JAARU ANIIK
The lunch room was loud, overcrowded and smelled of mediocre food. Jaaru didn’t queue in the lunch line and instead directly chose a place to sit. As she was moving, she saw Init, her sister nearby eating a bowl of noodle salad and sat down next to her. “Ya Init, what are you up to?” (‘Ya’ according to the system stood for ‘heya’, not ‘Yatra e’ which means “keep on” in the old language of the Sigya-na-Sygia that the system suppressed)
“Ya Aniik! How is work treating you?” she responded.
She smiled: “Ah, you know, people are petty, petty creatures. Can you believe that someone complained because a colleague used ginger perfume? No allergies or anything, just really hated the smell. And thought that his manager’s inaction was discrimination.”
Init shook her head: “Really‽ I could do your job for 14.5 seconds before I burst out laughing or told someone to do anatomically impossible acts.”
Aniik chuckled: “It’s like a constant soap opera. You know, just without streaming subscriptions! Unlike your job which I could do 14.2 seconds before I went rogue on some piece of software or its programmers.”
It was common that they joked about each other’s jobs like this. Init laughed: “I might just do that still. Some of the things people call in about are just ridiculous.”
Aniik nodded: “I can only imagine, well, I can’t really because I don’t even fully understand the kind of software you support, but I can extrapolate my job’s ridiculousness into yours and be sympathetic.”
Init smiled: “That’s all I can ask for. But let me tell you, any time I have to interact with someone on the outskirts of the system, I lose a bit of my sanity. The voice connection there just could as well not exist.”
Aniik nodded as she ate a bit of her lunch. After she finished chewing, she asked: “You had one from a world almost outside of the system?”
Init ate more noodles, then responded: “Yeah, still in integration, but his software went ass over beak and randomly added things to the integration that should have long been deprecated. So, a difficult issue, but the person is in the absolute ass-end of stellargraphy! Because of fucking course he is.”
Aniik sympathised easily: “I had someone like that recently as well for a clusterfuck of a case. The world wasn’t even in the system yet. And I had to kick the logging software so accept a name without a last name every fucking time I interacted with him because of course the developpers never thought of that case that is super common for just about every species out there.”
Init groaned: “Yeah, same!”
Aniik wondered: “You know, it would be hilarious if this was the same person.”
Init chuckled: “For us: Yes, for them: Well, they are having issues!”
TEKI
Teki spent the first hours after the second integration swimming in the sea. He noticed that when he swam too far away from his pod, he felt a strong urge to return and a message appeared in his mind:
Temporary restriction
Due to the uncertain nature of your character, we have restricted your roaming currently to the area of the repository Village-of-the-gathering-shore.
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He didn’t pay them any mind, being too happy to be allowed space to roam. Even if he technically had replaced a prison he could barely stretch in for a bigger one, he was exuberant. He felt finally unleashed from chains of the situation as well as the Company. He frolicked for hours until he calmed down and returned to his pod to at least pretend to work. Just as he entered, he received another message:
Quest received: The weakest village
The village of your repository is level 4. It is the last village of that rank on the planet Tsanh. Please be a significant factor in upgrading the village’s status to level 8. You can do so by teaching skills to the inhabitants and by levelling up your own skills to higher levels.
Reward: Restriction lifted
Succeeding in this quest allows you the freedom to roam as well as potentially to register to a different repository or create one for a new settlement – for example on another world.
Teki looked confused: “So, you want me to teach a village that is lagging behind? Interesting… Can you tell me where the village is located, System?”
After receiving no response, Teki nodded and looked around. Then, he swam to the shore.
CVETKA KRALJ
She felt the skill slip out of her grasp as Rush checked his messages. Making it look accidental, she touched him again and once again he looked confused for a moment. “What have you done?” he shouted at her.
Cvetka looked at him strangely: “I have used Yanigalean Resistance. I can’t like, not use it when I touch someone who is under an influence.”
He looked confused: “What is that?”
She looked at the message history on his tablet and noticed it was almost empty, just showing a message from someone just called ‘The Grandmaster’. “‘The Grandmaster’? Is that one of your parents? And what happened to your message history?”
He shrugged: “It does that occasionally. Doesn’t any tablet occasionally do that?”
She shook her head: “This never happened to me, no. I would not be surprised if your communicator had been tampered with so it does that.”
He looked unhappy: “Tampered with? That’s quite the accusation! No one had access to the device once my parents bought it for me.”
She looked into his eyes with a serious expression: “You need to let go of the device. And potentially not communicate with the people offworld. Your parents are in various influence-based classes, right? They are doing some unholy acts with your mind!” When she saw his shocked expression, she hedged: “Probably without bad intentions, they probably just want to put you on a good path but that won’t be the path you chose and the path you can thrive in.”
He shook his head: “My parents would never do this to me.”
“I can prove to you that they did: Give me your communicator and write into the sand here my hypothesis: Your parents are using influence magic to manipulate you and they have means to remotely reset your message history, so that you don’t notice that they are doing it. I will just ask your parents if they are using influence against you. I hope that my Yanigalean Resistance will protect me against any of their tricks. And if they reset the message history, I will ask again. They have real life things to worry about. We mostly need to level up here, so we pretty much have all day.”
He looked at her concerned: “I am not sure if that is a good idea. They might get angry.”
Cvetka nodded: “They have years to manage their own emotional state again until you return. They should be able to get over it. By the way: Who is that grandmaster fellow?”
Rush blushed a bit: “My grandfather. It’s a bit of a nickname we have.”
Cvetka raised an eyebrow: “Also a user of influence, I guess?”
Rush hummed in agreement: “He is. Founded the Syntrix Corp. Basically, he’s the one in charge in our family. He was also on a planet when it was integrated.”
Cvetka smiled: “Let’s see.” She typed a message, waited for a moment and then saw a message appear, show up too short to be consciously processed and then the chat history be deleted. She used her own communicator and let it record the screen. Then, she messaged the previous contact and said that the communicator acted up so the message was not shown.
Another pause, another blinking of a message and then a complete reset. But this time, she caught the message, she read it and cussed.