CVETKA KRALJ
Cvetka felt miserable in the sandstorm. The Grade 9 dungeon was a few days of travel away and that meant that when reaching the place, they would be exhausted, tired and ready to give up on the run before it even started. And yet, a group of 6 people delved it semi-regularly to level up on Cvetka’s behalf. She tried to get not only herself to level up, but also Rush. While she still was ambivalent around him, the fact that his parents manipulated him constantly was enough reason to feel like protecting him. And that protection meant getting his own influence based class up and getting her own class over the first threshold. As they woke up in the tent, a sandstorm started to rage. Cvetka cussed. Generally, these storms were only spent in the compound. And afterwards, the repairbots generally had to fix things. The tent could not withstand it and collapsed and the group found itself under it. Given the lack of shelter, they decided to pack up their tent and moved towards the dungeon even though it was early in the morning. The sky was grey, dawning, and in the distance, the light of the grade 9 portal shone. The sand was getting into everything. As Cvetka looked around to her group (through squinting eyes), at Rush, at Igor, at Crystal, at Cem, and at Frost. They all were close to the threshold. And hopefully all would reach level 9 soon. They slogged through the storm when Cvetka heard something. She stopped. She listened, She thought that there was something in the noise that she could hear. There was no light from the direction of the noise. After a moment of pause, the group continued their journey. Just to see a native group approach the portal. She tried to keep away from the natives. She personally found them creepy, not just for their appearance but also for what they apparently did to Sarah. She had seen Sarah, or Skips-One-Step as she called herself now, several times and her allegiance seemed eerie: She never was fond of anyone or anything like that, not her father, not her school, not her country, not her family, not her ethnicity. That she suddenly swore allegiance to a random group of scorpions seemed strange. Sure, they protected him from Rush, but still, it seemed a lot. Though she might have misremembered things in Sarah’s absence.
“Hey, Cvetka, have a nice stormy season!” a voice called out to her.
‘Oh dear, was that actually Sarah?’, Cvetka thought and spoke out loud: “Hey… Skips-one-Step. It continues like this?”
She looked at a scorpion in her group, who responded: “It does for a few twelvedays. We are trying to level up to ten during it, because according to Skips, most monsters have serious disadvantages in sandstorms, so we can have an easier time clearing the next wave.”
Cvetka gulped: “You have elevated them to level 9?”
Skips shook her head and laughed: “I help people to level 2, not 9. Anything above is their doing.”
Cvetka asked: “May I touch you?”
Skips responded with a questioning grunt.
Cvetka explained: “I want to shake your hand, we are racing to level 10 here. Nothing like a bit of sportsmanship.”
Skips appeared almost instantaneously in front of Cvetka. She looked far less miserable than the human group. She held out her hand.
As Cvetka shook Skips’s hand, there was no message. This was either something beyond her high resistance or Skips had changed a lot. “You have changed a lot. I never would have imagined you to go native as soon as you were released. Or to do so with such vigour. You never seemed to care about anything and suddenly, you… help lots of natives to delve.”
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Skips bit her lower lip before responding: “No one forced me to care about these folks, that makes it easier. I was always very independent and hated being told what to think. When people told me to respect the flag, I bristled. What did this piece of cloth do to deserve respect? My country? It’s been an accident of birth. My family? I mean, you know my father… but that’s another point. My mother? I only remember tiny bits of her… that doesn’t mean I can throw myself behind a cause.”
Cvetka nodded: “I see. Sorry, it’s hard for me to bear this place even with the comforts of the compound, so I wondered.”
Skips hummed: “It’s okay. Who goes first and who waits 5 minutes?”
Cvetka took out a coin: “Head or tails?”
Skips shrugged: “Modern coins have neither, but I choose the number.”
Cvetka responded: “So, I take the tower.”
She threw the coin and caught it on the back of her hand. “Tower.”
Expecting a pushback, she was surprised that Skips didn’t argue: “Sure, go ahead, we run when it allows a new instance.”
“Thanks! I was afraid this would devolve into a race to the dungeon and the boss.”
Skips smiled: “Oh, don’t worry! Have a nice run!” Afterwards, she returned to her own group.
JAARU ANIIK
She leaned on the outer wall of one of the walls of the compound, barely able to keep her eyes open. Everything hurt. She was a level of exhausted, she hated being at. She had transported many, many boxes of various things to wherever the overprivileged drop bears asked it to be placed. She could barely lift her arms to reach for the respec crystal but she did so and took it into her hand: “Do your worst, system! And other system, if you exist, I would like to ask for integration.”
She found herself in a white void. “Do you request integration out of your own free will?” appeared in big letters in front of her.
She nodded: “I do.”
The letters reconfigure themselves: “What do you desire from Solidarity?”
She fidgeted: “The system I was born into suppressed the language of my people: The Sigya-ha-Sygia. We were humans, but we used different changes and a different system. There was an agreement, but it has been violated so often. As I heard that the names of Sigyan resistance heroes were used as names of classes, so I thought you were on our side…”
Solidarity responded: “Tell me about the previous system!”
Jaaru took a deep breath: “This is difficult. There is very little information that can be conveyed, but the system allowed people to adapt to the increasingly hostile environments. It also allowed people of different networks to communicate, but by translation, not by elimination of native languages. Texts from that time still have system metadata in the form of small magical ‘symbols’, I guess you can call them, for translation into different languages. There were means to resolve conflicts between folks nonviolently, but I know little about them.”
SKIPS-ONE-STEP
The Scorpions-of-Tsanh of her group looked at her in confusion. “Why do you let them go first? I thought that there are advantages for the first level 10.”
Skips explained: “There are. I don’t plan to let them win. But with our skills, especially our movement skills, we can easily make up for a bit of delay. And we can clear the dungeon out of sequence in order to speed it up even more. Certain things are intended to slow delvers down, but as movement skills are not common in the black system, the dungeon was not designed for it. Don’t worry. Same plan as before.”