The cave itself appeared to be sealed, probably a sedimentary vent with the craggy brown rocks, which were set with candles, stuck to the rocks with dripping wax that looked like it had been building for centuries. There must have been two dozen candles in the 30-foot space, which had a sandy floor and arched into the darkness overhead. There were animal hides, deer, and… wolf? Against the walls, jammed into crevices or held up by battered and ancient wooden frames, I had to assume one of them concealed the exit.
“My goodness! Aren’t you an interesting one!” I heard a voice say, and I spun around to see an old man in a robe. I looked at the man more closely. My butt ached, but not near as much as it should have after taking a long sliver of sharp rock as a wound. I felt some blood slick and cool against the back of my left thigh, but it wasn’t dripping, just wetness. When you added the blood spray I had taken from cutting a few throats and mangling a face, I was probably looking pretty horrific.
I was holding my knife at the ready, but I lowered it slightly. He was bald, in a ratty brown robe that looked like it had seen better days a decade ago and hadn’t been laundered since, and his beard was gray, matching thick eyebrows over pale skin and piercing blue eyes. His face was lined and craggy, with thin lips under the wispy beard that trailed down to his waist. His hands were fairly big, and if I had to guess his age based on the wrinkles and hands, I would have figured about 60 years old, ten years older than I was when My mother had put me on ice.
“I could say the same about you. What are you, some kind of hermit? You look like a monk who’s lived a hard life and retreated from the world.”
He smiled creakily. “Is that what I look like? Is that a figure you can respect and learn from? My appearance comes from your mind. I am not a person, any more than the goblins you just slaughtered or the young woman you saved.” He sat down on a beaten stool made of sticks with reeds woven through them into a seat and then waved his hands at a beat-up bedroll of what looked like a canvas stretched out on another woven frame. “Please, have a seat. Your species is protected, and yet you are here. I imagine you have a lot of questions.”
I looked at the bedroll, thought about the wound in my buttock, and shook my head, “No thank you, I’d rather stand until I can get this looked at.”
He grinned, “You are not wounded. It was merely a scratch, and entirely psychosomatic. Anything that happens in the tutorial is temporary, and the blood will vanish when you do.”
I shrugged and sat down heavily on the bedroll. He was right. My buttock still sort of ached, but I didn’t feel any fresh pain when I sat. I peered at him closely, and he smiled, “Sorry I cannot offer you any refreshment, but this is YOUR construct and appeal to wisdom, not mine. The last time I did this, we had a nice tea ceremony in a flying palace surrounded by dragons that lasted almost two hours before we could get down to the nuts and bolts of your overview.”
I looked around, “So I created this?”
He nodded, “More or less. Right now you are in an Opiary, a sort of artificial rift created by your subconscious cues and the system. You were being tested, and placed into a situation where your actions could offer a variety of outcomes. I am no judge of moral character, but the fact that you helped the young lady kill her assailants to assist her psychological recovery from her ordeal, rather than simply claiming the rewards of slaughtering the goblins as you were so tempted to, speaks highly of your self-control, a trait which could certainly set your path in a more profitable direction.”
He brushed a hand in the direction of the white watch thing. “Aren’t you going to check your notices? Your curiosity has to be eating you up.”
He was right, I really wanted to see what skills or traits it claimed I proved, but that could wait. “Can you give me more information, right from the beginning, about what the hell is going on? Why do people keep telling me the Earth is protected, and talking about rifts, or demanding I pay back rift rewards to repay a debt or something? Why am I even alive? The last thing I remember, I was checking OUT of life, not in. Am I going crazy?”
He nodded, “That’s exactly what I am here for, also to help you make a few selections. Humanoids in this sphere are very dangerous. To maintain stability, the galactic races have declared all human-bearing worlds as off-limits, non-contact preserves, and limited their ability to use travel nodes and technology until they are capable of expanding through the galaxy without assistance.”
“There are other human worlds?”
He nodded, “Humanoid worlds, yes. Pure humans are only one of a large variety of species, all descendants of the original system designers. As a result, some Humanoid worlds are entirely isolated, while others may interact only with other Humanoid species. As far as the greater galaxy is concerned, all the worlds farther from the galactic core are miserable, uninhabitable rocks. The fact that those worlds, such as yours, are filled with life is one of the more closely guarded secrets in the galaxy.”
“Rifts are where the chaos, the energy that teems outside of the organized universe, breaks through into the real universe, destroying and infesting everything in its never-ending goal to consume the real universe and turn it all back into chaos where it first started. The theory is complex, but the system was created to force that chaos into physical patterns, where it could be fought by mortal creatures and turned into physical resources.”
“Human worlds teem with rifts because humans are exceptionally well-suited to combat them, but when the human world backslides technologically, the systems that contain them tend to have a lot of rifts that are untouched.”
He chuckled, “The problem is that the system tends to adjust itself to the local populations. Humans have a very peculiar set of strengths, so when other species closer to the galactic core need extra resources, there are a ton of extra rifts just sitting around collecting dust and occasionally erupting, that they cannot touch because it’s simply too dangerous for non-humans to have a chance of surviving.”
“You are alive because you exited the planet while it was still capable of spaceflight. Since then, it has backslid and lost that capability, and somehow whatever life force makes you alive persisted even in your frozen vegetative state. So the Unification, a struggling civilization desperately searching for a risk-free way to gain resources, found you, paid a great deal of energy credits to the system to regenerate your body and remove its deficiencies, and expects you to combat those rifts that are within your abilities, presenting them with the resource rewards for doing so.”
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“It sounds like they made me a slave.”
He shrugged, “I suppose it does. Technically, the structure they purchased to house you is the only place within thousands of miles capable of keeping you alive. They want you to explore rifts to give them a return on that investment, but once you start exploring rifts, assuming you survive, you will likely not need their largess for particularly long. At the moment, you could look at it as being enslaved, but when you grow more powerful, you could purchase many options including transportation to a local habitable world’s node, or even a space-worthy vessel or transportation to another world.”
“For the time being, your well-being will have to be supported by energy credits you earn within the rifts, which means that other resources you discover within would probably need to go to your… sponsors.”
“My well-being?”
He nodded. “Things like food, equipment, clothing, armor, weapons, and even some enhanced abilities can be purchased with energy credits. It is a hard road, since most delvers, the term for rift explorers, tend to work in groups to support each other, and you are alone.”
He chuckled. “The only suggestion I can make if you want to control your own life as quickly as possible is to delve a LOT, and eventually search for a rift where you can create your escape. Whether you feel an obligation to the Spindafor Unification for saving your life is entirely up to you. And no, you are not crazy, although you are unlikely to accept my word for it.”
“Aren’t you human?”
He shook his head, “No, I am a synthetic intelligence created specifically to help you in the tutorial. I have a limited number of help topics I can access, of which you have already explored the majority, but I am not sentient or capable of creative thought. All of that comes from you.”
I sighed. I guess I’d have to take him at least partially at his word. I went ahead and checked out my watch thing.
You have displayed the trait stealthy!
You have displayed the trait critical attacks!
You have displayed the trait melee training!
You have displayed the trait durability!
You have displayed the trait empathy!
Congratulations, you have gained enough advancement to ascend to level 1!
You currently have no class. Please contact a shrine or node to select a class.
Your physical affinity has been analyzed and defined as chimera.
Your mental affinity has been analyzed and defined as imagination.
Your spiritual affinity is undefined until you are assigned a paradigm.
You have gained two potential genome quirks due to your shaper affinity. These gifts have been added to your potential trait purchase list. Please contact a shrine or node to use these traits.
You have gained 25 energy credits for defeating 5 goblins in the tutorial!
“Good start,” the old man said, “may I make recommendations?”
I nodded, “Of course. After all, as you said, it’s my mind making them, right?”
He shook his head, “No, this involves information you do not possess. I would use those energy credits to purchase a personal recycler, a class one weapon, and a class one set of armor. The items will not be very good, but if you choose a rank one rift, your attributes and affinities should be more than capable of helping you succeed.”
“The recycler will cost ten energy credits, and the armor and weapon will be five each. That will leave you with five energy credits to spend on rations. Rations are well-known for not meeting flavor preferences, but they contain enough nutrients and water to keep a human alive and healthy for a day. Just make sure that when you look at your node purchase list, you turn on the specifications for your species and affordable options. There are a lot of things you can purchase from the list, and you can sell to the list for energy credits as well if you have resources available.”
“You can only purchase items from the list at a node. In your case, you have a minor node attached to your arm. When you are in a rift, however, you will notice that your transtator is no longer available as a node. Nodes cannot function in rifts, and your transtator adjusts accordingly. That means no escaping a rift by node jumping, or purchasing special-purpose equipment for defeating the rift once you are already inside.”
“Opiaries also count as rifts in that you cannot purchase anything until you exit. You can choose to take my advice or not, as you see fit.” He shrugged, “That also means that, if you purchase or gain a personal opiary, the rules apply there as well. You do not appear to be trained in high-energy physics, so I will not attempt to explain the science behind it, suffice to say that two objects cannot exist in the same space without bad things happening.”
I nodded slowly with a slight smile. That rule seems to exist everywhere. That’s why teleportation research was always such a bugaboo. Most experiments in creating matter were defeated by the fact that even the most perfect artificial vacuum still had a few molecules in it, and when you tried to reassemble matter inside of other matter, you basically created a nasty nuclear bomb.
“You probably noticed that you gained Traits?”
I nodded, “Traits and other things, like a genome quirk, a weird affinity called chimera, and some kind of points.”
He nodded, “This is where things will get a little strange. You see, the system creates a set of traits for you, based on your abilities, both physical and mental, as well as a few things you might consider thoroughly supernatural.”
“These things allow sapients to adapt reality slightly. ALL creatures possess these abilities, but few people can effectively use them. The system helps you build pathways in your mind and body allowing you to better adapt to these talents, but they do NOT come from the system! They are already natural to your body, mind, and soul… Consider the system’s influence to be a bit like a training guide.”
“Humans, which the system was originally built for, are broken down into sets of traits, and you can gain a class that focuses on more specialized traits, sort of like becoming an ear, nose, and throat specialist instead of a general practitioner.”
“This sounds like a game. One of those games that my friends used to play. Is the system all a game?”