I appeared in the spawn void, letting out a sigh of relief as the bliss of no longer feeling my abused body washed over me. Despite Max numbing my pain and counter signaling my screaming nerves, there was nothing he could do to prevent the restricted movements and bone-deep knowledge that I should be in pain. Within the small stationary Link, I was removed from it all completely, my consciousness whisked away and given a new digitally immaculate vessel to inhabit for a time. I ignored the login button and closed my eyes to enjoy the feeling in peace for a few seconds.
Max, of course, couldn’t leave me to my peace. “What the hell was that about? I saw you making moves on my girl.” His annoying voice cut through my relaxing moment.
I sighed and opened my eyes to find him standing in front of me in the gray foggy expanse. “Can’t you shut up, even for a minute?”
Max opened his mouth and blasted me with a bone rattling foghorn blast, before glaring at me and continuing to not shut up. “Shutting up was never part of the deal, but you keep on insisting you're not after Ali like that, then you go and start with the smiles and shoulder pats? I don’t buy it.”
I waited for him to finish airing his issue, and was surprised when he kept it fairly short and didn’t break into another of his rambling rants. “Max, what is going on with you lately? You're being…” I stopped myself from saying an idiot, “You’re not acting the same lately, is this all stressing you out too or something?”
Max narrowed his eyes. “Don’t change the subject! Just respect the dibs and don’t lie to me like that, meatbag.”
“I didn’t lie to you. I meant what I said, I really don’t see Ali like that. Didn’t you see the look on her though? She needed some reassurance, some compassion. Less pressure, not more. Also, she is definitely not ‘your girl’, and you’re going to create extra problems if you keep thinking like that.” I considered my next words carefully, intentionally scattering some stray ideations of washing machines, pogo stick accidents from my youth, and peeling potatoes into my thought process in an attempt to throw him off from simply reading my thoughts.
“Look man, as far as I can tell, you kinda freak her out. To her, you’re an inhuman face on a screen and a voice on the radio, which she shot, if you remember.” I held his increasingly angry gaze and reached for empathy. “If you wanna… I don’t know, somehow be with her, she’s going to have to agree to it. But I warn you, that might prove more difficult for you than this whole business with the Core’s Impex and our entire plan.”
Max’s dotted eyes glared back into my own, before he turned away in an overly dramatic huff. “You have yet to see my true power, mortal.”
“Oh, quit it, Max. Power doesn't have anything to do with your little crush.” I thought for a moment, trying to understand his side of things and meld it with my own interpretation while dropping my mental wariness. “What’s going on with you though? This has to be about more than Ali needing a little pep talk, and you never answered. If you want any of us to trust you, especially me, you really have to keep us in the loop. More than you have, because the last time you came at me with a serious explanation and choice, you were an absolutely manipulative jerk about it.”
Max crossed his arms, then took a few slow steps away from me into the void. He held his proud defiant pose, his nose slowly rising back into the air. I prepared for another argument, but he surprised me. His shoulders fell and he turned to face me. His eyes dropped downwards, and his crossed arms turned from a confident gesture to a self soothing slump.
After a second, he finally looked back at me. “You said that I needed to feel things, that I couldn’t just logic my way through everything. So… I turned some of them back on. I’m pretty sure it was a massive mistake. First Greg slips the world's worst lie right past me, then I get all jealous. This crap is turning me into a whiny baby.”
I suppress a grin at his accurately self deprecating comment, shaking my head. “That’s what this is? Well… damn.” I’d wanted to fight with him, to argue over his naive stupidity, but faced with his answer I just couldn’t bring myself to. If he was going to be real with me, I wanted to meet him in the middle. “That’s… actually–almost–a solid excuse, I think. As long as you learn something from it. That’s the thing about us, uh, biologicals. We live and we learn, and amped up freshly felt emotions are the real deal, you’re lucky you don’t have some sort of AI puberty thing you have to go through, or maybe… that's what this is…”
I drifted off from my statement as I was caught up in an imagined version of what that would even look like, and chuckled to myself a little. When I looked back at Max, he had a few scattered dark spots across his face, and suddenly smelled of stale oniony sweat. I blinked, seeing my stray thoughts made into his reality.
He scowled and shook his head, casting off the faux acne and BO. “Cut that out, it's not funny! This sucks, dude. Your stinky monkey puberty can’t compare to what I’m going through.”
Despite being extremely tempted to play around with this newfound ability, I needed to be the adult in the room. “You’ll get a handle on it eventually, just… maybe don’t let your desperation get a hold of you, or be so trusting with outsiders? Learn the lessons.”
“Bah, outsiders? They’re all outsiders. Are you telling me everyone dirtside is a dirty lying cheater when they think they can get away with it? Why haven’t you been lying to me too then?”
I stared at him, my determination to talk him through all this waning. “How the hell could I even lie to you? You live in my mind and read all my thoughts. I think I’m even starting to get some of your thoughts bleeding through too.”
Max’s face turned to a blank mask. “You’re getting some of my thoughts too?”
“Hey, answer the question first Mr. Don’t-change-the-subject. How could I lie to you? Really, I wanna know.” I said half seriously.
“Delusion, obviously. But really, what did you hear from me?” Max leaned in closer, his newly grown eyebrows narrowing into a single line.
“It doesn't matter really, I can’t even remember what it was, only that it happened.” I shook my head and diverted back to the actual issue. “Not everyone is a liar either, so don’t just do the thing where you go from one extreme to another. People are nuanced, you’ll have to learn to read the context and develop trust over time. I’ve proven to be trustworthy, right? Ali and Tevin haven't let us down either, and while Rin might be cagey and hard to read, he’s never screwed me over. Like…” I reached for an example, a way to tie this all together for him to give him a chance at understanding the nebulous and squishy idea I was trying to help him wrap his hard-coded mind around.
“Think… about Raschel, and her rat-bastard traitor friends. We trusted them when stakes were low and had a fun time playing games and hanging out. Then gave out conditional trust and let them escape with us, which while being a mistake, was the compassionate thing to do. Yet now… do we trust her? We’ve kept her with us because we need to, and we’re even letting her drive the van. Why?”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
I stared off into the void, organizing my muddled thoughts. “It would be simpler and easier to just shoot her and leave her in a ditch, but we’d have to live with the possibility she was actually innocent in all this. Or we could drop her off at a city and be done with it, but then we’d be trusting her to keep what she knows about you a secret. Yet instead of all that, we keep her where we can see her and we watch to see how she handles it, because we’re not fucking monsters or too-trusting morons, or at least… we try not to be. It’s not ideal in any direction because it's a compromise, but it’s the best option for now.”
Max was watching me with wide eyes, and nodding his head as I did my best to explain something I only barely understood myself. “The thing about trust… is you have to give a little out for free to see how someone handles it. Raschel has earned just a tiny little bit of trust, in my eyes. But Greg? We gave him reason to be angry at us, signaled weakness by needing an armed escort in the first place, and your fanboying and shit-talking gave him the impression that you’d come down on his side when he made his little play for revenge.”
I sighed and took a deep breath. “It’s not wise to put all of your trust in someone you just met. You have to start small, and build it up. Does that make sense?”
Max nodded, looking for the first time somewhat lost and confused. “I think so, as much sense as a stupid monkey can, anyway.”
I gave him a brotherly slap on the shoulder and grinned at him, completely unfazed by his insult. “Good, now can you get out of my way so we can get this Trial over? We can have a real talk about jealousy later, just… let Ali sleep and give her some space, and cut it out with that ‘my girl’ thing. No one’s going to be trying to put the moves on her while we’re fleeing for our lives.”
“Fine, fine. Let’s do this.”
I hit the damn button to send myself straight into the Faction layer, skipping the Hub entirely.
Stepping out of the portal led to me stumbling off of the block of stone I had been sitting on before being forcibly yanked out of the game by Max. After catching my balance and lighting my lamp, my surroundings immediately worried me.
The rough stone tunnel was scattered with shards of stone, puddles of liquid, and a number of broken crude iron tools and weapons. Some of the liquid looked like blood, while other splotchy patches turned out to be expired glow-goo that the dwarves used to light the pitch dark tunnels and caverns. I reached out to grab a broken-handled and heavily cracked hatchet from nearby to test one of the puddles I couldn't recognize, and was reminded of my chemical bending gauntlets.
Using the probe feature and jamming a finger into the pool told me that it was a mix of acids and enzymes, and tagged as a chemical weapon that the dwarves developed back when they used to fight with each other. Instead of a specialized substance to melt or work stone, this stuff would eat away at the thick exoskeletons of their fellow dwarves.
Feeling even more nervous, I popped up the minimap and reached out to Max mentally, the brotherly feelings from our heart-to-heart evaporating. “Where is everyone? Why didn’t you tell me they were under attack?!”
“Cool your jets.” The map popped up into the center of my field of view as he explained. “I can’t see much of what’s happening here unless you’re actually linked up. I can do simple stuff like send messages and make bank transfers, but I don’t have access to the overworld unless you’re Linked in.”
The map zoomed in and spun around to orient itself and frame the little blue arrow that looked to represent me, as well as a couple of clusters of markers a few rooms away.
“Our Row looks to be holed up in the vent room with what's left of the squams. Remember those little buggers? They had you running like one of those little yappy dogs that keeps barking and acting all mean but skitters out of reach when the big dog steps up.”
I started jogging up the long sloped tunnel, between piles of neatly stacked stones that had originally clogged the passageway, bounding with long sprinting steps while I continued to question Max internally.
“What about the other group on the map?”
“Now that I’m in here, it looks like two other Houses ganged up on our guys and gals. See?” Max shifted the map to the side and zoomed it in even tighter on the occupied rooms, and a bunch of little nametags started popping up to label the markers.
The first thing to catch my eye were the six remaining friendly markers left in the squam room. The purple eyed “pretty-boy” Lurbolg was nowhere to be seen, the troubled addict Korfook was missing, as well as a couple of the other dwarves I hadn’t really gotten to know at all. Thankfully, our two leaders Kazek and Bomilik were still labeled on the map, as well as the awkward but friendly Kikkelin, who I had been in the middle of a conversation with when my connection was severed. Jozoic’s marker was there too, paired up with Sallis and planted some distance from the others in the vertical chamber just before the vent room.
The next thing I noticed were the labels on the nearly 20 icons marking rival dwarves in the next room over from Jozoic. I saw two House names, Bassaldourn and Rocksturdy. The fighting seemed to be at a standstill for now, thankfully, marked by a long gap of empty hallway between the group of rivals and my Row.
“Hey, uh, you should calm down with the sprinting-directly-to-where-you-need-to-be thing. Just because you can see them on the map doesn't mean you’re supposed to be able to. This isn't like dirtside back home where we can blow stuff up and override all the things, we have to play it cool in here.”
I slid to a stop in the first room I came to and scanned around. Taking Max’s warning and playing to the watchers, I cast the beam of light around the room and called out. “Kazek?... Anyone?” I kept my voice low, just above my normal speaking tone in hope that it wouldn’t give me away to the rival group.
Internally, I was really starting to worry. I just couldn’t catch a damn break. I’d been flailing around from one firebox, to another frying pan, only to land on a bed of damned coals just when I thought things might become a little more straightforward. What was I even supposed to do? I couldn’t tear through these guys like I had the rebels back home. My natural stats had yet to be updated, so all I had going on were my gauntlets’ equipment bonuses and the outdated version of my strength and resilience from before Max had made me so strong.
The system scanned you for your natural stats during your monthly pay-day, and I hadn't had a full dive from a subscription payment day since then. Thinking about it, I realized that it had been over a month ago, and I should have already had the unhideable timer pop up on my HUD.
That felt like a thought that Max would respond to without me having to voice it to him, and when I managed to complete both of those thoughts without him answering, I had to fully form the question in my mind and shove it towards his corner to get him to answer.
“What's the deal with that Max? Am I immune to payment day somehow? You’d think the core would notice something like that.”
“We have to fight through like 20 trained adolescent scary ass beetles and you wanna talk about game subscription fees? Focus!”
I made a noise somewhere halfway between a grunt and a sigh and started quickly walking down the passageway leading back to the vent room. “Heading straight to the vent room makes enough sense, we can walk and talk. So… explain.”
“Well… yes and no? It’s complicated, but It's more like… I already paid for you? It’s hard to explain. All you need to know is that the two systems are integrated in this sort of janky way that lets me get away with juuuust enough shenanigans to pull it off.”
Letting the worry freely show on my face, I moved a little bit quicker in the direction of the vent room, switching gears back to the task at hand. “Hey, can you type out a message for me? We need to talk to the dwarves.”