After getting my 2nd "worker elf", I started wondering what was going on with the "Population" counter. After granting me the 2nd active worker at 1/19 to 2/19, it went slowly onwards to 2/20 and 2/21 - but what were these other 21? I decided to do a deep dive into the internet to see if anyone had an explanation yet.

I soon found that about 1% of active games (yes, there were already sites collecting stats like this) had what they were calling "phantom populations". These included almost all "world builder" and "empire builder" games, most "city builder" or "economy builder" games, and many farming or entertainment games.

These "phantoms" could not interact directly with humans in the real world, but COULD have dramatic effects. The biggest known one was that they could create and provide "trade goods" that humans could buy by placing items of value on the "trade tables", which would then make the phantom goods on the display tables real, and customers could pick them up and take them.

This information was mostly provided by someone having a game called "Pie Shop", who had a few phantom pie bakers and an NPC "store clerk" that sounded like my worker elves. Some of the anonymous "world builder" people who responded claimed to have THOUSANDS of phantoms in their starter "empires". When they got their technology going, the world economy was obviously going to be revolutionized, if those goods could be translated into the physical world.

All this information got me back to researching deeper into my game menu controls - and there were depths to it I had never realized before. In the "Local city map", there was a "view resources" tab, which showed my entire neighborhood for miles around, and claimed it all as under MY jurisdiction. If I devoted Gold, I could destroy or renovate any part of it I chose - the current human population didn't even register as existing other than as "trade resources" - with one exception.

My hard-training neighbor with the "clicker system" registered as an "unaligned hero", with options to enter recruitment negotiations - or to initiate combat with.

I also noticed that all the roads in the area translated to double movement speed for all units, and gave me a "trade" bonus of some kind. A small local church was designated as an "unaffiliated shrine", and a small local grocery shop gave both a food and trade bonus to "MY" city. There turned out to be at least 3 other "unaligned heroes" in my area of control, but I wasn't about to seek them out. If I was right about how the game translated things, they could challenge me to combat once they knew of me - and I was nowhere near ready. Hopefully they were at least as clueless as I was.

I DID have an option to build an actual combat unit "Elven Spearmen", but it would take time and resources from other aspects I needed to get done - and seeing elves with weapons might scare folks.

Back on the internet (yes, I love puttering back and forth instead of maintaining focus), I found that many people had been transformed into other races as part of their game. Elves were by far the most common, but very few were "my kind" of elves - everything from Drow to Sun Elves were possible, it seemed. And in the "very rare" category, everything from "My Little Pony" ponies to baby dragons now existed. Anything overpowered was in some kind of "baby" or other near-powerless situation - for now, at least.

I had avoided getting "Dark" magic during game creation, but the options had been there - as had other, even more ominous options, all the way up to portals to a "dark mirror" universe inhabited by dangerous dark forces far beyond anything Earth was yet seeing. I'm sure many other games had similar options, and not everyone was going to avoid them. Hopefully my own focus on Light Magic would give me good defenses against them.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

With that in mind, I checked the internet again - Yes, large numbers of people were simply missing. I recalled that MANY games start out with the protagonist imprisoned or alone in the wilderness. Even more alarming, many children were missing - and I had no clue how the Empowerment affected the very young. The only clues on the internet involved kids taking on roles from popular stories, movies, cartoons, or other entertainments.

Reviewing my non-spellbook skills, I thanked my lucky stars that I had bought the "improved starting power". Without it, I would have been helpless - possibly not even a "unit", with zero offensive or defensive ability, in game terms. The lower costs and improved loyalty assured me I wouldn't go broke trying to feed and maintain my units and population any time soon. Population DID require upkeep, but there was a large "free" allocation based on the resources of one's starting city - and my area had considerable quantities of such resources.

Both food, and eventually gold, would trickle as phantom population expanded, and my GUESS was that my neighbors wouldn't even be aware of how their properties were being used for my benefit. Everyone near me was simply considered a "tenant" by the game, and contributed to the tax base in ways not explained by the menu system - but collecting it required certain phantom population thresholds. The first was at 50.

Oops! I had the phantom Population thing all wrong - it had just been so long since I had played. Setting workers to Housing didn't actually build anything, it was all Recruitment (producing more Population), and my actual capacity was only limited by how many I could feed and keep happy! The "workers" were simply a physical manifestation of how I could control and assign them.

My "item creation" menu was a lot of fun to play with, but useless for the moment. There was a huge list of items I could create and enchantments I could endow them with, but they were EXPENSIVE - in terms of mana required. The weakest +1 anything would cost 250 mana (200 to give the item a base enchantment, and 50 for the +1). Costs went up from there - rapidly.

Beyond that, my Casting ability (still at 1 right now) limited how many mana/day I could invest in enchanting. i.e. it would take nearly a year to make anything worth making with my current abilities. And those same mana points were needed for nearly everything else I wanted to do.

My final ability, being able to freely trade mana and gold for one another at a 1:1 cost, was fun in that I got to see what a gold coin looked like. It turned out to be a coin slightly smaller than a dime with my face on one side and a tower peak on the reverse. Probably not a good idea to spend before I was in a position to announce myself in public.

My Population, the evening of that 2nd full day of Empowerment, was now growing at 1 every 2 and 1/2 hours, and still accelerating a bit with each new one. I was (VERY slowly, 1 mana/day) researching "Move Tower", so that I would be able to retreat/hide when the time came. The rest of my daily mana was going evenly to Casting and Mana Storage.

Just before midnight, I decided to test "Combat Mode" with no opponent. I was right about mana use - I had a "personal" 5-point mana pool at the start of each combat, and I could "zap" anything in combat range with my magic ranged attack - but only once, as it used up 3 of my 5 mana. The effect looked about the same as a .22 caliber bullet, at a guess, and was supposed to have the ability to damage nearly anything that couldn't resist magic.

My personal mana would reset for each new combat I initiated, but the fastest turnover I could do between combats seemed to be about 15 minutes. My elves and phantom elves could not join combat. Trying to take a "mundane" weapon with me into combat simply didn't work - the combat system wouldn't engage if I was armed. I could still use such weapons normally outside of "combat", of course, but they weren't recognized by the game. It made me wonder what would happen if an attacker with such weapons were to come after me. An experiment for later - probably much later.