Welcome to the world of Raida! This is an automated tutorial to help you acclimatize to your new-
“Skip.” The otherworlder hurriedly waved away the dialog box, dismissing it. “Don’t have time for this right now… well, actually, can’t say I’m not at least a little bit interested in a tutorial world. I’ll get one of the idiots to record the world number for later,”
He sat down right where his spawn point had put him, the sphere he had liberated from the world of Aphelia clasped in his hands. Zachary could make out some sort of city in the distance, tiny buildings in the usual shades of grey and white of masonry. Was that… a flying car? No, but there was no time to waste; he had no way of knowing if the situation involving his Masks might be a time sensitive issue. So there was no time for dilly-dallying.
Time to get to work.
Masses of severed wiring were still looped around the red orb, ends cleanly cut off from their prior connections after having been lumped in with the soulbind he had initiated. Zachary turned the ball about in his hands, examining the orb for damage done during his exit. After all, he had had a few persistent doubts at the time of his daring heist – and subsequent escape thereafter – that whatever that had removed his access to his other Masks might have also prevented him from using System commands for his own purposes; or worse, corrupted their effects in some way.
Yet given his successful getaway, those doubts were most probably unfounded.
Hopefully.
To be honest, Zachary didn’t really care about whatever it was the object currently in his possession was capable of doing. For one, he wasn’t exactly privy to the right words that would be able to unlock the orb’s potential. It might have been a good idea to have pilfered a couple of the successes on those pages and pages of commands that the Cult of Humanity had deciphered thus far – but there just hadn’t been any time.
Besides, it wasn’t as if he was in any position to coerce the pronunciation of those rubbish words out of his handler, so bringing along those phrases would be just about as useless as guessing the correct phrases himself. He didn’t even know what kind of word construction that imaginary language used, so it would be an absolute nightmare to have to infer their meaning then translate it into the correct syntax that the cheat item used.
His only goal was to bring the System-Generated object with him when he left Aphelia – and he’d succeeded at that goal splendidly.
“Here we go. This had better work,” he muttered, peeling off the remnants of frayed wiring bit by bit, revealing the dark red sheen of the crystal orb. Clasping the sphere with both hands, palms pressed closely against the surface, he recited from memory.
“Access communication module using highest value held object as medium. World 5A. Access code 1325a%731489.”
To his relief, a familiar transparent blue dialog box popped up instantaneously, the System having recognised the request and the viable data package offered up. Zachary watched the orb’s crimson coloration dull, slowly transitioning to a darker, brownish shade as the stored information began to be consumed for the momentous task of connecting him through the walls of the Reality Stack to his desired recipient.
Calling World 5A…
In a base far removed from the bulk of the Reality Stack, in a facility that was almost close to the very top of innumerable other realities being cycled through at the same time, a phone began to ring.
~
“Umm… Yupun…? Something’s happening!” Poyun, the Jonum slug-mind frantically called out to his partner, his sole eye now fixated on the weird grey block on the panel in front of the monitor which had started to vibrate and screech out shrilly.
The two of them had, without exception, left the various different machines and mechanisms embedded into the inner workings of the base untouched on orders from their employer; but surely if something had begun to make noise, that had to be cause for concern, no?
And Poyun didn’t know what any of these things did, so all he could do was shout for assistance from his fellow employee.
Yupun slithered into the room, angrily scowling at his dunce of a co-worker with as much emotion as a featureless amorphous grey blob could muster. He’d been quietly enjoying a nice curl up with the mental interfacing spike installed in his room when an unfamiliar ringing began to reverberate through the facility, forcing him to have to dislodge the thirty-five established connections to the pleasure centers in his nervous system using the quick ejection button.
Which yes, was also as agonizing as it sounds.
As a result, he was not in the best of moods at the moment – who would be, after having their session of self-stimulation rudely interrupted?
“What did you do, you idiot?! Did you trigger the self-destruct again?! I thought I told you not to touch the big red button labelled self-destruct! What excuse could you possibly have after I’ve plastered five notes over the damned thing?! How hard is it to understand not to touch a big red button CALLED SELF-DESTRUCT?!”
“I only did that twice, alright? And it was what, eight years ago? Get off my back about it already. Look, I covered it up with a mug so I don’t accidentally bump into it again.” Poyun lifted up the aforementioned mug that had been upturned over the red button in question, careful not to drop it.
He didn’t want to trigger the self-destruct yet again – having to reconstitute one’s gelatinous mass from trace smears on walls was a time-consuming and mind-numbingly boring process.
“I swear I didn’t touch anything,” Poyun insisted. “I was just in here looking for my notes. It just started wailing all of a sudden. Can you fix it?”
Yupun approached the control panel in a huff, furtively glancing at the myriad buttons on its face. It wasn’t as if he was more well-versed than Poyun on how these inputs worked, either. They were supposed to be here to act as glorified security guards – restrain any intruders that found their way in and keep them in their custody till their boss came around. The slugs were for all intents and purposes, beings that one could describe as nigh-unkillable, thus making them perfect for the role. Where other organisms might wither and die, due to their tenacious vitality the Jonum would last without much deterioration in a position such as the one they were in.
Incidentally, they had never actually needed to detain an intruder as of yet, either – so this job was simply one of lazing around and indulging in whatever they decided to partake in that particular day.
“… perhaps it’s time we consult the manual…” Yupun muttered, reaching below the desk with a tendril. Pulling the thick volume from its dusty home under the control panel, Yupun made his way over to the only other table in the room, dropping it on the surface with a thud.
After a few minutes of scrutinizing and scouring the pages of the manual provided by their employer, the two slugs realised they could not read English.
“Screw it,” Yupun said in exasperation. “I’ll just start hitting buttons. As long as you keep that mug over the self-destruct button, there’s nothing that could possibly hurt us. Here I go-”
“Hold that thought, Yupun,” Poyun stopped his colleague, tapping on something he had previously identified as being relevant to the sudden blaring of sound. “This rectangular block has been vibrating for a while. Maybe the ringing has to do with that?”
Yupun took a quick look at the thing Poyun was pointing at, then returned to choosing which button to push first. “That’s not a button; I don’t know what that is. Don’t touch it.”
“No, but it’s moving. I saw it; it started vibrating first, and then that horrible sound started.”
Yupun threw his tentacles up in exasperation, backing away from the panel to let his partner take over. “Fine, do as you please. But if it’s yet another self-destruct button, I’m banning you from touching the control panel for two centuries.”
Cautiously, the other grey slug wrapped his tentacle around the block, then slowly picked it up. At once, the infernal screeching stopped. Behind him, Yupun breathed a sigh of relief. By nothing but sheer luck, the idiot had blundered into a solution which didn’t involve them nearly dying again.
“Ok, that fixed the noise. Put it back down where it was before the base explodes or something.” Yupun urged. It was better to be safe than sorry; just because the ringing had ceased didn’t mean that a countdown hadn’t begun somewhere in the background, ticking down till a death ray or a horde of killer robots were released into the complex.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Just as Poyun was about to do as he was told, the monitor in front of the panel, which up till this very point in time displayed a couple hundred different blinking red lights, highlighted one particular dot in green and zoomed in on it. A text box replaced the matrix of dots, English letters filling the screen.
Loudspeaker On.
“Yupun, I swear to God, if you or your other idiot friend puts down the phone, I’ll find my way back to base and murder the two of you very, very slowly myself.”
Poyun quickly pulled the grey block away from the depression it had been housed in.
“Oh, it’s you, Mr. Zachary,” Yupun nervously replied. “You… uh, haven’t done something like this before, so we… we weren’t sure what to do.”
“I gave you a manual, didn’t I? All the buttons on the console are explained in excruciating detail there; I know that for a fact, because I spent two long months designing the damned thing.”
“Yeah, but- we don’t understand English, sir. We’ve been learning it in our spare time, sure, but I’ve only gotten to basic stuff about how to tell someone that you need to go to the toilet and asking where the nearest library is. Poyun- well, he hasn’t even started yet.”
Zachary massaged his forehead with his right hand to curb the sudden onset of a migraine, mentally kicking himself at his simple blunder. Right, of course they didn’t understand English. All that time recording down the functionality of the various buttons and he’d written it in the wrong language. Still; small mistake, he’d find the time to rectify it later.
After he got all his Masks back.
“Never mind that for now, the monitor in front of you – that’s the large, glowing screen in front of the control panel; it tracks my essence signature in the Reality Stack. Is there just a single dot; or multiple? This is important.”
Poyun nudged his colleague, beaming as he squeezed himself in besides Yupun. “See, I told you, the dots were something! Yeah Mr Z, there’s a whole bunch of them now. Hundreds!”
Zachary pumped his fist silently. Good, the System hadn’t erased any of his Masks, simply redistributed them. Meaning that he could retrieve them one by one. It’d just take a little bit of time hopping from world to world, then he’d be whole again.
“Okay, can you switch the console to verbal commands? It’s a black dial at the very top of the panel.”
Yupun scanned over the top of the console panel and flicked the sole black switch over to its other position.
“Done, sir.”
“Save current highlighted soul essence value as primary. Display world numbers of closest duplicate soul essences in descending order. Oh, and save current world number of primary in latest save slot.” Zachary rattled off.
“Poyun? Read out the closest five world numbers to me.”
Poyun stared at the screen blankly.
“Um, sir, I don’t-”
“Fine, Yupun, then,” Zachary snapped, annoyed. “And hurry it up, the connection isn’t exactly reliable. The data value of the medium I’m using probably won’t last for too long, given that I’m using it for something it isn’t designed for. Damn it, I don’t have a pen. Hold on.”
Zachary bit at the tip of his index finger without hesitation, drawing a drop of blood from the tip. “Ok, continue. Digits. Quickly.”
He proceeded to hurriedly smear the relevant number strings for each of the worlds closest to him on his tunic in turn, periodically staring at the ball in his lap as he did so. The colour of the glass was now a lot less vibrant, closer to a dull grey than its original red. The call was chewing through a lot more of the object’s resources than he’d previously estimated.
Time was running out.
“-954968981237. That’s the last one. Correct?”
“Yes, sir. Correct.” Yupun replied, matching his boss’s words to the numbers displayed in front of him. Zachary breathed a sigh of relief, the tension leaving his body.
He’d made it just in the nick of time.
“Alright. If there’s nothing else, I’ll end the transmission here. Keep doing what you’re doing for now, and-”
“Mr Z?” Poyun piped up. “Poyun here; actually, could I ask you something before you go?”
Zachary looked at the glass orb.
Light grey.
“Ok; but hurry up. In something like two minutes, this transmission will end whether I want it to or not.”
“What’s all this about, sir?”
“Something severed my connection to my other Masks. I’m doing all of this to get them back. And since I don’t have any way on me at the moment to read world numbers, I needed the specialised equipment on base to figure out where the System put them. Then there’s the whole issue of the proportional energy costs, and soul tether limitations that I can’t get around without having System mainframe access, which is also why I won’t be able to get back to base myself till I’ve gotten at least, I dunno, eight of my Masks back.”
“Oh,” Poyun said, confused. “But… you’re immortal, right?”
“Yeah- your point being?”
“If you can’t die,” Poyun continued. “Why not just… give them up? Why bother with all this trouble when you can just make new Masks? What’s the point?”
Zachary stared incredulously at the crystal ball in his hand, stunned into shocked silence. When he continued, it was with a whispered tone of barely disguised anger.
“I get why Yupun calls you the dumb one now. It's because you are. Just… Just give them all up? My Masks? Why in the world would I do that? They’re mine. They’re all mine.”
“…I’m sorry sir, I just-”
Call ended.
Before Poyun could explain himself, the connection cut off abruptly. Zachary eyed the orb in his lap, noticing that the crystal no longer held any colour. He sighed, turning it over in his hands. It was basically just a spent glass ball now; the immense priority values it had once held having been fully expended in that short five minute call.
Pity, Zachary thought. If I hadn’t spent those last few precious seconds going off on that moron, I might have managed to preserve some level of data value within. Might not have been quite as useful as an object generator like the Cult were using it for, but it’d at least have some use as a sturdy projectile. This thing’ll shatter if it taps lightly into any surface.
“Can’t be helped, I suppose.” Zachary said, regretfully. “I had to know where my Masks were. And now… I do. Soul tether off. Attach World 954968981237. Set detonation period as- hold on,”
He’d almost forgotten.
He took off his tunic, and grasped it in his hands, peering at the bloodstains on its front. He’d have to be a little daft to forget to do this, wouldn’t he? And after all the effort he’d put in to get these five strings of numbers.
“Bind object to Zachary Altair. Ok; now set detonation period as three seconds.”
After three seconds, Zachary Altair was no longer present in the world of Raida.
The nearby news outlets did pick up on a minor explosion in district ten – the blast had cracked a couple of windows almost three kilometres away. Luckily, it was determined to be nothing but an isolated incident which hadn’t resulted in any casualties, thank the stars.
But later investigations of the blast site had mysteriously failed to uncover even trace evidence of foul play. And yet the nearby trees had been incinerated down to their roots, and a medium sized crater had been gouged into the dirt.
It was as if whatever had produced the blast did so with so much force, it had eradicated itself in the process. Which couldn’t possibly be the case; even with bombs there’d be debris, small chunks of metal and tiny strips of burnt rubber which would have been expelled into the surroundings.
For a while, everyday folk gossiped and speculated on if this was some sort of declaration of war by yet another secret, evil organisation hell-bent on the destruction of the world, and if a new vigilante would summarily rise to the occasion, donning a fanciful suit of armor to fight off minions in order to protect the populace. Conspiracy theories flew about, each more outlandish than the last, all posing convoluted ideas that it could have been this or that, and that’s why the sun was going to explode in five days.
But no group claimed responsibility for the blast, and nothing happened in the coming weeks. So everyone soon forgot about the incident – like they always did. There were more important things to worry about, like the new video game released by one of the big video game studios, or the latest action blockbuster produced by a well-known director.
Well, an evil organisation which dabbled in human experimentation and world domination did rise two months after the blast, as well as a plucky young man that took up the mantle of his predecessor to fight them off.
But that was another completely unrelated story.