OSOS 0x14

Amicitia

M{ -.- }RA

Mara’s thumb hovered over the ‘Restore’ button, hesitation written all over her face as she froze in the middle of the walkway. She’d been gone for one hundred and fifty-two days, she might even be declared officially dead at this point, did she really want to open that box by reconnecting to the grid?

Grinding her teeth, she tried to justify things by painting the cell phone purchase as a ‘successful transaction’, but she’d have to be the most gullible idiot to believe a lie like that from herself. For all she knew, her cred-chip, if it still existed, was probably locked down and her assets frozen– Not that she had any heirs, or a will for that matter. Maybe a cousin was sitting on her estate?

Calius probably, he was always good with money… But regardless, that kinda nixes getting my old account back.

Backing out of the current screen, Mara tapped the ‘New Account’ button. She’d settle with a new number for now, and figure out the rest later.

Glancing up to see where she was, and what her options were considering her potential shortage of funds, she settled on fresh groceries. If nothing else, she probably had at least a few notes crumpled up in her purse. She’d have to take the train back the way she came, but the local restaurants weren’t exactly in her budget anymore.

However, much to her dismay, even as she was back underground and rattling along the subway tunnels, Mara was finding herself still punching away at the account creation screen. Dozens upon dozens of forms seemed to be necessary these days just to connect a new account, and she was still wrapping up even as her train began to ease into her home station.

As frustrations culminated into more and more aggressive tapping at the never-ending parade of registration screens, Mara heaved an audibly exasperated sigh as she resisted chucking the thing She knew why, but it was really driving her up a wall with how many contact details they wanted.

This fucking excessive… Fuck it–

“Let’s go with… Mora. Adopted sister or something. I’ll just fudge my details enough, and I can re-use the rest of it.”

Glancing around to be sure she wasn’t heard, Mara thanked the fates that the evening train back home was a lot less busy than the one she took out.

Disembarking as she scolded herself for muttering aloud again, Mara set off for her local grocery store, the route practically ingrained in her subconscious after the years she’d spent walking along the same sidewalks multiple times a week.

One eye on her screen, and the other on the street, Mara juggled her focus between her phone and surroundings, and let her feet do the walking. It only took about ten minutes, but by the time she found herself at the entrance of Green Mart, her ‘sister’ had acquired their own phone number and a brand-new account– Apparently, with no issues.

Satisfied she’d checked at least one thing off her list, at least in a roundabout way, she shifted gears and started fleecing her purse for all forms of currency. She wasn’t here for much, but she also had zero intentions of even attempting to use her nebulous cred-chip– The smaller her footprints, the better.

However the thought of minimizing her impact on the world tripped a realization as she walked through the entrance of her old grocery store.

Oh fuck– I definitely should have picked a different grocery store, someone’s bound to recognize me…

Whatever. I feel like I’m gonna devour a whole-damn-person if I don’t eat something, and soon.

Grabbing a basket and letting her cravings take the lead, Mara quickly found herself at the register with four rotisserie chickens, two jugs of veggie smoothie, and an entire chocolate cake. At least twice she started to question if her eyes were bigger than her stomach, but each time her gut nearly tore her throat out trying to climb up and ‘take the wheel’.

Yet, even back home, as she stepped out of the lift, Mara was still questioning her choices. She honestly couldn’t believe just how much food she’d brought home, spent basically all of her paper on it, but she held no reservations that she wasn’t about to eat every last bit of it all, and with very little abandon at that.

Throwing her haul out on the living room table, Mara settled onto the couch, propping her new phone up as she pulled open the Shibu app, actually curious what was new in the anime world since her chat on the train. However as the home page loaded its latest and trending, Mara straight-up dropped the fork she’d been holding.

Plastered on the homepage was a near-full-screen ad for the latest isekai, and she honestly couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

image [https://i.imgur.com/S19SlPp.png]

The anime was brand new, barely any episodes out, yet it had the exact same made-up name she’d just spun on the spot. If she was seeing this at any other time in her life, she’d blame it on some weird coincidence, but she hadn’t been here– So the question was begging to be asked–

“Why-oh-why is there a whole-ass-isekai with the Same. Fucking. Name!?”

Her stomach lurched up in response, growling like a feral beast twice her size, and Mara glanced down to her dirty fork on the floor and the uneaten food on the table. Dropping all sense of manners, Mara palmed an entire chicken and used her other hand to dig for more info.

Did they release some personal AI generator while I was gone? I thought they ruled that out as financially inviable on just server costs alone, so what the hell is this?

As she tapped further, already somehow moving on to a second rotisserie chicken, Mara realized the anime wasn’t just a dead-ringer for the name. Her ‘cosplay’ was practically perfect, gray hair, silver horns, small stature… minus the big-and-poofy golden ball gown, she had the look down pat.

It was all far too much to just be a coincidence, but there was also no way a whole show got made and marketed in the few hours it had been since she had even thought of it. So far, only three episodes were out, but Mara just scrolled past them. She was after the synopsis.

“...Chased into a dangerous dungeon by bandits, Sora’s life takes a radical turn when she discovers an ancient Jinn, unbound by the Rules of the Lamp.”

Sora huh? And a Jinn? At least they respect their roots, and it actually looks kinda decent…

As she reached for the third chicken, Mara found herself thinking of her own little ‘Djinn’, something that had completely slipped her mind in the chaos of suddenly arriving home.

If she was honest with herself, she hadn’t just been distracted, she’d been kinda dejected. Betrayed even. She had believed, without a doubt, that Trace was showing her how to get Debug back, but all it had ended up doing was shunting her back home– And she wasn’t even sure all of her made it.

The visual of seeing her own body left behind as she was ‘taffied’ back home refused to leave her mind, but she shoved it back down just as quickly as it bubbled up. For now, she didn’t have a solid avenue to getting Debug back, but she was learning. Trace had given her that much at least, and now that she was back online, the rest was just in the research.

However, as Mara finally looked down at her culinary catastrophe, it was clear there was something far more concerning on her plate. She’d come home with four entire, pre-cooked, rotisserie chickens. However what was strewn on her living room table was the bone fragments of not even two, and she’d somehow already chugged an entire gallon of veggie-smoothie.

I… I stopped eating meat in the woods. Why would I buy… and this amount of it too…

Internally, it felt like she’d barely eaten anything, but she knew she’d just eaten enough food for a whole handful of people to have their fill, so the math wasn’t mathing.

And as if on-cue, another reason Debug was so invaluable rears its head, they would already have the answers to something like this by the time it was a problem. Money can’t buy that kind of assistance–

Catching herself mid-thought, the word felt wrong to Mara. It didn’t box the feeling right, it was too… professional. Uncapping the last smoothie jug as she stood up and walked to her window, Mara reflected on her life lately in contrast to the night-lit city below, downing the entire two-liters of veggie-juice without batting an eye.

No, not assistance… friendship. You’ve done more for me than I had realized, so I’ll find you DB… It’s only a matter of time.

{ √Δ }

As her dagger-tip punctured the back of an ogre’s cranium, the slim dark-elf snatched her blade back from its jaw, just as quickly as it had entered, sending the hulking carcass crashing into the ground in her wake. Whipping the viscera from her blade with a quick flick of her wrist, the haunted assassin pulled out a small scroll from her hip and sliced another hole in her list.

“Three to go…”

Climbing atop the ramparts of the fort she’d just conquered, the dark elf found herself a cozy spot to rest for the night. The bodies would likely attract scavengers before dawn, and she wasn’t going to miss out on the experience. She’d already been on this particular quest for nearly a month at this point, and she had every intention of making full use of her weekend.

Settling into a nook with a decent view of the front gates, and a slight breeze headed in the opposite direction, the lonely assassin poked the air in front of her, summoning up her inventory as she sorted through the day’s haul.

Sighing as, once again, most of it was grindable junk, the elf tossed the lot in the quick-sell bin and sifted through the more unique items– Though she already knew most of it was trash to her at this point, she was only really on this quest out of boredom in the first place. Unsurprised to find her assumptions weren’t unfounded, she opted to ignore the rest and pulled out her camping gear instead.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Tent on the ground and a sandwich in hand, the elf was about to dismiss her interface but stopped as her hand hovered over the friends list. One by one her entire guild had started to play less and less, but that was normal, life happens, new games come out, and content gets stale. She wasn’t upset they’d left when she hadn’t, but she did miss them.

Climbing into her little perch next to the decoy-tent, the dark-elf knew she had a long night-shift ahead of her, one that would have been all the better with a friend to share it with. Glancing back over to her social display, the elf bit into her sandwich, wondering where they were now.

It was normal for a bit of silence in their group chat, they were all busy with their own budding families and lives, but not a single one had been online for her entire dive, which was starting to bother her.

The first half of her night went by about as it usually did for her, first the little critters, then a few bigger carrions, and at this point it was a coin-flip if she’d be seeing something… larger. However as she shifted her position to take the weight off her shoulder, she heard a noise from behind her, instead of in front of her.

Knowing full-well that she’d been very thorough inside the fort, whatever was making the crackling noises did not come from inside, and that was already enough justification to be on edge. Trying to remain as quiet as possible, the assassin shimmied her way towards the ledge that overlooked her little ‘campsite’.

*Ksh-BOOM*

The explosion sent a massive gust of wind past the edge of her hideout, signaling her chance to pounce. However as she got up to jump down, her ‘assailant’ came into view, and everything about it gave her pause.

At this point, she’d seen every major and minor mob in the game, and she’d never seen anything like this. It was like an old ‘Missingno’, except bright pink, and apparently entirely unphased by her improvised claymore.

“Shit.”

Cursing under her breath, the dark-elf wasn’t sure if she should take the thing on. It was like a lightning-slime on steroids, and she wasn’t exactly kitted to fight that. Every instinct in her was telling her to high-tail it out as fast as possible, but considering the rarity of such an event, the experience alone had to be worth it, and so she hesitated... And hesitated some more.

She stood there, foot on the ledge, overlooking the menacing blight below, for more than a minute, torn in indecision. She wanted to fight it– She really, really, wanted to fight it, but for every moment she stood there, it consumed something else. And grew.

By the time she made the smart decision to scamper, the pink-lighting slime had consumed the entire floor, and was working on the pillars supporting her little alcove. Searching for an exit, the dark-elf took a gamble and leaped from battlements, dropping a good five or six stories to the hard-pat dirt below.

Impacting with a more than audible thud, the assassin barely spared a glance behind her before she bolted. The monster was apparently very aware of her existence, and was already leap-lurching off the walls behind her. Cursing her luck, the elf made a bee-line for the woods, hoping that if she could break sight-lines, she might be able to throw it off her trail with her false-scent skill.

However, as she ran, it was hard to miss how fast the thing was. Pushing every skill and buff she had in her arsenal, the elf still found her speed to be lacking– It was maddening, the faster she went, the faster it did. The edge of the woods wasn’t even twenty meters away when she finally learned just how out-paced she was.

In a flash, her entire momentum ceased, pain erupting from her ankle as the slime seized her, crushing her speed in a single moment and sending all the kinetic energy straight to her joint. The white-hot pain flashed out her vision for a moment, just as her ragdoll of a body slammed into the ground as gravity took hold.

Even if the slime wasn’t already half-way up her legs, the elf was completely immobilized by the sudden shock, and with the amount of pain her headset was stimulating, she wanted nothing to do with being conscious for the kill-screen.

Yet, as the pink slime made its way past her neck, creeping past her mouth, then her nose, she knew that screen wasn’t coming. She barely had the energy to thrash as her lungs began to ache for air, and her vision was already hazy by the time the bright fuschia reached her eyes.

She knew it was a video game, a very real one at that, but she’d never ‘died’ like this before, and every bit of her struggle was both authentic, and involuntary. Adrenaline was running through her veins, in and out of the game, fight-or-flight in full effect, but neither were options ever available to her against this, and while she didn’t understand what was happening, she did understand that she was woefully outmatched from the start.

Head slumping back as her body finally exhausted the last of its adrenaline-filled struggle, and vision blacking out, the dark-elf met her end, and her character logged out for the last time.

M( -.- )RA

Already, Mara could feel the toll of her rune, ringing her tune. Trace was gone, utterly and completely. Any lingering sense she had of the skill as it fragmented in front of her eyes had just been dashed as it fully vanished from sight. But she didn’t have the time or mental space to lament in the moment, her legs had already given out on her, but the tempest of chaos she’d unleashed was the one in control. The fact that she was still standing was just a byproduct of her locked-up muscles, clenched tight from over-strain.

However, she didn’t dare relent in her single-minded dedication, not even for a moment, and finally it appeared her labor was bearing fruit. At the crux of her spell, where Trace had taken center stage and orchestrated space and mana like no other, a tear in the fabric of the realm had appeared, growing ever larger with every beat of her over-taxed heart.

From the edge of the clearing in the iced-over garden, all sounds of Celeste and Thelma had fallen silent, and it seemed to Mara, it was just her and the colossal titan of magic she had wrought upon the land. Then, suddenly, the tear caught and swelled in size, ripping past everything in sight as it swallowed Mara whole.

In a single moment, everything became that moment. All sights, sounds, and scents became a soup, swirling and mixing, distorting and condensing, until Mara felt her feet fall upon solid ground once more, and the realm-shattering bubble popped around her, revealing a sight she certainly wasn’t expecting.

She was back in the obelisk, or an obelisk, that much was obvious, but the room she was in was vastly different from what she’d seen before. However the light fixtures illuminating the bleak gray walls were a dead giveaway, despite the differences in the architecture. Unlike the penchant for hard edges in the last obelisk, this room was completely round. In front of her, and to her right were two doors, but apart from them, the room was as barren as it was circular.

Where is this? I thought I’d just pull Debug back, but…

Hesitantly taking a few steps into the blue-lit room she’d just found herself in, Mara found questions in every facet of what she was seeing. Everything about the room felt both uncanny and familiar, like it was just slightly, not-exactly, as she remembered it, but why she was here seemed to eat at her more than where she was.

Rescindo Caelus Muto, Reddo Normalitatis, Votum

The Latin words echoed in her mind as she tried to draw clues and conclusions from the scraps of what she did know. She knew enough from Trace’s ‘lesson’ to draw meanings from the words, so her translations weren’t going to be perfect, but the first segment of the rune seemed to at least be ‘relatable’.

Rescindo Caelus Muto… “Reverse Space Exchange”...

That certainly sounds relevant… but how does that explain this?

As Mara noticed a gleaming arc engraved into the floor, she dropped to her knees, pressing her face against the groove as she started to trace it across the room. Fingers following the etching, until it met up with another, then another, and soon she could visualize the entire rune that spanned the floor.

Did I make this coming here? It seems more complex than just six words… What’s the purpose of all this? Is this how they stole Debug?

Dropping all hesitations, Mara turned towards the door that was in front of her when she arrived. Debug had to be here, because the alternative was tumbling down a rabbit hole out of her control, and that was just unacceptable.

{ √Δ }

Thelma heaved the last of her old rucksack on the bed and began tossing in field rations and fine spices, enough to get her butt to the border if need be. She saw the look in Merlin’s eyes, and as strange as the idea was, she knew that that was the last she’d be seeing of him.

She’d seen it of course, the streak of light that struck the earth three nights prior, and she’d had her own ideas, but Merlin’s notes just reinforced the least likely of them. She’d been a thriving occupant of Somniantes for just shy of four centuries at this point, and she’d been through her fair share of mind-bending fantasy adventures, but having a literal space-ship slam into her backyard was not something she was prepared for.

Merlin didn’t have a name for it yet, his best assumption was something like Miasma, but Thelma’s home was far from Merlin’s upbringing, and unlike him, she was very well versed in what ‘radiation’ looked like. The devastation of that facet alone was something this continent was woefully unprepared for, and that wasn’t even broaching the concept of irradiated magical beasts, something she was very keen to put as much distance between as possible.

Slumping the pack twice her size up onto her back, Thelma looked over the rest of her little cabin as she double-checked that everything else in sight could be written off. After all, there was no guarantee that the old man was going to be able to do anything about the situation, most of his ‘ideas’ boiled down to ‘improvise’, which was certainly not his usual M.O.

As she made her way into the front ‘yard’, Thelma felt her attention drawn to the woods behind her, just as another tremendous quake rolled through in visible waves across the land. Bracing herself with one hand on the ground, she thought about the settlers she was about to go warn, but decided that that was going to have to suffice for them.

Digging her heels in, Thelma kicked it into high gear and leaped from her homestead, landing on the crest of the nearest wave of rolling earth, before jumping to the next, then the next. With a great amount of difficulty, she skipped across the tremors as she imagined the devastation such an earthquake was wreaking across Redonia, and the monstrosity that was perpetuating it.

It had been a very long time since anything had given her cause to run like this, especially in this world, but for some reason her mind went back to that fateful night, in a world not that different from this one. A world where she wasn’t impeded by her stature at every turn, but rather the color of her skin and the career she was forced into, but in many other ways, quite alike.

Peripéteia was the latest in full-dive MMOs, and it showed. Embracing every cutting edge technique. From AI actors to procedural quests for paying players, coupled with the ability to earn real money in-game, the headsets flew off the shelves when they finally launched.

She was one of the first adopters, and she spent nearly every weekend in its virtual world taking full advantage of the simulated time compression to both catch up on her hobbies, and grind her character, all within the realm of virtual reality.

TrinitT was her old username, and she wasn’t the biggest socialite, but over the seven years she’d spent playing Peripéteia, she’d found a small circle of players that were close enough to call friends. However, at this point, they were long gone. Her whole life had taken a sharp left-turn on that one fateful night.

Skidding to a stop, some several dozen kilometers from where she’d started, Thelma looked back at the world, slowly realizing it’s meant to be a solid, not a liquid, as it quelled the tremors wracking its bedrock.

Even though it had been over four-hundred years since that day, she still remembered waking up in a barren field like it was yesterday, utterly bewildered that she was somehow still alive, and for some reason, a good two meters shorter than she used to be.

At first it seemed like everything in the world was a bit too big, but after fighting her way through countless mobs, she found her first town, and realized just how short she actually was. From that point on, she’d braced herself for the bigotry and bias, but even for a small border town, she found herself treated with a remarkable amount of respect and accommodation– A stark difference from the unending racial ignorance she’d suffered as a dark-elf in the her old vr-mmo.

The people of Redonia showed her more kindness than she’d even had in her old, real, world, and it wasn’t the superficial self-serving kind, but rather the authentic, pries-open-your-cold-dead-heart kind. They’d even let her join, what was at the time, the Knight’s Guild, which set her on a career of prosperity and adventure that she wouldn’t have found elsewhere. So for all that and more, she was going to do what she could to help Merlin out, even if she couldn’t be at his side, she could at least put her fist through something squishy.

Checking her bearings to calculate her trajectory, Thelma smiled as she braced herself, then kicked, and in a single puff of dirt, she vanished, rocketing away at speeds better measured in kilometers per second.