Wolves, goats, and mountain lions, all with red stones glowing out of their mutated faces: those were what we killed on the way to Aranar, the next settlement. Combat was extraordinarily short: with 48 total Spellcraft, I could easily use Intuitive Spell to set up my whole damage combo while we traveled, and my critical hits one-shot the level six and seven monsters with ease.

Cuby was quiet the entire time. Watching her gouge or behead something took on a new level of disturbing when she did it without her usual zesty cheer, but I’d already told her I wouldn’t ask about it again, so I didn’t. Besides: I was beginning to admonish myself about thinking of this as some reaction specific to her as a phrenodine. She’d had a blade held to her neck; she’d thought she was going to die. The same thing could have affected a human like this, I had no doubt.

We traveled through the wilderness, trying to run parallel to the road. We gained a few XP, but soon the monsters began to diminish in level: soon we were seeing some of the same creatures we’d seen at low levels around Oromar’s Bastion. After that, we stopped engaging and decided to get back on the road and head straight to Aranar.

We took the road in silence for almost thirty minutes before Cuby finally spoke. “Do you think we’re… changing, Alatar?”

I considered this before answering. If this was what was really bothering her, I wanted to be supportive. “We’re starting a new life, here,” I said tentatively, feeling a pang in my stomach even as I said it—I tried not to think of my apartment, my favorite chair, my family….

Gone, I thought, trying to put the realization off just a little while longer. If I really was a copy, then somebody, the real me was still living my life—or had, many years ago.

Don’t think about it, I thought, my footsteps slowing. You’ve got to support Cuby, now.

If I could just… get to the dungeon. There was someone there who knew what was going on, who could tell me how to get home—who had to. They couldn’t just rip me out of my life like this.

I shook my head to clear it of the distraction. “You came here because you wanted to live differently than you used to, right? You told me that you didn’t want to just be an assistant to another taxin el, before.”

“Yeah.”

“That means being different,” I said. “But I don’t know if that’s what you mean, Cuby. It seems to me that what you might be worried about is all of the human thoughts and feelings that we have, now.”

“Yeah,” she said, looking down. “I think… I don’t know. I keep thinking about that sound you made, back in the forest. And about being afraid of the devil. And worst of all… ever since we talked about it, I keep thinking about those people in Oromar’s Bastion… the ones who existed, but don’t anymore.”

I was quiet. It was strange to hear her say she was suddenly worried about the dead: I hadn’t worried much about them since the potion had wore off. And the bodies we’d found in the outpost hadn’t bothered me nearly as much, either.

Don’t get me wrong: it had made me queasy to see them, and sick to approach them—but it was like even the worst of that feeling, the deep-seated wrongness of it all, was something I could cope with like nausea, anger, or pain. It was there, but it hadn’t shut me down the way it had before.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

I wasn’t sure if I liked this. Oh, it was good to be functional when I knew that I needed to be, certainly: but why had it taken so little time for death to become something I could see, then move on from? Had the system given me new instincts, new feelings the way that it had Cuby? Had my stats? Or had I just adjusted faster than I ever would have guessed? I mean, I knew that human beings were supposed to be remarkably adaptive, and of course we’d evolved to have the capacity for savage acts of violence….

But if you had told me a few days ago that I’d be violently killing people—even to respawn them in some other game world—along with witnessing the horrors of a warzone and still somehow be functional, I’d have thought you were insane.

“It costs me so much to vanish the feelings,” Cuby said after a few minutes of silence between us. “I haven’t lost self-mastery in… in more than a decade. The system made me more human, and I wanted that because… because it’s humanity,” she said, voice insistent, as if just the word was explanation enough. “But that means I can’t really be my old self anymore, doesn’t it? I learned how to be effective as myself, not anyone else. What does that mean?”

I listened to all of this with concern. I felt for her, truly I did—the very same feelings that led, in humans, to morality and self-preservation were apparently tearing her down. “Cuby,” I said. “Your mood right now is bad. You’re feeling a lot of negative emotions and just general emotional exhaustion. Does that sound right?”

“Of course that’s right,” she said, sounding frustrated. “That’s the whole problem, Alatar.”

“I just want to make sure I understand you,” I said, raising my hands in a placating gesture. “Look: when a person’s mood is bad, they tend to be worse at acting within and reacting to the world around them. They have less patience, they get annoyed more easily, they see ill intent where there was none… it’s not that happy people are perfect, it’s that happy people are more likely to try something new, or challenge the unknown. Unhappy people are much more likely to take an uncertain future and expect bad things. Happy people expect good things, and so they charge forward and, if they’re wrong, learn what lessons they need to so they can do better next time. That makes them more effective, on the whole.”

“What are you trying to say, Alatar?”

“That I have no real answer to comfort you, except that you ought to think about this when you’re your usual self.”

“I didn’t think about this at all when I was my usual self.”

“Then force yourself to when you get the chance,” I said. “Maybe you’ll figure out that it’s not worth worrying about. Or maybe you’ll realize that it is—and come up with a better way to face it.”

“Face it?” she asked. “I’m not facing it right now? What does that even mean?”

I frowned and worked my mouth, unhappy that my attempt at cheering her up had backfired. “Consciousness works best when it’s triangulated,” I said, trying to take a different approach. “From what you’re saying, this sounds like something serious, and of course you’re thinking about it and worrying. I don’t know what the inside of your head really looks like, I don’t know your experience—all I can tell you is that any good way to look at this issue is going to have to come from either your happier self, or both selves.” I paused, thought for a moment, then added: “And that what you’re going through sounds difficult and unsettling, and I’m sorry for that.”

She was quiet awhile as she thought on this. “All right,” she said at last.

I resisted the urge to sigh—I had no idea what she was thinking. Just another thing that the Colosseum had showed me I wasn’t: a guidance counselor.

“I think I can restore my self-mastery in town,” said Cuby. In wearied, stilted words, she added: “I hope… that you’re right. I hope that it makes it easier to see… something.”

We spoke little as we followed the road, spotting some lower levels as we traveled—many players who were under level 5, and a few NPCs as well. Soon the road rounded a ridge and then wound downward ahead of us toward a welcome sight: the settlement, Aranar, a walled, diamond-shaped town nestled in the crook of two mountains above a sheer cliff face.

“We’ve got about two hours to spend here,” I said. “Then our adventuring clocks will match the cooldown on our Set Camp ability.”

“Two hours,” she echoed, eyes distant, voice faint. Then she shook her head, focusing down the hill at the town below us. “Let’s go.”