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“How do you attack a divine realm?” Mark asked, as he stepped into Tartu’s workshop.
Tartu kinda froze as he stood, stooped over, hands covered in soil. A few little planters lay before him, and one of those mana crystal plants had been cut into many cuttings. He was putting the cuttings into the dirt and helping them along to become new, full plants of their own.
Tartu looked behind Mark, to Isoko, who was poking her head into the room, but not too far in. She was minimizing her exposure to the room in case she had an accident.
And then Tartu looked to the side, where Andria walked in, carrying some more plants in planters, held up by some mithril rings. Andria froze. “… Something going on?”
Tartu cast a Domain over his workspace and his hands cleaned themselves, dirt falling down onto plants that then grew a little bit before the Domain broke. “That’ll keep for a while. So! Mark.” Tartu asked, “You’re gonna have to start from the beginning on that one.”
Derek walked in, saying, “Before you do that! Malaqua says he knows about Kabberjaw and considers it a forward-facing part of the System.”
A second Derek said, “He did not elaborate.”
The first Derek said, “It’s not a danger, and it hasn’t been a danger.”
“Well I guess he did elaborate about that,” the second Derek said. “Mostly it was secretive as shit.”
“Normal behavior,” Derek said.
A whole bunch of tension suddenly bled out of Mark.
All of that tension seemed to infest Tartu and Andria, though… And upstairs, Mark noticed some vectors moving quickly. Eliot and Sally were upstairs, being talked to by David and getting pretty weirded out and worried—
Suddenly David stood next to Tartu, saying, “Reconvene in the hub. Take 20 minutes to explain everything, Mark.”
“… Okay,” Mark said, and then he got walking.
Soon, and much more relaxed, Mark was in the hub, and so was everyone else.
Mark started with, “First of all, Eliot: Can you date the land to see how old it is? And Tartu: How easy would it be to fool Eliot’s scanners into seeing stuff as a lot older than it actually is? Eliot first.”
Eliot glanced at Tartu, who glanced back at him, as Eliot said, “Quark can digest the information a lot faster than I can. But as of right now…” He glanced away, vector fluttering away, voice still present, “I’ve found old wooden chairs that I’ve carbon dated as 350 years old and Kabberjaw bone that is 20 years old, and also thousands of years old, which means that the skeleton regrows itself often… Or at least that’s what I think it means.”
Quark beep-booped, then spoke aloud, “I am seeing many things that are thousands of years old and also fresh. The most common old-age number is 8,500 years old, located in some deep caverns into some of the deeper bones out there. Would you like a breakdown of ages?”
Mark furrowed his brow. “8,500? But the age that the people here give is 7,000 years for the breaking of the System and the death of Kabberjaw, the Dragon King’s dragon?”
Tartu spoke up, “Those ages are apocryphal; we don’t know anything about the real timeline of deep history and I HIGHLY doubt these people know anything more than the rest of humanity. 7,000 years is itself a strangeness that couldn’t possibly exist because we’re already rounding off when we say 7,000. I’ve heard ‘5,000 years ago’ as the date of the separation of Earth and Daihoon, and 4,000 years as the generally accepted time when the Dragon King was around.”
Mark decided to accept that. He nodded. “So… Allof those numbers are made up?”
Tartu said, “Those numbers come from demons, so yeah. That 8,500 number seems a lot closer to possible reality than anything I ever heard before, because this place seems like it could actually bea real relic of that past.”
“Could those numbers be fake?”
“Anything is possible through magic. But since Malaqua knows about this place and considers it a forward facing part of the System, and that was your big issue, if I’m reading this right… I think we should get back to that thing you said earlier about attacking a divine realm— oooohhhh.” Tartu fell into thought. Then he looked at Mark. “Start from the top?”
Mark took a breath and started from the top, saying, “I was reading the Book of Worship, and I only got about 10 pages in, skipping around, and it was talking about realms of worship and ‘dead realms’ and ‘living realms’ and how most divine realms are cast into three types; a dead type, a living type, and a dead side with a living divinity to manage the realm. The third type is the most prevalent. That got me to thinking about how Freyala has at least two avatars, the black bald woman and the red-headed white woman, and how gods have died before…”
Mark laid out his reasoning on the potential dangers of this place, and he spoke at length about Worship as a tool of power, but soon he admitted he hadn’t studied it all that much and…
“Well… I was worried about this place being a weapon against the Two Worlds,” Mark said, feeling kinda weird to say that. “But if Malaqua knows about it, then it can’t be all that much of a risk?”
No one seemed to share Mark’s concern, which he thought fair, given all of this new information.
Isoko was calm again, no trace of platinum to her skin at all. Sally just listened, while Eliot was running tests in the background and not reacting to anything he was seeing. Derek was down to just 1 of him in the room, which meant he wasn’t all that present. Andria, Lola, and David were listening. Andria, strangely enough, was very interested, but not in a worried way. More like an ‘okay, this place is neat’, sort of way.
Derek spoke up, “Some High Inquisitors of Malaqua have told me to keep this information to myself, but that includes you, so… They know about Kabberjaw.” He added, “I’m at New Delhi, now, at Malaqua’s Grand Temple. Want me to ask anything in particular?”
Mark asked, “If someone enters the Tutorial from outside of Earth or Daihoon, like say, here, in Kabberjaw… do they get the option to return to where they entered? Or are they forced to pick Earth or Daihoon?”
Derek grinned. “I already know that one! They are forced to pick between the Two Worlds. If they started from outside the Two Worlds they’re put in the nearest habitable place on the surface of either planet that they pick.” He added, “So that means all of the people here either didn’t go through Tutorial, or they came back after having gone through Tutorial.”
Isoko said, “Anyone who goes into Tutorial leaves, then? And they have to find their own way back? Shit. That’s… tough.”
“It would explain the gradual loss of people, in a non-violent sort of way,” Derek said.
Eliot spoke up, “My basic scanners are measuring the PLs of people here and there, and I haven’t caught anything above a 20. So nothing more than Knacks, everywhere.” He added, “And I did find some ‘Skull Hall’ churches in Stronghold that have signs out front that say to bring all children in once they reach 10, to Awaken them to the Glory of Kabberjaw. So I think there’s some sort of indoctrination happening to keep people from leaving through the Tutorial.”
Sally rhetorically asked, “How would they survive in the Tutorial if they even got there? And what do they even needpower for, anyway? No monsters here. No danger at all.”
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“And the dragons take care of the big problems, if such should appear,” Eliot added.
Isoko said, “The people here could train against shadows, right? They’re not that strong, when you have a light?”
“Oh sure,” Derek said, “I put out a small light and the shadows came to me and they were panthers and goblin-sized things that clawed. I fought a lot of them off. In the actual dark they utterly annihilated me...”
Mark listened to everyone talk about what was happening out there.
None of them focused on the fact that this place was half of a divine throne of the System. Wasn’t that worrisome? Didn’t that freak them out? Strangely enough, Tartuwas the only one still focused on Mark, which was very weird for Mark.
Tartu said to Mark, “I was expecting this conversation to go a verydifferent direction.”
“… What?” Mark asked.
“When I saw the stuff about the Dragon King I was expecting you to ask about that. That’s your whole Blackvein persona for HVP, yeah. Maybe you’d even ask about how gods were born? What Worship could do to a person? How to use Worship for your own ends? That sort of thing.” Tartu added, “I expectedyou to ask how you could usethe fame you’ve gained from the Hero/Villain Program and from ousting the goblins from Krototh. That sort of thing. Fame is almost like Worship, though you do have to work it a bit to get it there.”
Mark had a surreal moment. “I can usemy fame for… for power?”
Other conversations fell away when Tartu mentioned the Dragon King and Blackvein. Now, everyone stared at Mark and Tartu.
“Not today, and not without a whole lot more work, but yeah. You could use it,” Tartu said, “If this was the Reveal and you were who you are, then you’d have already ascended to godhood. You Call well, which is great for establishing a nascent demiplane, which is incidentally why no one else can Call inside Kabberjaw’s space. This is Kabberjaw’s demiplane, after all. You even have a calling phrase ‘Death To All Monsters’. That catch phrase could be the basis of a great deal of Worship, right there, with people calling on that phrase to give themselves an adamantine edge against dangerous enemies of humanity, or some such thing.”
Mark felt floored. “… What?”
Tartu continued, “But we’d have to kill one of the gods before we could install you as one of them, taking over one of their portfolios. The New Pantheon has the whole System sewn up, as far as I know. Thrashtalon would make a pretty good murder target, but there is a downside to that. You would be taking over his portfolio, and he is the god of betrayal and evil, so that’d probably be a bad thing for you to become.” Tartu added, “But, I admit, I have no idea how godly stuff works at all, except in the most basic of ways, and you’re already rather attuned to Freyala with Union, so she probably has you marked as a backup for her, if she should ever fall.”
Mark felt weird. He asked a question he already knew the answer to, “You’re joking?”
Tartu said, “I’m kindajoking, but only because this is so serious and I’ve had this sort of conversation with Lenny and Shawn but in a much less… serious manner.” Tartu sighed, had a moment, then said, “I’m stressed as fuck and we’re underneath a lot of dragons, and now we’re talking about System stuff and gods and fame as a form of Worship…” Tartu looked around. “From the expressions here… no one here ever thought about this sort of stuff? With Mark?” Tartu rapidly added, “Mark taunted me with some of this shit in a fourth wall break for that downtown street brawl we did for HVP.”
Mark rapidly countered, “That was just me saying that I had Freyala in my corner.”
“Yeah,” Tartu said, “Exactly.”
Mark kinda pulled back. “Oh.”
Sally winced a little, like she had failed to do something she maybe should have done. “I never thought of Worship for Mark...” She asked, “Did other people think about it that way?”
Isoko suddenly realized something.
Isoko said, “I saw the talk online but I didn’t think any of those people were serious about Mark actuallyreplacing Freyala one day. That’s just too crazy, right?”
“Yes, it is crazy,” Tartu said, nodding in agreement. “Still talked about it, though.”
Eliot said, “We talked about Mark becoming a god when we all got really drunk after that one gate day, like, months ago, before the Mage Society stuff? You remember?”
“That didn’t count,” Sally said.
Isoko said, “I kinda remember that.”
Mark said, “Jokes are just jokes?”
“I guess you were outside of Mage Society back then,” Tartu mumbled... And then he laughed at his own private joke. “Talk of divinity and Worship is all over the place in high level talks of government and in the Crystal Tower and the HVP. You really never… I guess you never thought of it… Just too busy?”
Mark lapsed into silence.
Lola, David, Derek, and Andria looked on, not wanting to engage with any of that, and also not knowing how. But Lola felt good, in that moment. She grinned, looking at Mark softly. Lola thought Mark was a good choice for Freyala, if the worst should happen. Mark could see that, feel that in her vector. But Lola didn’t want to talk about it. No one wanted to talk about it.
Everyone was holding onto thoughts that were too big to hold, and so everyone had most of the same reaction; to drop those thoughts and think about something else, anything else.
Eliot said, “So I found the grav crystal and a raider hideout about 15 minutes ago. Wanna go get our crystal back?”
Mark emphatically said, “Yes.”