TODD

They continued to talk about possible methods for changing or upgrading the furniture while they prepared and ate dinner. Their ideas varied from letting everything turn back to debris, to bringing in an upgraded version and switching it out.

“Your clean spell triggered the crystal growth,” Todd commented after dinner. ”Where did you learn it?” he asked.

“I traded a bag of fiber and a spindle to a woman who was living in the upper halls in Londontown. She was caring for an infant son she was terrified would disappear in the night. She wanted to sell the child to me, but I couldn’t see myself explaining to a young boy how I bought him and left his mother behind.” Grandmother explained.

“Why did she think the baby would vanish?” Todd asked, genuinely puzzled.

“In the dark hours everything you don’t physically have contact with disappears in the halls of a square. That is why you have to pay for housing,” Grandmother explained. “I don’t think the baby would have disappeared. Control should see it as a player and everything it touched would also be safe. There is no reasoning with that kind of fear. I asked her what spells she knew and traded her for the magic instead. I explained to her that even if she sold the finished thread back to the vendor, it would pay her enough to stay in the inn for the night and refill the bag with fiber. Of course she would have done better if she managed to buy the fiber from scavengers and sold the thread to tailors.”

Grandmother’s story was familiar to Todd. He was pretty sure he heard a version of it as a child, with a slightly different twist. Something like a wise mother tricked the mad queen’s youngest daughter with the offer of useless magic, instead of the baby she desired.

Todd did know that drunks that passed out in the halls on their way back to their rooms tended to lose things. He thought they were getting robbed. In a way they were. The only difference was that according to Grandmother the robber was Control.

“Why do you ask?” Grandmother queried.

“You’ve always called it clean, but what if it is really a weak restore?” Todd asked. “I noticed at Alex’s shop that if I cast it multiple times his chair looked slightly better each time.”

“Interesting,” Grandmother commented. “There is probably another way to trigger the rest upgrade. I’ve noticed that Control rarely makes a single item or spell required. There are usually alternates.”

“Like how you ‘grew’ the broken pieces back up to full components and it accepted the replacement pieces we brought in from deeper in the structure?” Todd remarked.

“Yes, the first is the first exploration, low tier version. The second is a mid-tier return trip version. There is probably a magic version too, since both of those were just physical labor. Perhaps restore, or a higher tier version of it would just regrow the furniture in place.”

“Do you think there is a higher tier version?” Todd asked.

“I have not seen any evidence nor heard any rumor of it, but I can see how a spell that turns debris back into furnishings might make the selkie think a tier six is a kind of god,” Grandmother commented. Todd thought that would be impressive, but there were plenty of other reasons that the selkie would think tier sixes were gods. Not the least being her latest revelation that her nanobots continued to function outside of the structure. He suspected that functionality alone might explain it. The selkie spent a lot of time in the open ocean. Far from shore the ocean was probably magic free. That meant the selkie would be well aware that a tier six remained faster and stronger outside the structure.

In the morning they packed everything up and decided to just leave the litter with the extra components, nothing on it was that unique or valuable. Todd noticed his gathering bag with all the little pieces was already tied to his pack. They didn’t weigh much and he thought Alex might appreciate them so he didn’t say anything.

They ran out to the entrance. It was less than ten minutes away even at the slow pace Grandmother set. They slowed to a fast walk when they reached the trail up through the trees to the ridge beyond. Grandmother led after shifting her load around so that the gathering bag with the meat in it hung where she could see it. Her large gathering bag holding the spotted fur was tied to the back of her pack where Todd had a clear view of it.

When Todd noticed the bag just starting to lighten in color, Grandmother stopped and turned back to face him.

“Take a step at a time,” She said to him, “and check after each if you feel any pain.”

He did as she said. When the color started to fade from his spear, he felt, not pain, but a tightness along his side. He paused and pulled the shirt of his cloth armor up. It moved a little stiffly already, even if it still possessed most of its color. A series of red parallel lines marred his flesh.

“That doesn’t look good,” Todd commented. The marks disappeared into the top of his pants heading uncomfortably close to his groin. Grandmother peered at the marks.

“They look partly healed,” she commented. “They ran deep and I am worried about the damage underneath we can’t see. We better head back.”

“I won’t argue,” Todd responded. He took a couple steps back, but the marks didn’t vanish. He walked carefully until they were certain they were in the full strength of the structure's area of influence. Grandmother cast another heal on him. It seriously hurt, but he didn’t lose consciousness, which made Todd think the wound was much better.

They walked back down to the entrance court. “We can continue the survey,” Todd offered.

“I want to work on the hide a little,” Grandmother said. "I can use the stream to wash it. Afterwards we can finish surveying everything on this level between here and the grand staircases." Todd agreed. By unspoken agreement the two of them stayed together, taking turns working on the hide. Grandmother packed the hide back into the gathering bag that completely cleaned itself while the skin was out.

They surveyed inward from their entrance in a kind of grid pattern. They located six different grand staircases, arranged around the entrance in a rough semi-circle. In all that area they only found three potential rests. All three were the typical rest configuration of a wide spot in the hallway and debris piles. Only one possessed a glass wall. The glass was opaque. They didn’t take the time to find the crystals.

“I like our rest better,” Grandmother said, when they found the first one. This one’s advantage was that it was closer to the entrance than the one they slept in the night before. The second rest was close to a water source. They could find nothing interesting about the third beyond the opaque glass wall. They ate lunch in the last rest. In all the surveyed areas on the entrance floor, they found no galleries.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

GRANDMOTHER

“Should we search the next floor down?” Todd asked. Grandmother was looking at her map. It was difficult to tell which section of the map was revealed today and which twenty years ago. She was pretty certain that nothing of the old map was left on this floor, but the floor below showed a variety of different revealed paths she took over the years. It was these paths she was searching now for the distinctive shape of a long thin gallery. She found one, but they already searched the area above it. That area was not dead space but a hallway. Grandmother couldn’t see how the high ceilings of a gallery would fit in there. She dropped a marker on it that would remain even after the map was updated.

“Yeah,” She told Todd. “I can see the shape of a gallery not far from here on the floor below. Let’s at least go there and look. I don’t know when I went that way and revealed this map. I should have checked my map before we started. Most of my old data has been overwritten. Do you know any way to roll them back?”

“No,” Todd responded. “I do know a setting on your interface that makes map sections more transparent the older they are.”

“You do?” Grandmother said, surprised. “Can you show me that?” After a quick check to ensure nothing threatening appeared to be too near, Todd sat down to share his interface with Grandmother. Sharing interfaces involved sitting next to each other and holding hands. Todd showed Grandmother which icons to select on the menu system to reach the map setting. Grandmother committed the choices to memory, before opening her own interface.

The icon didn’t look like a map or like ink fading or anything else Grandmother could think of that might represent displaying older data in a lighter color. She didn't know how someone figured out that was what it did. After selecting the fade with age setting she reopened the map. The section of map where her marker rested was so faint it was almost invisible.

“Oh yeah,” she said to Todd, “it was a long time ago that there was a gallery there. Still I think it might be interesting to see what is there now.”

They headed in the direction of the closest grand staircase and went down to tier two space. This was a different staircase than the one they used earlier, so there were no component stacks in the hallway. Those stacks would already be starting to decay, since they didn’t go back today to at least look at them.

The old gallery location was a completely ordinary length of hallway. They cleared the rooms on both sides and found a ruined sanitary facility. The pools were cracked and dry while the cubicles in the back were so overgrown they couldn’t get near them. This made no sense since the room was in complete darkness until they entered it and turned the lights on. That was the structure. There was no sound of water calling them in. They only found it because they swept every room. It was the first sign they found of sanitation facilities since Todd was wounded. They couldn’t decide if it was significant or not.

They returned to running grid patterns on this floor. Grandmother called it a day a little early, but she was feeling frustrated when they reached a third grand staircase. They decided to go back up to their claimed rest for the night. The climb up was a lot easier without the litter. Grandmother was dreaming of dinner and an early night, when Todd stopped suddenly and went to full alert. Grandmother put one hand on her knife and flexed her fingers on the other hand.

“It has changed,” Todd commented. Grandmother looked past Todd to see a much larger space. The rest they left that morning was a wide spot in the hallway stretching to the right. Now the rest stretched to both right and left. The left half looked like another rest, right down to the debris on the floor. Grandmother did a quick inspection of the area, before stepping across and continuing down the hallway to the collapse they could see in the distance.

These were the rooms she raided the night before for debris. They appeared unchanged, even the debris inside hadn’t respawned. She returned to the rest.

“The crystal has moved,” Todd told her, pointing up at the gem that now floated over the new larger debris pile that might once have been a sofa. This development absolutely flabbergasted her. Everyone knew protection crystals could not move.

She swung her pack off and dropped it by the front leg of the bench, before sitting down on it. The existing chairs and sofa faced the hallway, with their back to the exterior glass wall. Before they left they faced the other direction. She stared at the debris piles and thought about it. In her forty-five years in the ruins she could not recall ever seeing a double rest. That made her think this was not a steady state. In time the rest would fall back to a normal rest configuration or would disappear just like a normal rest.

All day the question at the back of her mind was how could one upgrade a rest that already contained complete furniture in it. She couldn’t come up with a solution. The closest she came up with was maybe this ‘rebuild the rest’ quest was only available on the ruined rests. The rests with intact furniture did tend to have larger crystals. Perhaps a phase two quest became available after the rest was rebuilt and that quest was what you needed to do in the intact rests.

Now as she looked at those new debris piles she wondered. Without the ‘rebuild’ quest how would a player grow a rest? Could this rest, so close to the surface with its window, be unique? What if ‘rebuild’ quests yielded different results depending on the starting rest? What other rooms were there that this rest could be turning into? The only thing that came to mind was a gallery. It was the only thing she could think of that contained more than one sofa in it. She wasn’t certain if it was the only option or if she could only think of it because she spent the last couple days looking for one and it was fixed in her mind.

A gallery wasn’t right. The window was overhung by roots, giving some tangible proof that there was not much structure above this point. Galleries were long thin rooms, with high ceilings, multiple stories kind of high. There couldn’t be that kind of room above this point. Besides, she had seen ruined galleries. The east entrance to Chicago was one. If rests turned into galleries, what were the ruined galleries?

Her thoughts swung the other way as she considered that Todd and her failed to find any ruined galleries after two days of searching. The two of them could move fast, they covered a lot of ground in those days. Were the galleries she saw when humans first entered the structure just leftovers from the last players to come through? As soon as Control decided they weren’t going to try to reclaim them it took them away? What about Chicago?

Considering it was the entrance, it was possible the gallery there was continuously occupied for most of the time between discovery and now. Control didn’t like to change things in front of players, look at how this room didn’t change until they left. Control might think someone there was in the process of claiming it.

“What does Companion call galleries?” Grandmother asked Todd. She turned to look at the man and found him cooking. He was roasting a chunk of meat over his portable stove, on a spit he’d put together from some of her ‘just in case’ components. He was holding a small bowl and was basting the roast with a liquid he’d obviously prepared before this moment. Grandmother was vaguely aware he said something to her a while back, but she couldn’t remember what it was.

“Do you want me to hum the notes?” Todd replied.

“No,” Grandmother replied. “What is the literal meaning of his words? We gloss over a lot of what he says into the words we use. Otherwise he comes across as some kind of religious fanatic.”

“This is an Alex question,” Todd responded. “I wouldn’t be too hard on Companion. We call prize altars… well prize altars. There is a trace of religion in there. Give us a couple hundred years and humans will sound like religious fanatics too.” Grandmother frowned, as she considered the truth in those words.

“Alex told me once what the translation was, but I can’t remember what he said. I was hoping he told you,” Grandmother explained. She knew this was an Alex question, but he wasn’t there. Todd leaned back from his basting and thought for a moment or two.

“I think it was something like an association meeting place. Or was it an adventure hub?” Todd said.

“Yes, that sounds familiar. The meeting place of an association of adventurers,” Grandmother said.

“Do you think this rest is turning into a gallery?” Todd asked. He was a smart man and quick.

“An association hall,” Grandmother responded. “And maybe, I’m not certain.” Grandmother fell silent for a moment, Todd went back to his basting. She realized they needed to keep going. Humans pushed through the dark space too quickly. Grandmother thought they managed to miss most of the content here. These early lessons were important. They were the base rules of the game. Grandmother herself did better, since she did a lot of day trips into the area while returning to the Speedwell at night. She was alone and focused on inscriptions and the spells they described. But by not staying overnight she missed things as well.

“We should call them ‘inventory access’,” Grandmother announced, “instead of prize altars.”

“That is a more accurate description,” Todd commented. “Dinner is about ready.”

“Good,” Grandmother replied. “After we eat, let's run down and see if we can retrieve some of the components we left behind yesterday.”