broadcasting device to feed information to the translator. But one cable in particular was connected simply to one innocuous computer, stashed away in the corner, down on the ground level of the room.
Her eyes blazed. Target acquired.
[Player Log End!]