Karrol Stir was still in the square, and he did indeed have a feather for me. I paid 8 gold, and when the trade was done he said: “You’re the first person to buy one of those.”
I could have laughed. “Are you just collecting everything?”
“More or less.”
“Where do you store it all?”
“In containers,” he said. “The Safe Zone rules make it very difficult to steal from them. But we have more to speak of—our earlier deal.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I don’t wish to fulfill our bargain tonight,” he said. “The attack on the town has resulted in much activity, and my time has become ever more valuable.” He glanced around at the square, which was still bustling even though it was now well-past sundown. “If you come at a later time, tomorrow morning, tomorrow night, I’ll answer your questions at half the rate I promised. Can we agree?”
I nodded slowly. “You’d still do it tonight if I insisted?”
“Of course. But it would interfere too much with the value I’m generating—the new deal is more worth it for me, and hopefully you.”
I smiled. “Tomorrow, then.” I was starting to like this Karrol Stir fellow.
I left him and joined Cuby in finding a place to sleep. The inn was apparently packed, but the town’s guards were happy to tell us that several places had been set out for players to camp while remaining within the Safe Zone: parts of the inner mountain where the lift exited, a gradual slope leading toward the mountain’s peak, and some segments of street that had been cleaned and cleared near the east and south gates.
We picked the mountain slope. It was the furthest walk, but also left us in the best position: anywhere else and we’d be caught in the thick of it instantly, unable to make a decision of how best to engage.
The Set Camp ability was probably the strangest experience thus far in terms of having the system “drive” me. I built a small tent in 30 seconds, pulling the pegs, scaffolding, and cloth from nowhere at all and assembling them with remarkable efficiency.
“Look!” Cuby said when we were finished. “My door is right outside your door! Now we can talk while we fall asleep!”
The tent-assembly got me thinking about the nature of the game as I sat and got ready to make the Charm of Gliding ability card. Would I need to bathe in the morning? Change my clothes? There were no bloodstains or anything on them from the day’s work, but surely I was sweating still, right? With everything that had happened, I hadn’t noticed.
Once I had begun to paint the card, Cuby spoke. “Being tired is strange,” she said, already snug in her bedroll. She shifted in place. “I can definitely feel the sense of comfort that makes this so appealing, though—but no wonder the sleeping species are so much less effective when exhausted.”
“I hadn’t thought on it much yet,” I said. Which was technically true, even if I never was going to think much on it. I was human; I knew the deal already. Hoping to change the subject, I added: “It’s just so much to take in. All of it, everything that’s happened… it’s hard to believe in the first place.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Even for me I guess it’s hard to believe, when I stop and think about it. I can’t imagine what it must be like for you, given that you didn’t know you’d wake up here. Say, what do you think your outside counterpart is doing right now?”
“Hm?” I asked.
“You know, your counterpart. The original you. The one that’s still doing waste assistance.”
I blinked, my hand freezing above the card where it held the paintbrush. Did she just say…?
“I’m a copy,” I said, the full implications sinking in.
“Well, yeah,” she said. “Anyone who wins the lottery is a copy. Even some of the ones who get in on merit get copied.”
“Even the biologicals?”
“Obviously,” she said, laughing. “The only non-biological is you.”
“Like a transporter duplicate,” I whispered to myself, thinking of Star Trek.
“Huh?” Cuby asked.
But I was thinking. Whether I was in the future or not, whatever had happened… was there a me still back on Earth? Someone who really had woken up and gone about his day today, or whenever, after alien probes had scanned his brain or something to make… me? A duplicate?
What was more: the Hierarchy could copy consciousnesses? Or was it just the Colosseum, the remnant human technology that they were using? I had even more to ask Karrol Stir the next day.
“Something wrong?” Cuby asked, peering at me from where she lay on her belly, the door of her tent pulled open.
I sighed. Yes, Cuby, but I don’t know what it is. I think your people are about to find Earth, and I think I’m supposed to stop them, somehow.
But instead of saying this, I focused on the problem that I could say aloud: “Just thinking about the game,” I said. “I don’t think I’m playing very well. I have a sense magic ability that I’ve forgotten about attached my Mage Class passive, and I put off taking my skills for too long, and I chose the wrong ability to lose for fighting demons.”
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“Don’t worry, Alatar,” she said. “Most people here have no idea what they’re doing. The taxin el are at a natural advantage, because it’s a human game, and they’re the ones most skilled in the ways of humans, but even they don’t pick it up naturally. Even I’m just guessing at a lot of this, and I took a long time studying past seasons before we started.” She flashed me a reassuring smile. “And besides. You don’t need to play perfectly and beat everybody, you just need to play well enough to survive.”
It would have been reassuring if I thought it were true. But I might well have a very good reason to want to win. Earth.
“Me, I just want to be powerful,” said Cuby. “Even if I don’t win the ladder, I can still build something for myself in this new world—well, in the main game world—once it’s done. I know how competent I am compared to most everyone else. I’ll be as good at this as I was at being a left hand in shadow.”
I frowned at this last phrase—was that her old job title, partly mangled by the translator? It sounded like a high-ranked assistant who did dirty work, under-the-table things. “What about the taxin el?” I asked. “You said the hierarchy didn’t apply here, but Haroshi got to start with two classes. And isn’t everyone just going to remake the world that we’re used to?”
“You’re not bowing down to me just because I’m a phrenodine,” she said pointedly. “But yes, you’re right. Still, I don’t think it’s going to work out the way that people might expect.”
“Why not?”
Cuby’s smile became secretive as her gaze became dreamy. At last she said: “I’ve worked under the taxin el all my life. Some of them are truly glorious—I mean, they really are like a taxin el is supposed to be. But some of them….”
She sighed. “You know what the worst place in the Hierarchy is to buy enriched nutri-gel? Not the normal stuff, but—” she glanced at me, then shook her head. “Sorry, you probably don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s a luxury that phrenodine consume, sort of like how vrindex, lamue, and taxin el will create and process foods that take more time and resources than they need to spend because the experience of eating brings them pleasure. Phrenodine, we love our enriched gel.”
“Okay,” I said.
“The best gel ought to come from Enzal—obviously. But... If you test unmarked gels, the Enzal gels underperform. Nobody chooses them as the best, even though we’re all supposed to know they’re the best. And that’s the thing: once you know that you’re supposed to be the best, you get lax. You stop competing. You rely on your reputation, not quality.”
She paused, smiling in a relaxed way as if she were taking pleasure in her train of thought itself—or just in the softness of the bedroll. “Taxin el know that they’re the best. And I think it makes a lot of them… very bad. Trust me, you’d bury yourself in inconclusive processes if you saw how high so many of them make it while being so completely incompetent, how many of them rely completely on the telorians, phrenodine, and karox who are supposedly beneath them. I’d know because half the time, those are who I’d target to get my master’s competition out of the way—not the taxin el themself, but their underlings.”
“...Target?” I hazarded.
She fixed me with a humorless gaze, one that told me I knew what she meant. “Target,” she intoned. Then she leaned forward and whispered like she were sharing a particularly delicious secret. “The Hierarchy is done. The advantage of two classes is nothing compared to the advantages they needed to hold it all together outside. Yes, it’s still protecting him, here: his chosen boon means he’ll be stronger than others, can gather followers, can re-establish his supremacy, or at least defend it. But it just isn’t the strength that they’re used to. And can I tell you something else?”
“Okay.”
“I sort of… want Haroshi to attack tonight.”
“What?”
“You see, Haroshi gives me every impression of the taxin el who is useless because he never had to be useful—the shmuck who gets posted at the edge of the galaxy, or worse, moves there voluntarily because it makes him sick with envy to be around other taxin el who were worth their position. And I want him to die, or at least lose his power, because I think he doesn’t deserve it. Most of them don’t deserve it.”
“And if he attacks tonight, you think that will be a good chance to….” I let the sentence hang.
“Kill him and take the card,” she said decisively. “That, or ambush him in the free dungeon.”
I sighed. “The last one… I can’t do that, Cuby.”
“I figured.”
“I’ve barely spoken to him. If he isn’t murdering people, if he’s really just going to complete the dungeon, that will help these townspeople. We don’t know that he killed those people that… that the wolf-man found outside the caves.”
“Okay,” said Cuby. “But just stick with me, all right? You’ll see what you need to. And that reminds me.” She materialized a small potion bottle from her inventory and passed it to me. I read its tag with confusion:
Uncommon Item – Potion of Steady Focus
Drinking this potion will grant you a + 5 bonus to your focus stat, along with rendering you immune to emotional alterations. Lasts 2 hours.
“What’s this for?” I asked. “I mean, 5 Focus is pretty good, but why do I need it?”
“Just in case,” she said. “Don’t forget it, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay,” she said. “I think I’m actually falling asleep now.”
“Goodnight.”
“Hm?” she asked.
“I said goodnight.”
“Why?” she asked. “Has it been? It’s probably going to get worse, and we already got attacked.”
“Nevermind. I’m wishing you a good sleep.”
“Oh. All right.” And she rolled over and was silent.
I finished the Charm of Gliding card and learned the spell into my new spell slot, then did the same.
But not before I considered what Cuby had said, and, in time, considered Cuby. She looked so harmless, lying across from me, eyes closed, breathing steady. But, well… maybe it was because I used to work in advertising….
Had Cuby just done everything she could to convince me that I could fight Haroshi despite knowing so little about the system? Had she somehow guessed I was one of the chosen, and told me all of that to manipulate me into potentially helping her get that card? If she suspected I was a taxin el, had she told me all that because she was hoping to see if I’d get offended, giving me away?
No reason it couldn’t be both. After all, silly as she might seem sometimes, Cuby had essentially been right about every single thing since we’d gotten here. And her plan to stay ahead of the level curve had worked—at level 7, she was above or equal to everyone else in town.
I kept thinking about this as I fell asleep, my thoughts running in circles until I drifted away into blackness.
And sure as the sun rises, I woke some small time later with Cuby shaking my shoulder, the sound of the town alarm ringing out over the mountainsides.
As with everything, Cuby had been right.
Haroshi’s attack had come.