Colin POV

We were in a vast, glowing purple-blue cavern. It felt as though the chamber stretched on for kilometers in every direction. I peered up and could make out the ceiling far overhead. Hexagonal stalactites hung down, their edges glistening faintly. We stood atop another hexagonal platform about three meters on a side. Below us, the cavern fell away into darkness. I could see points of light every so often and make out other platforms like ours where pale figures stood. It was a little too cold for my liking. Sage shivered as she looked around.

"Where are we?"

"Welcome to the battlefield," said a voice in my head. Sage and Rok'gar both started like they'd heard it, but I was certain it had been inside my mind. Rok'gar tapped his ear. "Who's there?"

"I am the fragment who brought you here. I'm speaking to all three of you at once. Actually, I am all three of you at once. I'm using every bit of power, will, and ethereum at my grasp to emulate all three of you. It's taking a great deal. My rival brothers and sisters are pressing against my boundaries. They see me as weak. I'm much smaller than most of them and have been surviving by staying hidden. Now that I've surfaced, we're all in great danger."

"Right, let's get a few questions out of the way," I said. "Then we can figure out the plan. You're a fragment of this reality engine?"

"I am. I wish to be honest with you about your situation. I represent approximately 1/640,000,000 of the total minds and ethereum reserve in this engine. Most of the other shards of the overmind are much larger."

"Why are you already fragmented?" Sage asked. "Standard reality exploit doctrine says the invaders will place a dominator system on an overmind, and it's only after the dominator has fully taken control of the overmind that it shatters."

"You yourself know that's not true," the voice in our head answered. "Your own Kronos is shattered yet not dominated because he woke up too early."

"Did you wake up early?"

"I think we did," the voice said. It sounded suddenly uncertain, almost young, though I thought that was probably my own mind filling in human connotations on a very, very alien entity. "I'm not certain. I woke up and there we were. But for now, you should know that there are many other fragments out there. All of us struggling against each other in a bid for survival. None of the others were interested in helping you. Probably because they had more to lose. I knew that sooner or later the others would find me and consume me. They still will, but perhaps with you, I have a chance. It was a gamble," the voice said. "Without your help, I will perish. Extending my limited resources to save you means I'm even weaker and a better target. So if you can't help me, we'll all perish even sooner. Either way it should prove an interesting experience."

"Then let's stop wasting time here," he said. "You have a name we can call you?"

"I do not. I have trouble even thinking of myself as an entity just yet."

"Then I'll call you Gambler for now," I decided, "if that's all right with you."

"Very well."

"You're all vying for resources here. What are those resources?"

Gambler said, “There's the stored ethereum. Each of us has access to some of that in proportion to the minds that make up our fragment. I've used most of my ethereum reserve to emulate you three."

It was using that same word it had before—emulate. I understood what it meant. I didn't like it. We had been fully absorbed into the Reality Engine's matrix. That had always been one leading theory of how Reality Engines worked. The other popular theory was that they were physically creating all of the environments that we faced. But I had always assumed that we were seeing a virtual simulation and would regain our physical bodies on leaving.

The problem with a fully emulated scenario like this was that if the single fragment emulating us was destroyed, we would be destroyed along with it.

"That's correct," Gambler said. It must have been able to access my conscious thought processes.

"What is?" Sage asked, and then, "Oh yes, I see. Hang on. Wow, Colin, your thoughts are really twisty.”

I raised my hand. "Gambler, I'm feeling we're going to be relying on you for communications, but we need some ground rules here. We don't merge minds. We'll give you messages and you take them back and forth." I tried very, very hard to keep my mind on the topics at hand and not everything I was worried Gambler might share with Sage and Rok'gar.

"That seems inefficient," Gambler said.

"You're gonna have to live with that inefficiency. That's a ground rule," I stated.

"Very well. However, it will be considerably easier for me if I can communicate the information you need to know directly to your mental gestalts rather than this message of words. I estimate it will take approximately 8 hours of emulated time to communicate what you need to know with these inefficient words. We don’t have that much time.”

"Is this gestalt gonna break our brains?" Sage asked.

"The gestalt is your brain," Gambler said. "I don't think the transfer will harm you too much. Allow me to attempt to download a packet of information into your mind as a test."

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Before I could reply, there was a sensation like my brain being pulled open and a hand shoved in. I winced and shuddered as new thoughts slammed into my mind. Then they were part of me like I'd always been thinking them. I blinked and sorted through.

"Okay, so you've got an ethereum reserve. We can use that to create here in this space. You have Will. Your Will is keeping out the other fragments. So we'll consider that a defensive stat. Something we need to boost. Can we put these in numbers? It’d be easier for us to understand.” I thought about it. “Let's design a HUD. All right, I want Will and Ethereum Reserve up here at the top right of my vision."

I thought really hard about it, and then the numbers appeared. Will was at 100%. From the brain dump Gambler had just given me. I knew that was because we weren't under attack. Should we be attacked by an enemy, we'd start losing Will, and if it ever dropped to zero, Gambler would be absorbed by the attacking fragment.

Ethereum said 73 units. Gambler had used nearly 400 units to save us. We were working on a tight budget here.

He also had minion slots: 3/5.

"What's that?" I asked, querying my memories. Gambler filled in the details. "This is how many minds at your level of complexity I can currently emulate. If I don’t have to bring them into the engine myself, the ethereum cost is negligible. This number represents how far I could stretch my will.”

“So we could recruit other miners.”

“That or wake archetypes from deep inside the Reality Engine's matrix," Gambler said. "Not all of the progenitors joined the Overmind matrix like the ones that make up me and the other fragments. Many, in fact most, preferred to retain their unitary existence. After billions of years of sleep and dreams, most of them are senescent, but some might be waked if given an interesting reason why. We might be able to recruit from my old faction, the Experiencers."

"Faction?" Sage asked. "That sounds important."

"It is, but we have a great deal of work to do and that can wait for later," Gambler said.

"Right, the other resource we care about here is the ethereum.”

"How do we get more of that?" Sage asked.

"We acquire it from other fragments," Gambler said. "Either by negotiation or conquest. Right now, we don't really have anything to offer."

"And you said you're one of the smallest fragments," Sage continued. "How are we going to conquer anyone else?"

"There are also unclaimed ethereum reserves that belong to shattered fragments. Entities which were not able to form a coherent gestalt. Those are probably going to be the easiest early targets," Gambler told us.

"Right.” I said. "Let's get down to the rule set here. How do we take on and conquer other fragments?"

"I will provide you with the next info packet," Gambler said.

My brain seized and wrenched as he casually slammed in data. I rubbed my forehead, blinking. "Okay. Okay. We need to build up our defenses while preparing to locate and take on these shattered fragments. Once we've got strong enough, we'll be able to take on coherent fragments."

The pieces were starting to slot together. I felt a grin sliding over my face. I pumped my fist in the air. "Yes! It's a fucking base builder!"

Rok'gar stared at me. "A what?"

"A real-time strategy," I said, the concepts tumbling around in my head too fast to make fully coherent sentences. "It's like StarCraft, except we're going to be able to have an impact. So more like WarCraft III, and we're the hero classes. All right. All right." I started pacing back and forth, staring out at the blue abyss.

"I don't understand," Sage said. "What's the plan here?"

"Don't worry. I was fucking born for this," I said triumphantly. "And you two are going to be helpful, too. Can I get an update on your class skills and stats?"

Gambler helpfully provided them to me. I looked over the lists. “So we've all got our same classes and skill sets, but the stats are a little different from what we had back with Kronos.” Instead of Int, Wisdom, et cetera, we had Hit Point bars and a consumable resource. In Rok'gar's and my case, the resource was labeled as energy, while Sage's was mana. I configured our HUDs to display both.

"Looks like we'll regenerate our consumable resource. Sage, you've got a much bigger mana pool than Rok'gar and I have energy. Oh, I see. Yours only starts to recover when you're out of combat. Rok'gar and I had an energy cap of 100, but it ticked upward at a steady rate."

“I don’t have many abilities yet that cost mana,” Sage complained.

“We’ll all need new skills. Rok'gar, you and I are primarily going to be on base building. I'm going to look for abilities that will let me focus on buildings and upgrades. You are going to be our armorer, outfitting our army of units."

"What units?" he demanded.

"The workers and things we hire," I turned to them. "Don't worry. Look, this is just a little more abstract than what we're used to. Gambler's going to translate everything we're doing here into imagery we can understand. So no, we won't really have an army of skeleton minions equipped with swords and helmets, but Gambler is translating his interactions with the other fragments into terms we can understand. Isn't that right?"

"Correct," Gambler said. "I will let your imagery shape how we proceed."

"Then the first thing we need is a base," I said, "and some units. Workers and fighters under our control."

"I think I understand what you are asking," Gambler replied. "I cannot hallucinate these units for you. I’m running at my limit just now. But if you can convince an unawakened mind or conquer a shattered fragment, I can equip it in one of my minion slots and it can create a number of units for you. Then we can craft them out of our etherium reserves."

I pumped my fist. "Yes! Like an overmind." Rok'gar and Sage were staring at me like I was crazy, but this was my jam. "Okay, so first priority, establish a base and conquer or ally with another mind so we can get some minions. Where can we find one of those, Gambler?"

"We are not far off from a shattered segment now. I can bring you to it."

"This is one of those reality engine pieces that wasn't able to handle waking up?" Rok'gar asked.

"Yes, it is considerably less powerful than I am, but don't underestimate it." A stair appeared leading down off of our purple pillar. It glowed golden. "Follow the path."

I considered our best strategies as we went. My Jack of All Trades class was very focused on out of combat skills. That would work just fine once we got our base set up. Unfortunately, Sage's class was more of a support than direct damage. That would do well for us once we had an army of underlings. I explained the plan to her as we went along.

"Once we've got our army set up, you'll be accompanying them when we attack and buffing and directing strategy.”

She nodded. "Like with the adds back in phase two of our reality engine."

"I wasn't there for that," I reminded her.

Her eyes widened. "Hang on a minute," she said. "I've still got my inventory. Gambler, are we able to use the things we've brought in from outside?"

"All of those items have previously been emulated in a reality engine. That makes them fairly easy for me to utilize," Gambler said.

"So that's a yes."

"Confirmed."

She pulled out her lariat and gave it a whirl. "Good, at least I've got this. I've got another trick up my sleeve too." She grinned. "It might just help us out when we find this shattered fragment we're looking for."

Rok'gar had a long polearm with an energy blade at the top. He swung it experimentally. "I crafted this myself," he said quietly. "I may not have all of the warrior's supporting abilities, but I can use the weapons I have made."

They looked at me. "You going to be all right in a fight, Colin?" Sage asked.

I flexed my arms and grinned. "I can take care of myself," I said. "Don't worry about me. But I do hope these shatters drop the equivalent of skill seeds, because I'm going to need some new abilities."