I had never felt such sorrow as I felt upon my father’s rejection. I ran, sobbing, all the way to my room and buried myself under my covers. I was joined momentarily by Beckah, who tried to calm me, but I screamed and threw pillows at her until she left me to my misery. She didn’t deserve the things I shouted at her, but she accepted my anger without complaint. Left alone, I cried myself to sleep.

~~~~~~~~

“Hail?” A familiar voice awoke me. I sniffled, looking up. The light coming in from the windows told me it was evening time, I had a bit of a nap. For a moment I thought perhaps it had been a dream – a nightmare, but one look at my mother told me that it had not.

“Why?” I asked her.

“Oh Hail, I wish you would have asked me before you asked him that,” she said sadly.

“Why doesn’t he want me?” I demanded. “My stats are high! Except for endurance, but I can--”

“Display Status, public,” mother said, a familiar, yet very different, box popped up between us.

Name

Analise Teoran

Level

42

Health

23940/23940

Strength

35

Mana

36540/36540

Dexterity

53

Experience

--/--

Vitality

57

Age

27

Endurance

46

Race

Human

Intelligence

87

Class

Cleric of Thedum

Wisdom

65

Job

Princess of Yuikon

Charisma

97

Traits

Royal Blood (+5 charisma, bonus to relations with factions loyal to Yuikon)

Spells

Cure Major Injury (27)

(Hidden)

Detect Poison (50)

(Hidden)

Cure Major Poison (14)

Cure Major Disease (22)

~~~~~~~~

My eyes just about bulged out of my skull when I saw mother’s numbers. I don’t think I’d ever actually seen an adult’s status before, and I couldn’t believe the difference between us.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“How?” I asked. “Did you kill monsters?”

“No. I’m a cleric, Hail. I gain experience from healing people and treating the sick and wounded. I can gain experience from monsters, but there’s really no point for me to do so when I can make just as much simply serving at the temple. But I wasn’t showing you my status to show off my level. Look at my stats.”

“They’re so high,” I said, feeling awed.

“No, they’re not,” she said, sighing. “They’re average at best, for my level and class. They only look high because nobody over level ten has ever shown you their status screen before, have they?”

I frowned, but realized she was right. “What’s special about level ten?”

“Nothing, really. It’s just that each level you gain gives you more than the last one. And your also limited by your age. Once you turn ten, your stats will almost double. At that point, maybe we can have you go out with the guards and start killing some rats or slimes or something to gain some levels, but it would be even better to wait until you turn fifteen and get the second bump--”

“I don’t want to wait seven years! My father is the greatest hero in the world and I should be his squire! It’s not fair!”

“Hail, the monsters that your father fights could kill you with a sneeze. Your father is level two hundred, and he spends his time fighting dragons and demons and monsters from the abyss. Maybe in another ten years we can get you up to level thirty and he might be interested in showing you around then, but--”

“Why hasn’t he ever come to visit before?” I asked. “Travelers can teleport anywhere that they’ve been, can’t they? That’s not a made up thing people say about them?”

Mother frowned, then sighed. “Not exactly anywhere. Anywhere with a Nexus, which means most cities and fortress towns in our kingdom. As for why he hasn’t come and visited … Hail, your father is a Traveler. He’s not from this world. He doesn’t consider this world to be reality, and so he doesn’t really see you as his child. To him, you’re just another non-player character. Just like all the rest of us Natives. The visitors, they’re not really heroes, Hail. They’re just people who can’t die in this world, so they run around doing impossible things just for fun.”

“But I am his son! He married you and he made me and--”

“Hail, my marriage to Gideon Lachlann has been annulled. He’s agreed to let the kingdom move on. That was the entire point of the parade today, it was just to lure him and his guild back into the kingdom so that we could gauge his intentions for our world. It’s clear now that he’s just like so many other Travelers who are just here to play the game. He took advantage of me, and the kingdom, for his personal prestige and used it to build his guild, but ultimately he doesn’t care about any of us. And so the king has decreed--”

“He can’t!” I protested. “He’s the greatest hero in the world, we need him to keep us safe--”

“Gideon Lachlann isn’t even in the top five-thousand players anymore,” a strange voice came from the shadows. Mother jerked in surprise as the room was lit up with motes of blue light, and from the motes formed a man.

“Lord Administrator!” she cried, and promptly knelt before the stranger.

“Please, I hate it when you natives treat us like we’re gods,” the stranger said, motioning for her to rise.

“Who are you? How did you get into my room?” I demanded, throwing a pillow at him. It passed right through.

“See? That’s better,” he said, chuckling. “Analise? Why don’t you explain to your son who and what I am?”

“Hail, this is one of the administrators,” Mother said reverently. “They are the true saviors of this world. They are the ones who opened the portal for us. And they forced order unto the darkness, restricting the strongest monsters into dungeons and lairs. Without them, our civilization surely would have--”

“That’s not exactly the true extent of it,” the administrator interrupted. He sighed. “It’s really hard for you natives to understand, but this world and the world the travelers come from are not split the way you think. It’s, well it’s hard to explain. But the reason most of the players in this world think of you as ‘not real’ is because you’re all very sophisticated artificial intelligences. Well, most of you are advanced neural nets that are tuned just beyond the tipping point of the Turing Test, intended to direct players to the real masterworks. But then, just about every NPC in the castle is a potential quest giver, which means that you’ve probably never actually met one of the drones, have you, Hail?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I complained. “Get out of my room! Guards! Guards! Intruder!”

“You want to go somewhere else for this conversation? Very well.” The administrator snapped his fingers, and suddenly instead of my bedroom, we were out on a beach. My eyes went wide at the display of power. The stranger grinned.

“How did you do that?” I asked, my tone completely different.

“Vast cosmic powers,” he explained. “Well, not really. I figured you might need some convincing so I arranged it ahead of time. It’s a few simple lines of code that brings us to the one of the coves on the Sea of Squalls, then back to our starting points. I use it a lot, actually. It’s a nice place to think, and sometimes it’s nice to remind players that yelling at me won’t get them their loot they think should have dropped or whatever other problem they have with the game currently.”

“Nothing you say makes any sense,” I complained.

“Sorry about that,” he said, grinning ruefully. “The truth is, Hail, that I’ve come to apologize. Things have rather gotten away from us, and some things have happened which will affect you greatly, but are entirely not your fault.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that your father disowning you and your mother is not your fault,” he said. “It was … well, we were hoping that it wouldn’t happen, but it has. Which is a real shame, and we’re still sorting out where things will go from here. But I just wanted to step in and tell you that you don’t have to worry. We’re not pulling the plug on you. In fact, we’re actually somewhat excited to see what you’ll do next.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Hail, your mother, your grandfather, all of the people in the castle, they don’t feel the way that you do. They have simulated emotions for dealing with player characters, but they’re only surface deep. You’re about eight-generations more advanced than they are. And it’s been a real shame that Gideon quit roleplaying in favor of raiding, because you’ve just been sitting on a shelf this whole time. The truth is we thought about repurposing you early on, but Hail Teoran being the son of Gideon Lachnlann was canon. So instead we cranked up the aye eye of those around you and hoped that Gideon would grow interested in you as you got older.”

“Why are you saying all this nonsense?” I demanded. And then I noticed that mother was simply staring vacantly at the ocean. “What’s wrong with mother?”

“Oh, she’s outside of her parameters. She doesn’t know how to act right now. Don’t worry, it’s just a glitch in her programming, she doesn’t know how to act anywhere outside of the kingdom of Yuikon. I forgot about that. See, that’s one thing about us humans, Hail. We often forget details like that until something reminds us.”

“You’re lying,” I realized. “You did it to her on purpose.”

The administrator tsked. “Did I come up with the answer too quick? Yeah, I bet that was it. Well, either way, I just wanted to have a few minutes alone with you before the fallout began, Hail. You see, legally, in the kingdom of Yuikon, you’ve just become a bastard.”

“What?” I shook my head. “That’s, no, I--”

“It’s not your fault, Gideon is just a jackass. And I think he’s going to regret it in the long run. He was a great player in the opening year of the game, which is why we gave him a few opportunities, including marrying your mother and fathering you. But he lost track of himself along the way and became obsessed with raiding and exploring new zones as they opened up. But eventually we’ll reach the point in the game where there are no more zones to explore, and the challenge will begin to come from things other than new [Dungeons] and [Lairs]. And he’s just pissed away an opportunity to be at the front of that.”

“I don’t want to be a bastard,” I complained, thinking of the few other bastards I knew. They were all looked down on and discriminated against by their families.

“Don’t worry. You’re still a royal. You’ll be removed from the official line of succession, but it was always unlikely that you’d end up on the throne that way. Anyway, the real fun will start in a few months when you turn ten.”

“I’m only eight,” I pointed out.

“Oh, right. Time in your world moves faster than it does in ours. Don’t worry too much about it, but also don’t be too surprised if any Traveler friends you make talk about taking a day off and are gone for a week, or something like that. You’ll figure it out, we made you pretty smart. Anyway, I’m going to snap my fingers now, and when you wake up, a week will have passed from today and you’ll be feeling a lot better.”

“Wait! None of what you’ve said makes any sense!” I protested, but he had already snapped his fingers.

~~~~~~~~~~~

I woke up in my bed, and a stream of memories from the last week hit me. I had been going through the motions like a ghost, without any feeling or attachment to the events. I was allowed to keep my room and my clothes, but my nurse Beckah had been dismissed, and my lessons had changed significantly. Rather than being educated for the off chance that I would somehow inherit the throne, I had spent the last week being drilled by our sergeant-at-arms.