The Developer Reborn As Archmage

The empty gray void pulsed once, which was a good sign. The command had at least been acknowledged. It was already more than what she hoped.

This alone raised some questions immediately. The build version of Vainfall had included the letter ‘F’ at the beginning, which marked it as final. There should be nothing left to fix in this version. Keeping that aside, developer access was never a part of Verse Gear. She was supposed to enjoy the game, not bug-fix it.

/dev was a terminal command that was used internally in Amberlith. It didn’t make sense for Verse Research to be using the same command. They were a subsidy, but it didn’t mean they had full access to Amberlith processes, especially not one that was specific to Amberlith games.

Verse Gear, as a brain interface, had far bigger ambitions than gaming and simulation. There was no way to know why this even worked.

The void pulsed again as Darya was trying to rationalize what had just happened. It flashed a tint of blue this time. The light bounced back and gathered at a luminous blue line across the horizon.

A voice emerged inside her head. The void was speaking to her with her own thoughts. She had experienced this with the initial Verse Gear trials. The luminous line across the horizon fluctuated as it spoke. Letters flashed before her, flickering into existence out of nowhere.

Credentials verified, nstrum.

Darya didn’t have a body to wear an expression on her face, but it would’ve been utter confusion if she did. The void had called her a strange name. She remembered it from the book that she found on her bed back on the ship. The Oracle Book of something, with the painting of a woman with the signature N. Strum.

The way that was written in a single word awakened something within that she didn’t know before. She recognized the name in this form. She had used it for a long time. She remembered the day she entered it into the terminal on her first day at Amberlith when she was prompted for a username.

Why did I use a name that’s not mine?

She was Darya Altazark. That was her name—

Or was it?

She had died and been resurrected. She had endless memories of working on Vainfall. She knew everything she needed to know about the magic system. Has it always been that way? Something was wrong.

[Soul Merge Conflict: Resolve Identity]

A strange command again. She couldn’t read it this time either. It came and went, setting her at ease. If she had to guess, Verse Gear was still calibrating her with the character.

It didn’t matter. The word ‘nstrum’ had flashed right before her eyes, and she had last seen it on a painting attached to a strange book. This void beneath Vainfall had something to do with the Reverend Mother of Light that Seris told her about. Along that line, it had something to do with Dovarism as well. Everything in her life had led her here.

Led who here?

Darya Altazark.

The sense of wrongness returned. Where did the devout Dovarist princess of Karossa gain the memories of creating Vainfall? How was she so confident about what this void was? In that case, how was she even using the force quit command at all?

Something was wrong here.

[Soul Merge Conflict: Resolve Identity]

The unreadable words had flashed from the depths of her brain again. She felt the sense of wrongness lift—

Wasn’t that happening too often now?

She hadn’t been counting, but she remembered other instances of this same thing happening. It was perhaps lower than ten times, but definitely more than five.

What could Verse be fixing so often? This hasn’t happened in the trial phase. Verse Gear was the most polished piece of hardware ever. It was specially polished since it was heading towards the first human trials. Why had the princess of Karossa ended up with this faulty unit? Surely, she had enough gold to buy the best of everything. She had a luxury ship, surely, a brain interface wouldn’t have cost—

“What the hell am I thinking about?” She asked it out loud. The sense of wrongness returned, and she suddenly realized something she hadn’t even thought about since she woke up.

Who was she?

“Hm?”

These memories couldn’t be welded together. The princess of Karossa from Vainfall hadn’t worked on an Amberlith VRMMO on Earth. For the first time, she realized how wrong that was. She had almost settled into it without question, but it had always been wrong.

The missing piece was who she was as a person before she woke up in Vainfall. She couldn’t remember any of it. Every memory that she could recall of herself was of honey-skinned, hot-as-a-fashion-model Darya.

She had been Darya when her picture was taken in preschool. She had been Darya when she was trying lipstick for the first time at twelve years old. She had been Darya when she took a selfie on the day she was called for an interview at Amberlith. She had been Darya in the mirror when she brushed her teeth for the last time before her coma.

There were obvious discrepancies that she knew were wrong. She looked far better than her mean girl bullies, whose faces she had forgotten. Now she looked like she would’ve been one of them. She looked too good as a teen not to have anyone paying any attention to her. Now she looked like someone who could’ve easily claimed her crushes.

Wait a minute. How do I have a pretty girl face, but ugly girl memories?!

Her brain went into overdrive to solve this puzzle of gargantuan importance. At the end of it, she managed to boil it down to its most fundamental insight.

She was two people. From the perspective of Darya Altazark, she had lost every memory before her death. She had lost her past. From the perspective of this developer woman from Earth, she had lost her future.

What was that woman’s name?

She knew it from what she saw when the void spoke. Her credentials had been verified as ‘nstrum,’ and it meant she was this N. Strum.

“The Reverend Mother of Light was me?” She spelled it out, trying to understand what any of this meant.

Darya’s lost past had been overwritten with N. Strum’s memories. She was two people mashed into one, and Verse Gear had been correcting things ever since her resurrection.

It made some sense now. She tried to shake the image of Darya Altazark. She wanted to remember what N. Strum—this woman without a future—looked like.

The answer was like a word at the tip of her tongue. She knew her face. She had worn it for thirty years. She was pale—

[Soul Merge Conflict: Resolve Identity]

There it was again. This time, she was aware enough to remember what she was doing before it appeared. She was trying to remember N. Strum’s face. The strange line of text appeared before she could, and the sense of wrongness was lifting.

Except it was a relief like the day’s first hit of nicotine. A smoke couldn’t fix things that went wrong in the smoker’s life. The wrongness was still there. It had always been there. Verse couldn’t do anything about that. It had just been relaxing her before she started thinking too far into it.

That’s solved now. Well, what else? Ah, yes. I was fighting a seven-foot-tall druid just a while ago.

She didn’t know what to think about Darya losing her past and N. Strum losing her future. Both were topics that hurt her brain further. Vainfall was supposed to be her vacation, and here she was in a void after whacking an archmage druid with a sharp stick. Things had not gone to plan at all.

She didn’t want to think about things anymore. She wanted to know what to do next. Moving forward has been her answer to everything in life. That was how N. Strum made it to the old age of thirty without jumping off a bridge. Despite everything that went wrong in her life, she loved what she did for a living. It didn’t matter if Vainfall was a vacation or not; she had to find a way to love it now.

A pretty elf, a loyal katana warlock, and a luxury steam sail yacht made that a lot easier.

Maybe she needed more out of this second life. What could that be? She was never the one to chase materials or power. Could she settle in a small wooden house in a peaceful corner of this world? Could she watch the grass grow from there?

Not that either. She didn’t come here to be a frog in a well. She wanted more. Much more.

Alright, what do I want?

The answer didn’t come, no matter how hard she tried to think about it. Her brain was always stubborn this way. It wanted what it wanted, whether she could execute it or not. It had gotten her far enough in life.

In the absence of answers, she decided to try things that she remembered from her past. She had already used /dev. Her credentials had been verified. There was a lot here that she wanted to test.

She used another command that she usually started her day with.

[/dashboard]

Vainfall Version: 17.01.134. RLP-F User ID: nstrum [lead] Access: admin Playtime: 81,762h Contributions: 19,235 [show activity]

She noticed her access level had been revoked. Back when she was working on the VRMMO, this dashboard was refreshed for every major release. The numbers below were staggering. Eighty-one thousand hours of doing anything may as well have been a lifetime. She had been playing Vainfall for that long.

This had to mean something different, because the most she personally sank into this game was about five thousand hours. She had less than fifty hours in the version six dev build. Developing and testing features didn’t accumulate much play time. It wasn’t even her playing anything; it was automated tests.

In that case, it was even worse to imagine what could have accumulated eighty thousand test times. That had to be about a century of development, long enough for the idea of making money with games, and the entire field of computer science itself to be irrelevant in the forward march of time.

This was RLP.

She wondered if the development process was different because of it. She imagined creating a game world while plugged in through Verse Gear to this development environment. In that case, this enormous playtime could be the record of development time. It wasn’t as egregious as before.

Close to a decade of development and nineteen thousand contributions. Fair enough if the result was the holy grail of RLP. This is actually lower than I thought.

[/show activity]

redacted date | Created 3 commits in 2 sub-repositories vainfall/resource-spawn-worker - 1 commit vainfall/deepcore-registry - 1 commit | redacted date Created 1 commit in 1 main repository vainfall/NSTRUM - 1 commit

The dates were redacted, and she had made two last commits. The activity before that, with her username in capital letters, was the developer environment equivalent of a neon sign. She had to check it, and she had to have known that when she made that commit.

Maybe it’s a message from me to myself! How exciting!

[/path: vainfall/NSTRUM/]

The fluctuating blue line on the horizon shattered into blocks and lines with glowing edges. She heard her thought-voice lay it all out.

There was only one file in the NSTRUM folder, and it had a name that was impossible to miss.

Folder: vainfall/NSTRUM/

— README

Her laugh made the void around her fluctuate. She would’ve wiped tears from her eyes if she had hands.

“Oh, you had to do it this way, huh?” She muttered, trying not to giggle like a maniac again.

[/open]