Surely, one of the great joys of epic fantasy was when the Council was finally convened. Sometimes, it’s the villain bringing their victims together to see their reactions as he (or she) rubs their victory in their faces. Other times, it’s the long awaited gathering of the powers that be and the guardians of old, as the next generation of heroes convinces them to band together and take a great burden onto its shoulders. Sometimes, the Council was just a ploy—the villain emerged, and betrayed everyone there, or perhaps the heroes’ hopes were dashed by recalcitrant opposition (that usually ended up having a complicated backstory of its own right). Whatever the reasons, when the Council was being called, you knew something big was about to go down.
In this case, that something was me, myself, and I. Me and a couple of my selves sat at a round table in a sumptuous room in a palace of epic proportions, dressed in shining armor or rune-inscribed robes. Andalon watched the proceedings in a mix of awe and confusion—both appropriate reactions, I think.
After some pointless, but grandiose exchanges, we agreed on what we were going to do. Each of us was going to investigate a problem of our own. I would use my body to try and get in touch with the knights. There was no telling what kinds of vital information I could get out of them. At the same time, I would also be preparing for the potential arrival of Yuta or Ichigo’s ghosts. I’d been close enough to Yuta’s corpse during the craziness in the lobby that I figured there was a good chance he’d end up in me—and, if not, there was still the matter of the ghosts from GL. The trip I’d taken to GL a little while ago seemed to have done the trick: the ghosts Andalon had gathered were nearly finished uploading. If Yuta didn’t appear to me, they certainly would. To that end, I would also be preparing to deal with them and whatever revelations they might bring. Finally, I would also be checking up on Lantor. Part of me wanted to let it ripen a little longer before I took another peek inside, but I managed to convince myself that the fungus’ attempts at breaking through had gotten so severe that it would be foolish to lower my guard on any front, physical or mental.
Because I’d been the me who’d been pushing for checking up on Lantor, it only made sense that I would also be the me who went and did it—which was exactly what happened. This was the reason why I now stood back in my Main Menu staring up at the ever-shifting, size-changing grid of translucent orange cubes floating over the sphere of soul-crystals. The view was currently zoomed in on the cube corresponding to Lantor, though not to the point that I couldn’t see the rest of my Main Menu.
I was gonna need a lot more room for what I had planned.
Picturing what I wanted in my head, I raised my arms. The dome of sky overhead expanded, lifting upward as it grew. The space within my Main Menu stretched into an endless expanse. The water-slicked stone floor continued in every direction, polished to a mirror sheen. The sky overhead thickened, stirring with storms and cirrus clouds until it settled into a perfect afternoon.
Time in the Thin World could pass differently from the way it did out in the Thick World. This had been an important part of my reasoning for what I’d done with Lantor after having escaped from it with Kreston and Andalon. Because I was indecisive and impatient, I’d subcontracted a good deal of Lantor’s world-building to the procedural generation tool that Greg had made for Wyrmsoft 2.0. The portion of Lantor the Incursion had claimed belonged to the procedurally generated part of the world. Assuming there was some kind of intelligence (singular, or plural) behind the Incursion—whether it was the fungus’, or something else—I figured it could have changed the rules in its portion of Lantor however it wanted—except, it hadn’t. It seemed to be perfectly content with letting the RPG mechanics have free reign. But that still didn’t tell me why it was content to keep things the way they were. Was it capable of changing things, but uninterested in doing so? Or was it incapable of doing so? Maybe it was so alien and otherworldly that the very concept eluded it.
Hopefully, I’d soon find out.
“What’cha gonna do, Mr. Genneth?” Andalon asked.
“When I walled off Lantor, remember, I was thinking that, since the Incursion is occupying a procedurally generated part of my world, maybe if I let it have some time to itself, it would use the wyrmware to make Lantor more like itself.”
“So… are you gonna go inside again?” she asked.
I glanced down at her. “Not this time,” I said.
“Why not?”
While I’d been dealing with Letty and the others, I’d had some doppelgenneths look into what had happened on our trip to Lantor. Those investigations had come to an end, of course, when I’d linked up with the greater &alon and been infused with her power. Due to Thick World-Thin World time differentials, from my doppelgenneths’ perspectives, that had happened several days ago, and things had been all jumbled up ever since. Fortunately, they’d still been able to reach several conclusions, the most important of which was that, surprise surprise, Greg’s wyrmware was at least partially to blame.
Greg had engineered the system’s mechanics to distinguish between things that were done by god-modding (or a consequence thereof) and things done by playing the game as it was intended. The programming treated god-modding the way games treated mods back in the real world, and, apparently, because the Incursion’s parts of Lantor had been procedurally generated, they ran on the “vanilla” version of the system.
This had been a major point of contention for the Council. We’d discovered that dealing with Lantor wasn’t going to be a simple matter of granting myself god-tier stats, items, and abilities and going to town on the Incursion. Instead, any levels, experience, items, spells, or what-have-you that I gave to my character via god-modding would be removed whenever I stepped into the Incursion’s territory, washed away by the vanilla version of Greg’s wyrmware.
Obviously, there was no chance in heck of me successfully explaining all of this to Andalon, so, instead, I answered her question like this: “Well, I learned that going inside Lantor the way we did before probably isn’t the best approach. So, instead, I’m going to take a peek at it from outside the file. Basically,” I added, “my idea is that, if you ignore all the supernatural craziness, the Incursion is pretty much just a computer virus. It’s infected Lantor’s file, infusing it with malevolent code.”
Andalon furrowed her brow. “This sounds complycated,” she said.
Ordinarily, she’d be right, but, for once, I actually knew what I was talking about. Was I good with computers? No. But, I was very, very good at recalling verbatim everything contained in the staff training videos that WeElMed required we occasionally watch—specifically, the one about cybersecurity—computer viruses, Distributed Denial of Service attacks, and all that.
As the training video liked to remind us, the number one rule for dealing with computer viruses was to avoid opening any files or selecting any links that had even the slightest chance of containing a virus. Even the world’s deadliest computer viruses were powerless to harm your devices, so long as you didn’t give them access.
In this case, “opening” the file meant entering the Incursion’s Lantorian territory. So… I wouldn’t do that. Instead, I’d handle it from the outside, using Wyrmsoft 2.0’s features to probe this virus’ secrets from the outside.
“Instead of going inside,” I explained, “we’re gonna make a little cage for the Incursion virus to run amok in. That way, it won’t be able to hurt us, and we’ll be in control the whole time.”
“Is that a good thing?” Andalon asked.
I nodded. “Yes, Andalon, that’s a very good thing.”
Best of all, because I’d read Greg’s manual for his wyrmware, I knew that Wyrmsoft 2.0 had exactly the feature I needed, a world-building analogue of that useful feature where you could preview a document on your console before you opened it.
“
The soul crystals and the world cubes dissolved into vortices of particles that spun and spun, rising higher, filling the sky like smoke off a bonfire.
Andalon went “Wow…” as she slowly stepped away from the expanding image. Her footsteps pitter-pattered on my Main Menu’s water-slicked floor.
Instead of me appearing in Lantor, or in the concept-network that I used to navigate, Lantor appeared in front of me, as it would have appeared from high, high above. The particles of light had coalesced into a grand globe. But it didn’t stop there.
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The globe kept growing. Tumorous masses swelled from its surface, until its shape had become amorphous and distorted. The world’s terrain stretched across its bulging, nodule-studded surface like a latex skin. The distortions were mottled in a crazy mix of different colors and textures, and with seemingly no rhyme or reason. Some sections seemed impossibly bright. Others were as deep with darkness as the Night itself. I could see pockets of normality here and there—sections of land where Lantor was still my Lantor—but, for the most part, they were in the minority.
“It’s a good thing you got the other yous to listen,” Andalon said, from where she stood, at my side.
Not wanting to burst her bubble, I didn’t let her know that most of the arguing on the Council had been for show. Still, she was absolutely right: it was a good thing I’d brought up Lantor.
The incursion didn’t need any more time to “ripen”. Even from within the awareness of the progeny consciousness piloting my physical body, I could feel the incursion’s presence building and intensifying. It was like an itch or ache, and I knew it didn’t belong, even though it came from a world inside my head.
“Do you know what’s happening here, Andalon?” I asked.
“I…” She shook her head nervously. “I dunno.”
I sighed. “Fair enough.”
As I looked over the misshapen globe, I stepped around it to see the other side, and then immediately stopped in my tracks.
A section of Lantor’s surface was swathed in a hazy, orange sky, exactly like the one that had nearly killed the three of us not too long ago.
“Look,” I said, pointing at it.
Andalon’s eyes widened in concern. “Is that…?”
I nodded. “I know where we’re going first,” I said. I gave that part of the world a gentle tap.
Suddenly, the misshapen globe swelled in size, growing impossibly large with incredible speed. In a moment, even the massive nodules in its surface seemed to flatten out and turn smooth as we zoomed in. The orange patch grew and grew as we descended, and in a moment, Andalon and I found ourselves in an eerily familiar scene.
A granular landscape. Rivers and oceans that were bluer than blue. Tangles of gray brambles and cables that crisscrossed the land like undergrowth on a rainforest floor, rising up in places in forms like trees, or hanging like ivy from dusty canyon walls. And all of it was pristine.
Most amazingly of all, unlike my previous encounter with whatever this was, this time, it wasn’t trying to kill me. I felt perfectly comfortable, even though I could recall with perfect accuracy the unbearable ammonia stench and the frigid, frigid cold that had made me want to curl up and fall asleep and never wake up again.
“What do we do now?” Andalon asked.
“I guess we take a look around,” I said.
I don’t know how long we spent wandering in there. It was an indescribable experience. Without the sensory overload of the poison air constantly trying to kill me, I was able to pause and take in the alien surroundings.
It felt more like a dream than anything else, only more detailed than any dream had any right to be. This landscape didn’t belong on Lantor. Sure, Greg’s procedural generator was darn good at what it did, but… this was something else, entirely. I couldn’t believe it was something it had dreamed up.
Appearance-wise, the creatures here—if that was even the right term for them—were like hybrids of insects and flowers, only made from substances that looked more like metal than anything else. Flower-like structures grew on nearly everything that moved, slowly moving left and right, like antennae seeking a signal. Creatures like sea rays flew in the air, sifting through the clouds and streams of dust—red, brown, and black.
I didn’t have the faintest idea of what it meant.
Things grew quieter as we passed deeper into a “forest”. The “plants” seemed to be sickly. They shriveled and drooped, having lost their sheen. It wasn’t long before we saw why.
The Green Death was here. It sent its fruiting bodies up through the strange creatures’ flower-antennae, and sank its mycelium into the earth. The dark, fungal forms looked like burnt coral. Puddles of black ooze sizzled and boiled, corroding the wire-roots that spanned beneath short, gleaming blades of “grass”.
As we stepped out into a clearing, Andalon let out a shriek. She stumbled backward as she called my name, kicking up dust from the grainy, wire-corded earth as she fell to the ground.
“It’s there!” she screamed, scrambling back like a crab. “It’s there!” She pushed up against the “trunk” of a “tree”, pointing in terror at what lay up ahead.
It shone with the brightness of reflected Sunlight. At first, I thought I was looking at some new kind of creature, but then I was able to distinguish the objects from their shadows, and I realized what I was looking at.
“The Scary-Shinies,” I muttered, using the name Andalon had given them.
They were here, again, much like what we’d seen last time. They seemed to be arranged end to end, like a chain of geometric lumps, only they lay stiff and straight on the landscape. Like before, I saw long furrows carved in the ground behind them. Smoke—here orange, there see-through, elsewhere, impossibly blue—wafted up from the sides of the objects, and from the furrows behind them. The smoke rose up over the tree line, only to fall back to the ground in dark and dusty rain and snow.
Turning around—I was in no rush—I walked up to Andalon, by the base of the “tree”. I got down on my knees and reached toward her, and she threw herself at me, wrapping her arms around me in a tight hug.
I ran my hands through her blue, blue hair. “It’s alright, Andalon, it’s alright. This is just a picture,” I explained.
She looked up at me, confused. “What?”
“We’re not inside Lantor. We’re just seeing what it looks like on the inside. Nothing here can hurt you. Look,” I said, “I can’t even touch it.”
To demonstrate, I ran my hands through a nearby fungus-riddled patch of brambles that hung from the trunk of a tree like an evil orchid, only to gasp in shock.
Andalon screamed in terror, but I motioned at her to calm down.
“It’s alright,” I said, “I’m fine. It’s just…” I stepped back. “Well, take a look for yourself.”
There, beneath the shriveled, infected brambles was what I could only call a corpse. I recognized it as one of the “praying mantises” I’d seen fighting the hummingbird people on my last visit to Lantor. The reason I compared it to a praying mantis was mostly because of its body plan: an “abdomen” with a headed torso rising up from it. Its abdomen was slender, and bore an uncanny resemblance to a cluster of nerves in a ganglion. Its body seemed to be made of the cords of “wire” I’d seen on the ground and everywhere else, and on close inspection, I could see tiny amounts of fluid suspended within them, like the bubble of a level.
The creature seemed to have eight limbs, four on its abdomen, and four on the torso that rose above it.
Four legs. Four arms.
The head was exquisite: flower-like, like trumpet lily, with rods in the middle of it, like stamens and pistils.
Tragically, the creature’s body had been ravaged by the Green Death. I couldn’t tell what color it should have been, only that whatever life it had had, the fungus had sucked it out of it. Many of the bundles of cables and threads that made up its body were tainted , inky and black, melting open from within in the strangest kinds of ulcers I’d ever seen. The fungus in it was spreading across the ground, and had already begun rising up the trunk of a nearby “tree”.
Andalon looked at it with fearful eyes. She tensed up as I lowered to touch it, her eyes bulging as my fingers made contact with the corpse, only to slowly begin to relax as my hand phased through it.
Hesitantly at first, Andalon crawled up to the insectoid thing and waved her hand through it, staring in shock as it phased through, just like mine had.
“Do you know what this is, Andalon?” I asked. I glanced over at the Scary-Shinies in the clearing. “Or what the Scary-Shinies are?”
Part of me was hoping that, in having connected with the greater &alon’s power, the Andalon I knew had regained more of her memories, as she had on all the other occasions where the flames had come to us en masse.
Andalon stared at the corpse for a while, seeming to see through it. What she saw, I don’t know, but, after a minute or so, she looked up to me and said, “I remember something…”
She spoke in a quiet, far-off voice, as if she wasn’t entirely here. “I remember there was a fight,” she said. “A big, big fight.” Turning to me, she shook her head. “Amplersandalon didn’t know what it was about.
“What was the fight about?” I asked.
“I dunno,” she said, meekly. “It was too scary.”
“What?”
Andalon lowered her head. “I didn’t know what was happenin’, so I ran and hid. I… I still don’t know what happened. So much fighting. So many wyrmehs were so sad.”
“Was it the darkness?” I asked.
Suddenly, Andalon shot up her head and she looked me in the eyes. “No no no, it was about somethin’ else.” She trembled. “There are lotsa meanies, Mr. Genneth, but… the darkness is the worst of them all.” She glanced down at her hands. “Nobody listened to Andalon.”
“About what?” I asked. “Listened about what?”
All this information was new to me, so I wanted to get as much of it as I could.
“The darkness,” she said. “I tried to tell them, but nobody listened.” She whimpered. “They were all so mean…”
I tried to think about what it all might mean.
“Is there anything else you remember?” I asked.
“I…”
She looked down again, “I dunno.”
Well, it was better than nothing.
So: the Scary-Shinies—as we’d established before—were scary to Andalon because, somehow, they’d been part of whatever force or faction(s) had tried to harm her. Why you would want to harm a little girl who was desperately trying to fight back against the forces of Hell, I had no idea—or, maybe, I just didn’t want to know. Was there something to be gained from allying with Hell?
That was a terrifying thought.
But now, there was more. Something separate, yet possibly related.
A ‘big big fight’. That sounded like a war.
So, there was another war going on, not just the one against Hell?
“Great,” I muttered, “just great.”
“Is somethin’ wrong?” Andalon asked.
I shook my head. “It’s not your fault, Andalon. The…” I sighed, “the world is a messed up place. But,” I nodded, “thank you for telling me this. It’s scary to know that there might be another war going on, aside from the one against Hell and the fungus, but… if given the choice, I’d rather know than be stuck in ignorance. At least then, there’s a chance I might be able to do something about it.”
I glanced over my shoulder, back at the things in the clearing.
“Is there any connection between the Incursion, the Scary-Shinies, the Big Big Fight, and the Angel?” I asked. “The Shiny Guys, I mean?”
I doubted I’d ever get used to the idea of there being more than one Angel. I felt like I was reaching for straws, but I thought I might as well ask.
Andalon shook her head. “I dunno.”
“Angel,” I muttered, “what I wouldn’t give for Brand’s thoughts on all this.”
Sighing, I slapped my hand on the ground. The dusty earth rocketed away from us as we rose up over Lantor once more. Dozens of different environments loomed beneath us.
“What now?” Andalon asked.
“Now, we look at the other parts of the Incursion, to see what else we can find.”