Time froze again and a system message appeared:
"Welcome, Champion!
You've gained access to the Predictive Blood Shield, a versatile and powerful defensive tool. This shield encases you in a protective bubble, dynamically adapting to counter various threats based on your current health. As you progress, your shield will evolve, unlocking new modes tailored to different dangers:
Physical Mode: Optimized against physical attacks, reducing damage from melee and projectiles.
Magical Mode: Enhanced protection from arcane assaults, diminishing the impact of spells and elemental magic.
Resistance Mode: Bolsters your defenses against status effects, poisons, and curses, mitigating their effectiveness.
Phase Mode: Grants temporary invulnerability, allowing you to pass through enemies or hazards unscathed.
Environmental Mode: Shields against environmental hazards, such as extreme temperatures, toxic air, and rough terrain.
Level up your shield by engaging in combat and completing challenges. Each mode's mastery will provide you with the strategic depth to face any adversary. Remember, the key to maximizing your shield's potential lies in understanding and adapting to the threats you face. Embrace your journey, and let the Predictive Blood Shield be your bulwark against the darkness."
On my UI, an icon started to blink, one of the ones from earlier that was grayed out. As I “looked” at it, the words “Blood Shield” appeared over it in tiny letters.
I looked back at Poe and realized time hadn’t actually stopped, only slowed down. He was still expanding, but at an unimaginably glacial pace. I still called him “Poe” in my mind, a generous if not precisely accurate description, considering he was mostly pieces of flesh and those pieces were heading in all directions at once.
I didn’t hesitate any further and mentally clicked the icon.
A bubble sprang from somewhere inside me and I was surrounded by a humming, pulsing, semi-translucent ball of red energy, so quickly I didn’t even have time to blink.
Time unfroze.
Poe, or at least the pieces of him that were coming in my direction hit my shield with a sickening, wet splat. One of the eyes of the vintage writer and poet glared at me balefully then slid off the shield, hitting the ground with a plop.
On my UI, my “Blood Bar” shot instantly to 100% full.
The shield flickered, then vanished. The bloody bits of Poe began to drop but pixelated and faded away before they could hit the ground.
More icons and labels lit up and system messages started to cycle, flashing so quickly I couldn’t read them. This system needed some serious work. Probably made by Ford.
A loud beeping sound brought me back, followed by another, then another more rapidly. Then another, with increasingly narrowing frequency, faster and faster, and with a sinking feeling I realized I recognized the sound.
It was a countdown and sounded like the end of the movie Predator when Arnie’s about to get blown up. I closed all the messages that had so inconveniently blocked my view and looked down at the mangled mass of bone and flesh on the ground in front of me. A sparkle emanated from the still form. As I looked at his remains, I received another system message.
Loot? (Y/N)
Somehow, looting the corpse of someone who’d just been talking to me was completely different than looting in a video game but I steeled myself, this was just part of the challenge.
I knelt down and noticed a flashing light coming from his bloody spine, painting the ground red. With each rapidly increasing beep, the light flashed.
I mentally selected “Y” and another screen opened, just like my own inventory screen, filled with a ton of icons that made no sense.
Take all? (Y/N)
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
I mentally accepted and everything from his screen disappeared then there was a massive flash of light and…
Thank you for using Celestial Shields™, a division of Interstellar Safety Solutions, LLC. We hope you’ll consider us for all your exploration needs.
Once again, time froze and then I was standing, alone, in the bottom of a smoldering depression, surrounded by charred and burning debris. This time, however, the debris consisted of Poe’s charcoaled remains.
I gasped and looked around wildly, but the blast hadn’t affected Kevin. He was running around licking the air, unimpressed.
A bit of acrid smoke brought me back to the present and I sneezed. Kevin stopped licking and ran over, panting. I bent down and scratched his chin. He glowed green.
I looked around but there wasn’t anything around. No insects, no birds, nothing. Well, at least nothing within the blast radius. I could see faint forms high in the air, but around me, everything was gone. The weird cactus were gone, along with every bit of vegetation.
I’d only been an EMT for a little over a year, but I’d seen more than my share of horrific accidents, decapitations, mangled flesh, burn victims, animal attacks, and overdoses.
Maybe seeing all those horrors was what allowed me to handle a person exploding in front of me. I should have been catatonic, but I simply felt disconnected as I looked down at what had been a person just a moment earlier.
Poe’s remains consisted of a few bones sticking out of a pile of ash. His clothes had been obliterated and I’d already looted his…
That’s right! I’d looted him. Time to see what he had.
“Come on Kevin, may as well keep walking,” I said and we continued down the road in the same direction as before while I checked out Poe’s dropped items. I opened up my inventory screen and noticed there were a dozen-ish blinking items. As I focused on each one, it expanded out to a 3D rotating image with the name of the item on top.
1. A spiral-bound, leather-covered notebook
2. A feathered fountain-pen-shaped stylus
3. A tablet of some sort
4. A polished metallic object, about the size of a deck of cards
5. A bone-handled, folding pocket knife
6. A regular tobacco pipe
7. A twisted-gold bracelet inscribed with “Annabel Lee”
8. An gold pocket watch on a leather fob
9. A bag of gourmet jelly beans
10. A monocle
I imagined taking the bag of jelly beans into my hand and suddenly, there it was, like magic. Inside was a variety of colored beans, small, with flecks of contrasting color on each one.
I probably should have worried about the contents, but at this point, the Earth was gone, everyone I knew except Hannah was dead, and Edgar Allen Poe had just exploded all over me. If I died of a poisoned jelly bean, so be it. I popped one into my mouth and tentatively sucked on it.
“Root beer!” I told Kevin triumphantly. He wiggled his tail and tippy-tapped in front of me, so I pulled a pink one out of the bag and held it out to him. He sniffed suspiciously then took it gingerly.
I replaced the bag inside my inventory and kept walking. The next item I examined was the notebook. I couldn’t open it – it seemed to be a solid object, but as I looked a dialogue box popped up.
Claim All? (Y/N)
Without thinking I selected “Y” and the notebook vanished. In the top right of my vision however, a small icon had appeared that looked like a miniature version of the notebook. I selected it and a new window opened up. It was a to-do list.
Auto Initialize? (Y/N)
Again, I selected “Y” without too much consideration and entries started appearing.
Task ID
Task Name
Priority
Category
Value
1
Find Hannah
High
Personal
High
2
Restore Sarge
High
Personal
High
3
Accept Introductory Quest
High
Main
Critical
4
Pet Kevin
Unknown
Personal
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.
Unknown
I shook my head at the last entry and looked down at Kevin accusingly. “Did you have anything to do with this?” I asked?
He looked at me innocently but I could swear there was a glint in his little eyes. I kneeled down and he rolled over obligingly, exposing his fuzzy stomach. I rubbed it because what else was I going to do?
The second entry was strange and didn’t make any sense. I stood up and continued down the road, lost in thought.
“What do you think ‘Restore Sarge’ means,” I asked Kevin. He didn’t reply, just bounced around me as I walked, not that I expected him to speak. “Does that mean he isn’t dead?” Kevin continued to not reply.
Entry 3, the introductory quest must not have been the one I took off the board earlier, since the task was still labeled “in-progress” on my to-do list. I shrugged at Kevin. “I guess we’ll have to wait on that one,” I said and he pulsed green.
As we walked, I took the opportunity to check out the bizarre landscape. It was, as I suspected, a partial copy of Monument Valley, in that there was a road that split a giant area in half and the area was dotted with giant rock spires, but that’s where the similarity ended.
The rust and red hues were replaced by purples, oranges, reds, greens, blues, and even a bright yellow. The cactuses had an odd cartoonish quality about them, as if they had been inflated instead of grown. The dirt was a greenish-brown with flecks of silver.
The clouds corkscrewed across the sky in puffs of blue and I could see shapes flitting back and forth, occasionally blocking out one of the suns.
As I squinted, I noted there were multiple “suns”. Well, at least they looked like suns. In this world who knew.
I kicked a rock in frustration. “I don’t know what to do,” I told Kevin. “This sucks.”
Fortunately, at that exact moment there was a whooshing sound behind me and I heard a familiar voice say, “Welcome Champions.”
I turned.
Once again, it was the entire writer and poet, Edgar Allen Poe, looking down and frowning at some kind of data pad. Like before, he poked at his pad a bit then threw the pen into the air where it vanished with a little pop, and just like before, he stuck out his hand.
I wordlessly took it and he shook it, his grip firm and dry.
He was about my height, with a lean, athletic frame. He was fair-skinned and his suit was slightly rumpled, although it fit him well. His dark eyes held a hint of the sardonic and he regarded me over his neatly trimmed mustache. There was a jet-black raven with hints of blue streaks perched on his shoulder. It looked at me with intelligence and softly cooed, “Nevermore”.
“Where’s the rest of your team?” He asked with a slightly amused air. “Just the two of you?”
“Two?” I nearly asked again but remembered Kevin in time.
Just me,” I replied, looking at him hard. “You can call me ‘Jonesy’.”
A box popped up.
Name Edgar Allen Poe
Title Loremaster
Class/Race Bard / Human
Alignment True Neutral
Version 1.0
Something nagged at me so I pulled up my own character screen and there, next to my name, was MY version. I was Version 0.0. Poe was 1.0. Abe had been… what had he been? Version 3? 4? I couldn’t remember. What were versions and how did they work?
Poe 1.0 looked around, then at me with alarm. “What happened here?” he asked.
“A bug stung you and you exploded,” I replied. “A puffstinger, I think. Then you beeped and blew up again. The second explosion is the one that vaporized everything. At least, I think that’s what happened.”
He nodded slowly. “We’re wired with a self-destruct in case of death. It’s supposed to deter those who wish us ill.”
“That makes sense,” I replied, lying and wondering who would wish ill on Edgar Allen Poe.
He noticed and chuckled. “Even though we’re off-limits, we can be killed, as you just saw. They tried to make us invulnerable but the patch broke so many other functions they reverted it. The compromise was a self-destruct that would vaporize anyone in the vicinity.”
“Oh, like a pufferfish,” I said confidently. “You can eat it, but it might kill you.”
My confidence was a total sham. I was drifting in a river of confusion and everything Poe said baffled me more. He’d said “We”. Who was “We”? He’d said “They” tried to make him invulnerable. Who were “they”? Patch? Functions? Compromise? I felt sick.
“Exactly. In the early days, Champions killed Cadre all the time. Sometimes, they wanted to deny another team one of the Main Path quests, other times they just wanted our loot, other times it was just to break a quest chain, but this was the solution. If you kill us, you die. No escape.”
“But I didn’t die,” I countered.
“True,” Poe replied, head cocked to the side, regarding me quizzically.
“I did get a message after it happened,” I offered.
“And it said,” he asked impatiently.
“It thanked me for using Celestial Shields, whatever they are,” I replied.
“What?” he said in astonishment. “How did you get one of those?”
“I don’t know,” I said for the millionth time wondering how I’d gotten here at all.
“Well, that would explain it,” he said. “Celestial shields are immune to everything up to a Solar Blast, but why would you have one?”
An excellent question, but not one I was able to answer.
I countered with one of my own. “So you’re, what was the word, ‘cah-dray’?”
“Exactly,” he said. “Most of the time things run smoothly but when they don’t, one of us is dispatched to help fix things. You and your team were supposed to be met by a welcoming committee and provided with your starter kits.”
“Just me,” I said. “And I didn’t get anything.”
“Outside of a shield powerful enough to protect a planet,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “Anyway, I was dispatched to get your team situated, was apparently killed, and now we’re back to square one.”
“So you have a starter kit for me?” I asked hopefully.
“All in good time,” he replied. “Jonesy? Was that your name?”
“It is,” I said.
“Jonesy,” he repeated. “Ok, Jonesy, let’s get going. Our time is limited and we have a lot to go over.”
“Great,” I said and this time I meant it. “I have a million questions. Look, Mr. Poe, I don’t know anything. It would be way easier to list the things I do know. Like the thing that stung you. The puffstinger?” I asked. “What’s the deal with that?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Nothing here is supposed to aggro. In fact, the starting zones aren’t supposed to be dangerous at all. Puffstingers are usually found in higher-level areas. They have almost no health but one sting is enough to kill.”
I nodded. “So I noticed.”
He shook his head in irritation. “This entire initialization has been fraught with errors. No one knows what’s going on.”
“No one”… Who knew about this? Hannah would know. I had to find Hannah.
Poe glanced at his pad. “Looks like we’re short on time and the castle is a good hike from here, so let’s walk and talk.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “Come on Kevin.” I gave a beckoning wave to Kev and he shot forward, zooming around like a puppy on a sugar high. Poe had mentioned the castle again. What was the castle?
“You said nothing is supposed to ‘aggro’,” I said. “What does that mean?”
“Aggro is slang for ‘Aggressive’,” Poe began. “In the Test, there are various life forms. There are monsters or beasts, abbreviated ‘MOB’, there are Non-Player Characters, abbreviated ‘NPC’, and players. The puffstinger is a MOB, I’m an NPC, and you’re a player.”
“So you’re not real?” I asked in relief.
“It’s complicated,” he said. “And didn’t they cover this in training?”
“No,” I said shortly. “They did not.”
He shrugged. “Maybe see if you can take a refresher course.”
“Can you give me a two-minute elevator pitch?” I asked, then wondered if he even knew what an elevator was.
He did and although he huffed a bit, he complied.
“You are you,” he began and held up a hand when I started to ask something. “You are you,” he repeated, “because you were recorded and copied here. You are a 100% accurate version. The beings who designed the test believe that it’s unfair to start the challenge using lesser versions because it would invalidate the integrity of the test. Does that make sense?”
I nodded. “A bit. What’s a lesser version?”
“The original Test designers introduced a defect into the reconstruction process that ensured a single life form couldn’t be replicated an indefinite number of times,” he continued. “Some were concerned about clone slavery, some couldn’t deal with the idea of having two of themselves, there were endless legal issues, and of course, massive ethical concerns.”
“Sensible,” I replied to the newly reconstituted vintage poet and writer, Edgar Allen Poe.
“They wanted to introduce a cost to dying that wouldn’t immediately invalidate the participant or render them useless.”
“Also sensible,” I replied.
“But deaths had to matter. It takes a certain number of participants to complete each stage or everyone fails, so the compromise was written into place that would allow respawns that mattered and the test could still be completed. The Council is big on fairness.”
“And the compromise was?” I prompted, wondering who or what “The Council” was.
He kicked a rock as we approached it and it skittered down the road.
“Well, the idea of the compromise was that they would reduce uniqueness. Their position is that the maximum number of viewpoints will generate an optimal outcome, and their ‘death penalty’ so to speak, is to decrease a person’s perspective, thereby making them less valuable to the team. This necessarily decreases the overall chance to succeed.
I nodded. “Makes sense,” I lied.
The reduction in perspective increases with each death, so the first isn’t that big of a deal. The next costs more and so on. This was supposed to motivate people to use their ‘resources’ carefully while giving them a real chance to win. They actually want us to win, not lose.”
There were too many ideas in his speech for me to completely understand but something he said struck me. “The idea of the compromise?” I asked.
“There were unintended side effects,” he responded. “The system has to interpret things and for humans, the interpretation of ‘reduction of uniqueness’ was understood as a mandate to make them look less unique and think with less creativity.”
“Ok,” I said slowly, not really understanding.
He saw my confusion. “The end result was that with each death and respawn, people’s features became more regular. Skin imperfections were seen as a means of differentiation, not flaws. Hair loss was unacceptable, proportions changed to fit the average, and so on.”
“I’m not seeing the problem here. If all that changed was looks then why would it matter?” I asked.
“The looks were only one part of it. The other was that your mind becomes less creative with each successive respawn so the more you die, the harder it becomes to solve the tests,” Poe answered.
“That’s actually kind of clever,” I admitted.
“You think the godlike aliens who created all this are ‘kind of clever’ do you?” Poe asked amused.
I flushed.
“Well, they are,” he admitted, “but they didn’t predict the outcome. They thought it would stop people from wanting to die.”
“It didn’t?” I asked, confused.
“Notice anything?” he asked and gestured to his clothes and face.
“A little,” I admitted. “I didn’t want to say anything.”
“Because I died, I’m better looking,” he said flatly. “And I’m somewhat less intelligent than I was before. There are those who believe in an inverse relationship between happiness and intelligence.”
He said it so matter-of-factly that I didn’t know how to respond so I just said “Sorry.”
“The first respawn isn’t bad,” he said. “I was mostly trying to impress on you how serious deaths are.”
“Consider me impressed,” I replied. “Do you feel any different?”
“No,” he said. “But then I wouldn’t expect to. Have you ever read ‘Flowers for Algernon’?”
It was polite of him to ask, considering he probably already knew the answer. Nothing about me screamed “bookish”, or “smart”, or “likes to read”.
“No,” I said and he shrugged dismissively.
“It doesn’t matter. The point is, the first spawn is mostly cosmetic to give the players the concept of the change and how it will affect them.”
“So you’re better looking now but also still as smart as you used to be?”
“Almost as smart,” he replied. “Some people think that’s a good thing.”
“Why? Where’s the value in being dumb?” I asked.
“Have you ever been told you think too much?” he asked.
I snorted. “No. I’m not usually accused of that.”
Poe remained silent as we walked, apparently thinking, then finally spoke.
“Do you find yourself besieged by an unrelenting storm of thoughts? In the quietest hours, does your mind also wage a ceaseless battle, not just with the mysteries of the cosmos, but with the starker injustices of our own souls?”
I stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
He shook his head. “Well, if this doesn’t make any sense to you then the Church of the Refined Understanding might not be for you.”
“The Church of the what?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes, but instead of answering, he exploded again.