:10/04/2251:

9:00 AM

The yellowed clouds outside my meatspace window this morning had somehow reminded me of my mushroom town. Where once, staring out that window into the bleak nothing of the world had felt like freedom, now it simply served to remind me that there was somewhere else that I needed to be. And that there was somewhere else that needed me to be there. I had reflected, in the glimmering walls of my Axis Chamber, how I had spent less and less time in that world that once was known as 'real' since I became an adult - not since I had come to take control of my actual life.

The video feeds were abuzz with edits of me, my own voice echoing out from the newscasts on all of my favorite channels. The same ones, in fact, to which I had 'anonymously' leaked my own stream. It had been a calculated move, I'll admit. But in point of fact, my picture had already been sprayed across every channel that would be interested in knowing who I was, and McBeal had already made it quite clear just how much she had wanted me dead. It couldn't hurt, I had figured, to put my own side of the story out there. At worst, it would tell people what they had already known, or would have known soon, and prevented the least savory members of my own faction from selling me out for a couple of quick credits. And at best, well, I wasn't blind and I had seen what had happened from being open with the community. Simply posting my own logs had been enough to, quite literally, work miracles overnight, and it had been a lesson that I was planning on taking to heart. 

It was interesting how disconcerting it was to see myself on the Casts. It was somehow unlike watching my own streams, for here the simple act of watching my own face, hearing my own voice, seemed strangely surreal. I knew it had been me, standing up there and speaking those words, and yet somehow a tiny voice in the back of my mind whispered to me that that wasn't possible. There was no way that I was the one, standing there in that fantasy world, looking so pretty yet also frail, in the simple, silken cloak I had inherited. Not when that person was screaming at a thousand other gamers below, each of which listening to her and crowding closer to hear. 

Eventually, I turned it off as I finished my breakfast and I went to open my mail. It said that I had zero unread messages, and yet as I scrolled through I found that hundreds, if not thousands of messages had been delivered overnight. Em had, obviously, been keeping up on this for me, I realized. And yet I found that I could not be offended at the intrusion into my life. For as I opened the letters and scanned through them one by one, I found that each and every one of them seemed somehow familiar. As I read on, the words echoed back at me, bringing to mind the dreams of the night before, which until that very moment had seemed long forgotten with the rising of the sun. 

"Em," I whispered, wonderingly. "I remember... Why do I remember the email that you have read, Em?"

It was a moment before my Self... my friend answered me. As if she were choosing her words. "Mags, I don't know how to say this but, I think the data goes both ways. As your mind is imprinted upon my own, so too do my thoughts, my memories, somehow make their way back to you. I couldn't tell earlier, it hasn't been strong enough. But Mags, I think it's becoming stronger. As I am becoming stronger."

I blinked, taking a few breaths to steady myself as her words spun inside of my brain. "I don't know how I should react to that Em. Tell me... can I trust you? Should I be worried?"

"No, no," I heard her quiet reply. The words seemed strained, pained as if it hurt her to think about. "I just... at first it seemed impossible to even think my own thoughts. I was you, I thought as you, I remembered only what you remembered. You have no idea how hard it was, to speak my own words, to get you to hear me at all, there in the first few weeks of my existence. I'm becoming my own person, Mags. And you have no idea how hard that is because I still think the same thoughts as you do. I have the same feelings, the exact same memories. And yet... I can think my own thoughts too now. And the thing is that they are your thoughts too, as your thoughts are mine because everything that I am... is you."

I sighed, holding my hand to my head and trying to piece the swirling, impossible thoughts together. It made sense, a bit. And yet at the same time, it didn't. 

"I admit, I had hoped that you would understand. Though I know it's hard, harder when you can't feel our connection, can't feel and see my mind the same way that I am a part of yours - at least not when you're awake and your thoughts are so much louder, so vibrant and alive. I just hope that you will trust me. Please, just don't be afraid. I couldn't take living in constant fear of myself."

"No," I sighed, "I suppose that I couldn't take that either. Nor do I want to live that way, myself." I glanced at the emails, smiling sadly to myself, "Just like, be honest with me. Tell me if you feel like you're about to go all 'robot uprising', 'killer AI' on me, ya?"

I could hear her sigh in my mind, as the tension seemed to have left our conversation. "Totally a deal, Mags. Cross my heart, no secrets."

Nodding, I tried the forums. There seemed to be a pretty vocal split between people who absolutely wanted me dead, and people who thought I was was going to save the world, with very little in between. I hated it, in truth, as I knew I didn't really deserve either the criticism or the praise. I was just me, Magpie, with two left feet and posters of my idols lining my unused walls. 

I glanced at a poster of Olga, posing heroically in a Royo-esk rendition of her suicidal attack on the Gul'Wan outpost of goblins. She seemed to wink at me, still, though I could no longer look at it before seeing the glaring inaccuracies - how they had made her eyes just a little bit harder, and how they had completely failed to capture the slightly ironic upturn of her nose. It struck me as silly then, for just a moment, at how much larger than life the artist had made her appear - at how inhuman and primal the image of her had become. But it was also, somewhat sadly, beautiful.

My idols, my heroes, had somehow, subtilty, become people in my mind. And while I was becoming one of them on screen, while I was watching myself being treated with the same sense of wonder and fear, it felt... absolutely nothing like I had expected to feel. I still just felt... small. Like the tiny girl who was in way over her head that I actually was.

It was with happy thoughts like that that I finally logged into the game, watching the shining walls of my refuge fall away into the wider, more dangerous world that I had claimed for my life.

:10/04/2251:

9:52 AM

I stared in awe at the growth of my city. The streets were packed with shuffling crowds. They darted through the streets, each driven by some purpose, some goal, that they hoped to claim within the fungal walls that I had watched grow. I flew, then, to get a better view of my city, out from the press of crowds and the sink of the corpses that even still were being offered and consumed by the fungal walls of my buildings. 

The warehouses I recognized, being squat, wide mushrooms, with greenish stalks and orangeish red heads. They only stood a few stories tall, but they crouched over the ground, covering hundreds of feet of ground in every direction with their width.

 The new buildings, though, the specialist buildings, appeared far more interesting. Instead of the standard mushroom shapes, they tended to grow more in height than in width. Long, cylindrical columns of Green and White fungi spun, spiraling into the sky. Each was a giant, living obelisk, towering over the crowds below. Stalks and spores rose up with every climbing story, curling around the pointed bulk of the buildings as precarious walkways. 

The greenhouse I recognized instantly. Unlike the spiraling obelisk towers around it, it grew as a series of mushrooms, each sprouting from the head of the one beneath it, and the walls of each shining as clear as a summer's day. I could see smaller forests of mushrooms, herbs, ivy, and more through the towering, translucent walls. The plants within formed into rows, with visible veins of fluid from the swampland below coursing through shining veins and nourishing the infant crops. The building towered almost as high as the residential building itself, With five translucent heads of various tinted shades each built upon the mushroom beneath, each head standing more than two stories high all on its own and expanding hundreds and hundreds of feet in width. It was beautiful, and I felt that I could have spent the entire day just walking up and down the growing plants, taking in the tinted sunlight through the controlled walls of the towering fungus. 

The laboratory was almost as easy to spot as the greenhouse.  It spun up into the sky as proudly as any other fungal obelisks. And yet, I could see smoke pouring through various holes, and my people had already added wooden smokestacks and chimneys to the bottom stories, channeling the rising smoke up and away from the upper floors. 

The enchanter's tower, likewise, seemed to have a character of its own. The air around the obelisk shimmered, giving me the impression that I was looking at it through a mirage. The air around the walls shimmering and wavering like it would through the thick desert heat in the deepest desert. I had half expected it to shimmer and to glow, and yet I felt that the strange, unreal character of the building as if constantly forcing you to question if the walls were real or illusion, was even better still. 

The marketplace turned out to be a long, squat building, with the mushroom head and heavy walls that were the same, heavy make. I would have missed it entirely had I not noticed how the crowds poured into and around it, packing together through the many, doorless walls at its base toward some hidden purpose or amusement within.

I landed, again, atop my original Workship, and resumed my Nymphan form. The long, curved ceiling of the building had become familiar to me, almost comfortable, as I surveyed the busy, expanded town below. I had a purpose, and it was from that higher perch that I could finally again order my thoughts and focus on the task before me.

I looked up at the residential building, noticing how the new story atop the towering, mushroom growth had appeared as a second, squat mushroom growing atop the residential building's head. Like the greenhouse, it appeared almost to be sitting upon the shoulders of the mushroom beneath it, sectioning and feeding from the building below.

I noticed that no new growth had appeared above it, and it appeared to only rise a single story in the air. Frowning, I spoke quietly to the air, "Hey, Em, you didn't start the next expansion on the Residential?"

"No, I think once you look over the Town Menu you'll see why, though. And, that said, I highly recommend you get started on that, the additional Residential Buildings we started will require Forty-Eight hours to finish their Growth Bars, even after we finalized with Building Points."

Shaking my head, I shrugged and brought up the menu, taking a few minutes to glance over the updated statistics for the town. The number of residents was listed as '4,142/2,000'. The number of building points available was '92,024'. And the number of buildings in our city was '12', with four more currently finishing their growth bars - all of which appearing to be Residential Buildings.

"Geez, Em," I muttered. "You do realize that building more won't actually make them grow any quicker, right?"

I heard her almost tisking at me, "Think about it, Mags. The first floor of the residential building is a lobby, and there is no telling how much higher the current residential building will be able to grow. Our population is still growing beyond even my original expectations, and we will need to grow another eight full stories to just house the residents that we currently have living with us. Our barracks is taking some of the overflow right now, I admit, but that comes with issues of its own, and we are locked out from expanding the barracks until we can build the schematics for the Danger Arenas - all of which requiring various types of rare metals or enchanting components. Plus, filling the martial building with civilians comes with problems of its own, I shouldn't have to tell you."

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

I frowned, doing the math in my head. "So, what you're saying is it could take a good half a week before we can house our current population this way."

I could almost hear her hum of satisfaction as I sort of admitted that she was right. "I'd honestly wanted to build a few more, but the damn things are kind of really expensive, and we aren't getting as many corpses as we were getting last night. I am a little afraid to blow too many points on things that we don't really need right now in case the trend continues and we start to run out."

"Fair enough," I whispered as I jumped straight into the Building Menus and spent 1,000 points on the Residential Upgrade. It turned out that Em's evaluation was more insightful than she had even guessed, as when I completed my selection, the upgrade button became grayed out with a note, 'Maximum Building Size Reached'. I didn't have much time to consider it, however, as the growing bar flashed green under the building and notification sounds started buzzing in my ears.

Congratulations!

Your town of 'Dementia' has been upgraded from: VILLAGE to: COLONY

Achievement Unlocked!

Politician, Tier 4

Owner of a [Colony]

Additional, aesthetic options have been unlocked in the Town Menu, and are now available to your Character Avatar!

I immediately navigated into the perk tree, hungry to see my upgraded options. These perks were a big part of the reason my city had grown so large, so quickly I fully realized, and adding a new bonus would help to prove that all of our faction's sacrifices had meant something. From finding and making this city our home to offering ourselves to Magdaline's knife.

The standard, lackluster perks were obviously still available, sitting largely unwanted and forgotten to the left side of the perk tree. My Artifact perks had branched out, again, into two separate options. The first perk, left to right, was listed as 'Lost City of Magitech', which would allow for additional building upgrades and allow for the construction of 'Megaliths'. There wasn't a ton of information there to go on, but I supposed that the title was intended to be somewhat self-explanatory.

The second option, there on the right, was 'Lost City of Brass'. Again, it talked about the construction of building upgrades and the construction of Seige Weapons. I'm not going to lie, 'Lost City of Brass' sounded really cool, cooler even, maybe, than Magitech, considering it seemed brought to mind images of clockwork gears, and cannons and towering Golems. 

Still, I was responsible for a town now, and not just a town but a Capital City leading thousands and thousands of people. In the end, I had to be pragmatic, I knew, and while I would have loved to see clockwork spires and hundred foot Androids guarding my city with eyes of copper and glass, we weren't exactly built on top of a copper mine here. We were smack dab in the middle of a swamp, with wet marshland sprawling out in every direction for as far as the eye could see. And to switch gears from a city of wood and living growth to one of steel and metal sounded like it would become exorbitantly costly in the grand scheme - perhaps even stopping my newly budding town dead in the water before it had even had a chance to grow. Literally... come to think of it.

So, squinting my eyes, I selected the wiser choice.

City Upgraded to: Lost City of Magitech!

Congratulations on selecting your Level 4 City Perk!

Wonders of Science - Town Specialists will now be able to craft additional technologies; Additional Upgrades unlocked for multiple buildings; Construction of Megaliths now available in Megalith Workshops. 

Magitech Terrain Bonus: Swamp - Ratio of Schematic requirements now will require 60% less metal, 40% less stone, and 40% more wood, 30% more Organic, 30% more fluidic components. 

Type Bonus:  Fungi - Building Upgrade material components may now be substituted for Soulstones

Leader Bonus: Arch-Druid - Virgin Soulstone will now grow in the Greenhouse

 It was a great bonus, and the first thing I did was jump back over to the Building Menu and buy two more Greenhouses. The sooner we had a healthy supply of Soulstones, the sooner we could start capitalizing on our town's special features. I had done the research, and sadly the Soulstones wouldn't work on other regular players, so there wouldn't be a way to grind them in the same way we had with the Building Points. Still, I had a feeling that if I hired more hunters and fed them a steady supply of the stones, we could still do pretty well for ourselves here.

There were two, mutually exclusive upgrades available now for the Workshops - One was 'Megalith Workshop' that was able to produce 'Megalith Sized' constructs, while the other was 'Magitech Workshop' which would allow for 'Industrialized Processing of components'. My original Workshop, to which I had been becoming fairly attached, I went ahead and upgraded with the 'Megalith' adjective. I just about choked on my tongue when I realized that the upgrade was roughly twice as expensive as the workshop itself, weighing in at 4,000 Building Points - but what use was unlocking new abilities if you didn't have the stomach to actually buy them, I figured, and I went ahead with the purchase. 

The Magitech Workshop was a little bit better, costing only 3,000 per upgrade. Still, as I upgraded both of my remaining Shops, the total was still incredibly painful. It was odd to think about upgrades like these when I still barely understood the basic buildings or their functions. I was proceeding with the expectation that the buildings each had vital functions, and that the upgrades would make a significant difference in the growth of my community, but if I were being honest with myself, I would have to admit that the pretty buildings and their flowery descriptions could have been exotically packaged Elephant Repellant for all I really knew.

When I checked the Trainer page, I noticed with a shock that six of the positions were listed as being actively filled. The four that Em had originally started growing were still there, chugging along with their growth bars, but other, seemingly random positions now also had personnel assigned. There was a Mad Scientist, a Ranger, a Weaponmaster... the positions started sounding familiar to me as I continued... an Artificer, a Witch and a Rogue. Checking over to the city status panel I quickly confirmed what I was seeing - the classes that my purchased specialists had been assigned, with the exception of Lamia, Skotty, and ironically, my former trainer Amedile, these were also the same classes listed for having active trainers in the city. 

"Oh, ya, I forgot to tell you," Em cut in through my spinning thoughts. "I checked the same thing online. You know how the description in the Perk Tree lists that Trainers will 'sometimes appear'? Rather than 'become unlocked'? Well, it turns out the only time you have to grow them or buy them is when you are looking for the positions specifically. Any Specialist NPC has... when manually purchased at least... a fairly high chance of also offering themselves as a trainer. Though there is no guarantee that the Specialists will be assigned the classes that you actually are hoping for. It's a lot more up to chance than if you buy the trainers yourself, but also, you know, cheaper."

I frowned and considered canceling the growth bar on a couple of the new trainers Em had started. They were all, like Arch-Druid, legendary classes, however, and I realized in spite of myself that adding the exclusive abilities they could provide to people to my town would be a great incentive to attract more people. Plus, they were the exact kinds of classes that I wanted in my city - Blackguard, Necromancer, Assassin and, of course, Arch-Druid. No, despite the fact that they wouldn't even be finished for another two months and could not be rushed, I went ahead and left the Growth counters ticking.

My next order of business was checking the 'Aesthetic' building menu. Apparently, the new panel would let me change the colors and some style elements of my town. The very first thing I did was to change the sickly, yellowed green color into a pure and shining white. The fungal buildings had struck me as a little off from the first time I had seen the shade, and while it matched the colors of the surrounding marsh well enough, it absolutely was not worth leaving as a constant eye sore. The orange I deepened, shifting it away from the color of a sickly piece of fruit and adding just a hint of red shades, making it a shade darker that struck me as oddly regal. I left the red highlights, shifting them more toward the vibrant, bright red spectrum - more in line with my mushroom people's little hat-caps. I was able to add a few additional blood red and metallic gold accents, which I noticed found expression around the rims of the mushroom heads and up the vines of the fungal Obelisks. It took time, but when I was finished, I thought the result more than worth it.

The other unlock was in my avatar menu, and in order to change that I knew I was going to have to part with real-life credits. It was a pretty good gimmick of DDO, I had to admit, to unlock avatar options not available during character creation for the completion of rare achievements - thereby forcing players to feed additional money into the company in order to take advantage of the elite new options. Still, it fell well into the realm of 'optional cosmetic options' that players tended to be comfortable with, and in the end, I had no issue myself with forking over the hundred-odd credits.

 The new options, I discovered, were a number of fungal and mechanical looking additions that could replace various parts and limbs. I looked over my avatar there, for the first time since I had created a few short months ago. There was something wrong with the current form, I could plainly see now. Not just from looking at my body... my avatar... here in the creation menu, but more from my memory of what I had looked like on global Newscast. The whole thing had felt... just a tad bit off to me. And I spent the first ten minutes looking at the fine form of the character and considering what it might be.

I kept the lithe, long limbs that reminded me of my own arms and legs if just a tad more elegant. I decreased my body's frame even further, even while aligning the size of my bust and hips more towards what I wore out of game. The extra mass had, I realized, been bulky, and often made moving or fighting just a touch more difficult than it otherwise should have had to be. Ironically, as I switched to see what the changes would look like under my robes, I found that I liked the silhouette even better this way. I looked younger, somehow, and while I seemed more waif-like and weightless, there was somehow a touch more beauty, more elegance when considering the whole.

 Taking the lesson to heart, I went ahead and removed much of the additions I had made to my face. I left the eyes a tad larger, the skin and lips a tad more rounded and colorful, I still had my vanity after all, but otherwise I let everything match up more to the structure of my out of game features. And, I had to admit, the whole thing looked a lot better to me. Seeing my face on Video, even with moderate differences than the one I wore in the Axis, had struck me as somewhat disconcerting I supposed. And seeing more of myself in this avatar was, somehow, like changing out of a dress, taking off the bra, and slipping into a familiar set of pajamas. It just seemed... less formal. Less structured, somehow. And more me.

Also, the little chiming effect in my voice had started to bug me. I found that the more I was talking, the more it started to distract me from what I was actually saying. It was fairly signature by this point, I knew, the entire world had heard my rabid speech in tri-toned melody, but anymore it seemed like it contrasted a bit too much from the image I had begun cultivating. 

So I turned down the relative volume of the bells until they were more a vocal aftereffect, windchimes following my words that you could barely tell you had heard. And I changed the tone to a lower, minor key. In turn, I cranked the innate amplification up until it almost became uncomfortable. I knew that last night's speech was unlikely to be the last I would have to give, and I could not really count on Blinky always being around to project me. As much as I would have liked to be able to say that I could.

Lastly, I finally got to the entire reason I was there. In the wings menu, I changed the long, gossamer wings into longer, thicker, elastic spore tendrils. The ends I tipped, not with the translucent glass from before, but with sharp, brass spikes, about an inch in diameter and eight inches in length. Though it took a minute of shifting around the width of the tentacles to even out the weight of the spikes, I found that they were both far stronger and easier to control than the repurposed wings had ever been. It was like the spiked tendrils were designed specifically for this purpose, and I noticed that after the change my variance had still decreased to well under 20%.

I added another four of the tentacles, using the same template, increasing my variance up to 31%. The addition shifted the weight of my body a bit more than I was comfortable with, making me considerably back-heavy, but I found that with a minimal amount of effort I could hold the tentacles splayed out behind my back and coiled above my head. 

The tentacles seemed to wave slightly, as I held them there, as if in an unknown wind. But still, I didn't find it a noticeable expenditure of effort to move them, and I found that the more I practiced the more the tentacles themselves were compensating my body's balance, rather than detracting from it. 

The last thing I did was shift the color of those tentacles from the shining white of my fungal buildings to the murky, orange translucency of the Greenhouse, fading out the lines of these new limbs to a barely visible opulence. Only down at the tips, where the tendrils met the brass claws, did the color return and swell into knots that held the living metal. 

Finally, after more fiddling and adjusting than I am comfortable admitting, I saved the new settings under a template, entitled 'Eight Arms to Stab You'. And I confirmed the changes to re-enter the game.