Cuby looked back down at the pane that declared me a true human, reading it over for the fourth time as if it would say something different.
As she read, I thought something that was hardly very fitting for that particular moment: I realized for the first time that despite being translucent, the panes had reversed text on either side—they both read left to right. It was a silly thing to think of, and yet at the same time I wondered if my penchant for focusing on trivial system details like this one hadn’t been helping me to survive all this time. After all, surely not everyone who woke up in a different world was this good at focusing their attention on a video game….
“Alatar,” Cuby said, her voice sounding small, confused—almost hurt. “Alatar this doesn’t make sense. You’re not making sense.”
I drew in a long breath and sighed. “I trust you, Cuby. I—”
“Then tell me the truth,” she said, her voice hardening. “I’m not a fool. I told you that.”
“The truth is that I’m not from the Hierarchy,” I said. “And I’m not from the Colosseum, either. The truth is that I’m a human in the same way you’re a phrenodine. It’s not just my character race.”
But Cuby was shaking her head, taking a step away from me. “The humans are gone. The humans are.…” She glared at me, her mouth a hard line. “You think that I’m a fool?”
“No, Cuby.”
“The point of the humans is that they’re gone. They don’t do the job they’re supposed to do if they actually exist!”
“Listen, Cuby: I don’t know very much about your humans, about the humans who made the Hierarchy.”
“Then why would you show me this?” Cuby said, taking another step back, her face become a mask of wounded rage. “Who would ever lie about something like this? Alatar, I told you I wanted to trust you—to be friends!”
“I’m not lying, Cuby.”
“It’s an illusion,” she said. “You thought of using False Identity immediately—it was one of the first things you thought to ask Kontor!”
“To hide the boon card from people, because I didn’t want them to kill me and take it.”
“Because you are deceptive,” she said, practically spitting the words. “Because that is your nature—an NPC with aspirations of grandiosity when you’re just another fleshless program whose very soul comes only through the largesse of the species that you mock by impersonating!” Her voice was wavering now, as if she were on the verge of tears. Her words came fast, frantic, almost running together. “You found another illusion spell—some conjurer of false system-panes—and instead of sharing it with me, you—you used it to trick Haroshi by the mine in Oromar’s Bastion and you didn’t tell me because you knew you might have to use it on me, too.”
“It’s not an illusion,” I said. “You can see through my illusions because we’re in the same group.”
Cuby shook her head. “I can shoot you with grapple gun if I think it will help you,” she said, apparently thinking as quick as ever. “You can make your spells work even on me—you did it with False Identity before, back in Oromar’s Bastion!”
But I materialized the True Sight Potion from my inventory and linked her a pane with my False Identity Spell as I held out the potion. “Drink it, if you want to. Open the expanded view for the spell and do the math on how strong it is, if you need to—there’s no way I can get an illusion past 50, Cuby. It’s at 34 right now.
Slowly, cautiously, Cuby stepped forward and took the potion out of my hand. It disappeared into her inventory, and then she just stared at the pane.
I conjured the rest of them:
Human Inheritor:
Error: the full breadth of this ability’s functionality cannot be accessed by the system. At present, only the following feature is functional:
You glean more information from certain system interfaces, and the system administrator automatically flags you as a person of import.
Human Adaptability:
Instead of distributing 3 stat points as you choose upon leveling up, you gain a + 1 bonus to all your stats, then choose a stat to further increase by 1.
Human Supremacy:
You don’t spend experience or levels when claiming territory, accepting vassals, or accepting subjects.
Human Endowment:
You start with a Legendary Boon Card – Chosen. Your Chosen Boon maximum is increased by 1.
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And then I just stood there, waiting to react, the five panes that described my humanity hanging in the air between us.
She read them all, her breathing unsteady. Tears gathered in her eyes and began to stream down her face. Finally, she looked at me—and I could tell by her stricken face that she’d begun to believe, even if she hadn’t drunk the potion.
Then she did something that I understood with perfect clarity, even though I had never seen it done before in my life—something that made my hearth lurch with disgust almost immediately.
Cuby began to grovel.
First she drew both her kukris and tossed them to the ground behind her, stepping forward. Then she fell to her knees, pushing herself forward and resting her head onto her hands so that her face was almost in the dirt.
“Sariv akata,” she said, voice trembling, thick with emotion. “I have been graced by the highest of the high and gave no proper obeisance. Sariv akata, I have—”
“Get up, Cuby,” I said, suddenly so furious that I didn’t wait for her to comply, stepping forward and forcefully grabbing her under one shoulder to yank her off her feet. “Don’t do that with me, you understand? Don’t you ever do—whatever that was—with me! Don’t you realize that I’m telling you this because I can’t—I just can’t bear to be alone in this place? You want a relationship between equals, right? One where we trust each other?”
Cuby pulled back, her face hurt, and I immediately regretted my forcefulness. “Look,” I said. “I’m not—whatever you think I am. I am human, but not any kind of human who had anything to do with building the Hierarchy of El. You don’t owe me an ounce of reverence, you understand?”
“But—I only—” Cuby sobbed, suddenly seeming to me like a child whose parent had just snapped at them: completely different from the smooth and competent operator that I’d come to know. “How can you say that?” she asked, practically shouting. “How can you of all people—Alatar, you’re human.”
“And I don’t know what the humans who built the Hierarchy were like,” I said. I was trying to be careful: I could see, looking into her face, that it would be much, much easier to change her opinion of me, specifically, than it would to upend her entire society’s founding myth and change her opinion of humanity. “I don’t know if they’d found the path to perfection like Karrol Stir told me. I don’t. But the humanity that I come from—the place that I come from—is not a place where humans have attained any kind of perfection. It is a cold and difficult place, sometimes, and we only do the best we can. And the best we can do, Cuby—it often means that we approach our problems with a sense of humility, with an understanding of just how imperfect we really are.”
Cuby took all this in, her breathing becoming increasingly more steady. Finally she turned away from me, walked to the edge of the ledge, and seemed to whisper something to herself. She stayed there for a half-minute, still, before turning back to me.
“Okay,” she said. “Alatar… I always thought that humans were perfect, but that we were imperfect, and so the stories that we told of them were corrupted by our telling, not because we lied. That the way the Taxin El use humanity as a symbol to ordain and enforce the Hierarchy… if there are mistakes in how that is done then they’re our mistakes, not a mistake in the mandate. But… if humans had to perfect themselves in order to establish the hierarchy and ascend, then maybe… maybe there are humans who are imperfect, still.” She said this last sentence unsteadily, as if herself very uncertain of its contents. Then she shrugged.
“I understand you, though. You want to keep the Hierarchy from knowing about you because you’re afraid of what will happen to your home, yes?”
Slowly, I nodded.
“It would change everything for both of us,” she said. “The Hierarchy and your people. We’d worship you in awe, perhaps…” But then she made a small, sad smile. “But no: we’d destroy you as pretenders. The Taxin El can admit that some members of species exceed the expectations of the Hierarchy only as a curiosity, a pleasant exception—and because they’re an exception, they sustain the Hierarchy even if they controvert it.” She smiled. “I already told you, but I was an exception.”
“I can believe that,” I said.
“How did you get here?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that there was a message for me when I arrived. I need to reach the first dungeon. I need to find Mirrakatetz.”
Cuby’s smile broadened. “That’s why you don’t care about giving me the card—even though you could use it right now, according to your human features. You knew that if I had it, I’d want to go to the dungeon with you.”
“Pretty much that exactly, yes.”
“You do know it’s unusual that someone would just… give away a boon card? That you wouldn’t even suggest some kind of roll that was tilted in your favor because you’d contributed more?”
“Yeah, I figured.”
Cuby nodded. “Just as long as you know how strange that is.”
“Okay,” I said. Then, tentatively, I asked “So… we’re okay?”
Cuby looked around. “Yes? What do you mean?”
“I mean, I don’t want much to have changed between us,” I said. “I still want to hunt Haroshi and get to the Mirrakatetz, and I don’t want you to treat me any differently than you did when you thought I was an NPC.”
Cuby looked dubious. “If you say so,” she said slowly. “Only… Alatar….”
“What?” I asked, disliking the cautious look that had come over her.
“Nevermind,” she said. “We can talk about it later—I’ll try not to treat you any differently if that’s what you want… but that might be hard.”
“All right,” I said. “That’s all I ask, then.”
“Good!” she said, grinning with her usual exuberance. “Now, if I may, I want to move to less important things that are nonetheless still wonderful—though it’ll be nothing new to you, I’m afraid….”
“Huh?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
Cuby materialized two near-identical items from her inventory. At first I thought they were some kind of weapon—clubs, maybe. Then I saw that they were… legs. Cooked legs, maybe of a goat—-huge slabs of meat clinging to a large, white bone, steam coming off them in the morning air, their size and appearance giving the impression of something that belonged in a cartoon.
“Will you eat together with me?” Cuby asked.