Reward selected. Entertainment Center facility unlocked.

Level up! +10 Path Points! Erg/Health restored

Level up! +10 Path Points! Erg/Health restored

The rush of the level ups settled over me and I stared down at myself, watching as the erg ran through my system with increasing density, the glow increasing in vibrancy. I once more wondered at what I was becoming.

Another system message blasted into my perspective.

ERROR: Chosen

You have received the following Factory quest:

Power Supply (4/?): Expand power grid to cover 1 entire region.

Reward: Access to one factory facility of choice.

I’d have to ask the librarian what was meant by a region, and just what degree of coverage was required, but that was a tomorrow question. For tonight, all I wanted to do was get some sleep. I probably should check out the Entertainment Center, but a weariness had settled into me, magnified by all of the doubts that flowed through me.

What I needed to do before I slept, though, was deploy more of the autorifles. Fortunately, I was able to draw line of sight from my current location to the desired deployment locations, so I simply walked through the new expansion, shifting the contents of my inventory into even intervals along the wall. All in all, I deployed another twenty-eight of the autorifles, bringing the total to thirty. While it wasn’t as much as I would ultimately like, it was all that the current grid could handle.

Fortunately, so long as I continued to expand my area of control evenly, the area of deployment would increased quadratically, while the perimeter of the base would increase linearly, meaning that every new condenser would give me enough power to increase not just the raw number of autorifles, but also their density along the walls.

I somehow felt even more drained after finishing that deployment and stumbled into the factory. The stairs were simply too far and the mere thought of climbing them a herculean ordeal that I swiftly banished from my head. Instead, I collapsed down onto a couch, face first into the cushions, and immediately drifted off into sleep.

The nightmares were unusually vivid, the sounds of battle, of my campus overrun with monsters. My friends, my teachers, Sam, they all fought against the rising tide, but so many went down in blood and screams, screams that echoed even as I rolled off of the couch with a thud. I groaned and pushed myself into a seated position, glad to see that there was no one around to have observed my fall.

As I made a mental list of the things that I needed to get done today, I made my way up to the Entertainment Center. At the very least, I could check out its status before I started delving especially deep into the work of the day. I briefly pondered skipping the afternoon meeting. It was entirely possible that no one would show up, but I figured that I might as well make a showing, and if no one was there, I could move onto other things.

After that, I wanted to sink a couple more mines if possible and run them up to the factory floor. I also needed to get smelters running for all of those accumulated resources. Once all of that was settled, my next priority would be to help get the new fighters geared up as much as possible. If they had the weapons and armor they needed, maybe that fight would have gone much more smoothly.

I also needed to expand the processing facilities in general, to assure that I had a ready supply of materials I needed, and I wanted to upgrade my own weaponry. And the food production team might be needing tools any minute now. It was not a manageable workload, but for the moment I was the only person who I knew was working on it.

With a sigh, I pushed open the door to the Entertainment Center. The moment I saw the interior, all thoughts except for what lay before me slipped from my mind. While the other facilities possessed an aesthetic value above and beyond their pure utility, this place really was something else altogether.

The facility was roughly divided into three rooms, one directly at the entrance, one with a door across from where I stood, and the final one off to the right. The first room, which was occupied by two of the moms, Terry, and Marlene, was a simple lounge or den, with large and plush armchairs. What drew my attention, though, was the bookcases lining the walls behind the furniture. I moved in and scanned over the titles, seeing that the selection was entirely fiction, ranging from Don Quixote to 19Q4.

Which of course raised all sorts of questions, which I added to the pile to talk to the librarian about. I grabbed one book, a collection of short stories by Robert Chambers, and began to idly flip through the pages, finding that the contents matched up with my memories of them.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Hey, Cid! Can I call you Cid? Seems like the best nickname for you,” Terry said.

I jumped at the sound, having not noticed them approaching me. “Cid is fine. I prefer Placid, but Cid is fine.”

“Cool!” Terry grinned. “I know you got a bit busy last night, but I do want to chat with you in a bit. I need something made.”

I turned to face Terry fully and briefly went over the list of work that I had to, once again, before nodding slowly. “Fine. Let me finish looking around here, then I’ll come back and we can hammer out the details.”

Terry gave a salute and I let out a faint guffaw in response, before they reclaimed their seat, leafing through their book, The Invisibles by Grant Morrison, apparently. With a shrug, I went to check out the room on the right, which somehow was a video game arcade. I stared in silence for a long time, looking over the machines, before simply shaking my head and figuring that there was a similar process at work as with the books.

The four kids were playing various machines, one was playing pinball, two were racing each other, and the fourth was playing some sort of side scroller beat-em-up. A fifth person, who looked only vaguely familiar, was playing a game called CarnEvil, dual-wielding the pistols and firing with shockingly accurate aim. She was fairly short, with long black hair, wearing worn jeans, a black metal band t-shirt, and a pair of sunglasses.

I decided to leave them be and went to check out the third room, which turned out to be a small theater. It was currently empty, but a quick examination revealed a projector in the back, allowing it to serve both for live entertainment and pre-recorded media. Judging from the rest of the space, there likely was a catalog of films and maybe even television shows that the projector could present.

Something about this place caught in my mind, kept me from fully being able to move on. The presence of pre-system media was unusual, certainly, and something was tickling in the back of my brain about that, something that was moving into slow alignment. No, the strangeness here was something more personal, something in the arrangement of details in aggregate, rather than anything in particular.

Then it hit me in a rush and the weight of it forced me into one of the chairs in the theater. It reminded me of when I was a kid, and I would go out to the mall with my parents. We’d go to the movies, to the arcade, to bookstores, and it’d be a fun day out with the family. But then I had to ruin everything, I had to become something so strange that my family could never understand me. Their faces flashed by me, my parents, my brothers, the smiles turned to grimaces, the disgust visible in them.

I had betrayed them and their expectations, I had turned my back on everything they had set out for me, all of the work they had put in for me. I failed them and I failed myself and I couldn’t forget that, I couldn’t let that slip from my mind, even now, even with the world ending around me, I had to allow that guilt and shame and that pain to be a part of my soul. I leaned forward, wrapping my arms around my knees as I worked to keep my breath steady, I couldn’t afford to let anyone see my weak.

Slowly, the pain eased, the tightness of my chest faded and I was finally able to exhale fully, my body loosening, before I leaned back in my seat. I closed my eyes tight, squeezing out the surroundings, then allowed them to crack open inexorably slow, staring forward at the stage. It really was a comfortable looking room, wood paneling, smooth tile floor, those chairs that leaned back with the foot rest. I let out my breath once more, exhaling the stress that had built up, before slowly pushing myself to my feet.

As I returned to the den, Terry and the gun girl were waiting for me. Terry grinned brightly and put their hand onto the girl’s back. “Hey, this is my girlfriend, Raven. She also needs you to make something for her.”

I schooled my expression to a smirk, rather than a sigh. “Sure, okay. I can find the time to work on this. Helping folks out has to take priority.” I brushed my hair back. “So, what’s up?”

The girl - Raven - kept silent but glanced over to Terry. “Okay, so Raven here has priority. She picked up [Pistolero] when she changed paths, but Jen and Artemis won’t let her go train until she gets some guns.”

I nodded slowly. “That shouldn’t be too hard to do, I can edit a rifle design probably into a revolver, maybe toss on an auto-loader to remove the necessity of reloading.” I furrowed my brow as I thought through the design process. “What would really help would be if I could pull on your specific skill for the design, which-“ A smile spread across my face. “Well, we’ll have to test it out.”

Raven smiled slightly, though it came off as more of a smirk. Terry’s expression remained bright, though. They said, “I need a flute!”

I closed my eyes for a moment, thinking through my schema and my skills, before shaking my head slowly. “There is no way I can build a flute without help. I have no idea how they work, why they work, or really anything else about them. Let’s head over to the Research Lab, though, I think we might be able to make this thing work.”

A short trip across the foyer brought the three of us to the Research. “Let’s start with you, Raven.” I motioned to the central drafting table, before stepping in and grasping the edge. After a moment’s hesitation, she joined me.

The design space unfolded before me, stretching wide in my mind’s eye, tracing the patterns of possibility. I immediately called up my rifle schema and my ranged weaponry skill, aligning them as basic components of the design. It was incomplete though, I could feel that emptiness, that need for more information for the design to follow my whims and become what it was meant to be. So I reached out with my mind, feeling at the white void that surrounded me.

A tentative presence pushed back against me, then flinched away. I kept the pulse of my mind’s presence soft as I reached out, urging for a contact to happen in that quiet moment. The presence pressed back, and for just a moment, I felt the complexities of the mind behind it. She was a shy and quiet girl, made all the more so by the world’s ending, but she was confident in her skills and fierce in her protection of her friends and the one she loved. She rejected the hidebound mores of contemporary society, choosing to become herself in a way that truly and uniquely hers.

Then, slowly but surely, her skill slid across the barrier between selves, flying up to link up with the developing design above.