The System Seas

“That’s odd,” Marco had said. “I don’t know what it means by my preferred direction and future.”

“Neither do I. It sounds like a charisma-related thing, but honestly I’m stumped.” Elisa thumbed through a few notebooks, looked at a few entries, and then threw up her hands. “It sounds like it’s trying to figure out the best way to apply all that power you have pouring in but doesn’t know what you want.”

“I mean, I don’t really want anything right now. Why can’t it just keep going as it’s been?”

“Honestly, I don’t know.”

In the end, they decided to keep heading back out into the dangerous parts of the world. Marco was stronger than he had ever been, even with restrictions. The systems wouldn’t keep him hanging on to a penalty forever, even if he figured exactly nothing out and failed to learn a single thing. He could wait it out, and eventually he’d have what he wanted no matter what he did.

Somehow, though, that seemed like a waste. Putting aside that the system might reward him for learning whatever it was that it was trying to show him, he didn’t want to miss whatever it was that the system thought he should know. It seemed like the kind of thing that could be important, and he didn’t mind putting in a little extra work to figure out what it wanted to know.

The real problem was that he didn’t have the faintest idea of where to start in learning those things. Marco wasn’t stupid. Even Elisa didn’t think so. But he wasn’t a thinker. He had grown up doing things, thinking about how to do them well, but no more than that. This idea of thinking without any clear goal in mind was too much for him.

Elisa, on the other hand, had more concrete work to occupy her. She had taken the corpse’s notebook from the temple and carefully wrapped it in cloth to keep it safe, but now it was out and in use almost every time Marco looked at her. Every spare moment was used up reading it once she set herself to the task of decoding it. Jare’s offhanded gift of his nation's prior work on the project was proving useful, it seemed. He had given her half a dozen words that formed a shaky bridge into the strange system of symbols. They weren’t much, but they gave her anchor points in the stream of meaningless glyphs.

"I have ‘hunger, door, stone,’ and a few other words. Mostly scavenged from temples Jare visited. The context of the temples themselves seemed to have been helpful for the scholars."

"And you can use a few words to translate thousands? How?"

"By working very hard." Elisa shooed Marco away. "By thinking on these words and spending as much time as possible seeing what I can learn about them until my class gives me something."

She would whisper the new words aloud as she traced the marks with a fingertip. She'd write them in combinations with other unknown words, looking for any link at all between the known bits of meaning and the massive tome of unknown she kept open in her lap most of her waking minutes.

—

Days had passed this way, almost the entire time it took to get them from the main island to the border of the outer sea. During that time, her process became more and more methodical. She began sketching diagrams in conjunction with others in big branching trees of potential meaning, marking and notating as she weaved known glyphs together with arrows and question marks. “Hunger” and “stone” appeared more frequently than the other known words, which made a sort of morbid sense. It made sense that the dead temple-dweller could have obsessed over those ideas.

At night, when the fire had burned low and Marco was asleep, she was still muttering translations into the darkness, testing combinations under her breath. Each variant carried its own resonance. She swore that sometimes the air grew heavy, as if unseen ears were straining to catch her words. Once, she stopped suddenly and clutched the notebook to her chest, afraid she had spoken something better left unsaid.

Her efforts bore fruit slowly. On the first morning they spent in the outer sea, Marco found her pacing in circles around the deck, notebook in hand, her lips moving rapidly.

“What are you doing?”

“Testing syntax. If I place stone before hunger, it changes the entire construction. If hunger comes first, the phrase reads more like a command.”

Marco shook his head. “You are sure that's not nonsense? I'm serious. You've been working really hard on this.”

Elisa paused, staring into the firelight. “I… no, I'm not sure. I guess I have been working really hard on this lately.”

She started to gather her notes into an organized stack, then tucked them away into a few convenient notebooks she also stored.

"I'll sleep for a while, then look over it again. With fresh eyes. Thanks, Marco."

Later, after she was rested, Elisa showed him a page covered in rough translations. Half were crossed out, others circled with apparent certainty. The words Jare had given her had multiplied into new understanding, giving her four or five more words she was pretty certain she knew the meanings of and a variety of grammar rules she guessed, imagined, and hoped to be true.

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Elisa explained all these new developments with enthusiasm, explaining just how certain she was even if the progress hadn't been very extensive in terms of what she could now read. Marco tried to follow, but his patience gave out quickly. He faked listening as long as he could, then stopped her.

“Are you sure this is going to be helpful?” Maroc asked. “It seems like a lot of work.”

“Perhaps. But someone has to do it,” Elisa said, tucking the notebook away with a tenderness that bordered on reverence. She felt as if she were holding a key, though she had no idea yet what it might unlock. "I'm going to work on it slower after this, for sure. But I'm hoping that it's enough to help, and I think this is probably the most important thing I can be doing right now."

"Even with your new fighting skills? The whole elemental manipulation thing?"

"Oh, don't worry, I've been thinking about those too. There just hasn't been a good chance to show you yet."

That chance came later that day. Sailing had been unusually calm for most of the day, but it was only a matter of time before something found them and decided they looked like food. This had happened often enough that Marco had fought sharks, living coral, carnivorous whales, huge plankton that tried to eat the ship, and dozens of other odd terrors the ocean had dished up. That was on top of pirates, raiders, individual assassins, and all the other human threats that had come for him since he left home.

This was something different and far weirder.

"I thought it was one big monster, but now it looks like a hundred different things." Aethe stared down into the depths intently. Nobody else could see so much as a hint of danger down there yet, but her Scout's eyes were once again proving their worth. "We should see it in a few seconds, anyway. It's almost the same color as the water."

When the monster burst from the waves, the only way Marco was able to know it was a singular organism was because the system told him it was.