Chapter 112: At the Seams
Chapter 112: At the Seams
CROWN
“Duck, did you know what Sena did before I asked?”
The question made my flippant Terminal pause, her tail rising to wiggle back and forth lightly. She looked up from what she was doing – likely poking at her own interface – and answered the question with an innocent-looking lift of her ears. “Eheheh…”
I groaned softly and flopped into my chair. “So you hid that from me? You can’t do that sort of thing, I need to work with all the information I can get.”
Duck just squinted at me at first, then hopped up to seat herself on the plush arm of the recliner, her tail swatting my chest. She looked over her shoulder at me with her ears dipping down in an annoyed scowl.
“No, actually, you don’t.” Her tone was more serious than normal, and her eyes remained narrowed at me. “The whole point of a Terminal is to process things that you don’t need to. So I may have taken it a bit farther and encouraged you to interact… but it was for your own good. You have way too much on your mind and you’re thinking in big, abstract systems. You need someone who isn’t me to ground you.”
I grunted and swatted her tail away. “What makes you think I need to be grounded? I’ve spent lifetimes – well, one full lifetime and one partial – down on the planet living as one of them.”
That just got a roll of the eyes from duck, and she shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. Sena knows how people act, like in a general sense. You mostly work on such a large scale that it’s hard for you to get a feeling on what they’re doing. When you work in lifetimes as an avatar, you’re seeing something a little too close… a more personal story.”
She hopped off the arm of the recliner and turned around to face me, hands on her hips. “Basically, you need a mortal who can understand working at scale, even if she doesn’t understand all of you. She’s not the type to be horrified that you’re making decisions that can shift the lives of millions. That’s rare among mortals.”
I rubbed at my face, dragging my fingers down my cheeks with a frustrated groan. “Duck, you don’t have to tell me minor things, but I asked you about her and you deliberately didn’t tell me something. You’re my Terminal, we’re supposed to be working together on this.”
Duck poked her tongue out. “We are working together! Look, I didn’t hide anything that would hurt you. If you want to know more details… I think it would hurt your ability to do your job. Let me handle the little things, that’s what I’m for. It’s not like I can do anything else without you clicking Yes to continue. When you’re in your proxy avatar, that’s about the only time I can do anything down there.” She opened her mouth again, then thought better of it and left it at that.
With a heavy sigh, I closed my eyes to try to clear my head. Duck had far too much personality, but it wasn’t like I could just delete her. Orpheus said she was safe, and while I’d had doubts about Orpheus at times, that was the best confirmation I’d gotten. Duck and I probably wanted the same thing, she was just infuriatingly independent about how she wanted to go about it.
“Look, boss, I’m sorry.” Again, Duck tried to clarify, but this time she let out a little sigh. “If it makes you feel better, I do have something serious to talk about. Maybe-serious I mean. I’m not sure what’s going on and I’ve been keeping an eye on it for a while, but I just don’t have enough data. I doubt you can make any sense of it either, but at least you should know what I’m working on.”
That caught my attention. I frowned, opening my eyes and giving her an odd look. “What do you mean, maybe-serious?”
She pursed her lips, then the small elf gestured, as if bringing up her own terminal. “Remember when you put in those checks to help track Reality Point losses? Kind of hacking it in until we could get a more thorough and proper audit log? Pull those up.”
Duck was all business now, and while I still had questions, I humored her for the moment and opened my screen to the log. I remembered I’d been browsing this not too long ago and gotten interrupted… by Duck, no less. I raised an eyebrow at what I saw.
“I can see you scanning through the rows. I didn’t know that was possible.” I looked up as I said that, but Duck was already deep in her own interface.
The elf-Terminal just made a noncommittal noise. “Yeah, when I want you to, you can see where I’m at. You can do the same for me, you know. It’s just kind of pointless because we can mostly see the same stuff anyway.”
I watched as the highlight settled. It was two sudden dips, nothing precipitous but each one larger than the surrounding noise of minor RP expenditures like quest-givers and the like. This is why it had been so difficult to track. Until we had proper auditing tools – supposedly coming next rank – the only filtering that could be done was pattern-based, but removing the smaller expenditures made it harder to identify what the larger ones were, since it removed the surrounding context.
“Okay, take a look here, and then here. The first was when you dropped into Chall the first time, and then the next set is when you popped into the Sisterhood. Notice how it’s actually a cluster of transactions… creation of a body, transport down, transport back. With the second being cheaper because we already had the template.”
Duck explained this to me patiently, but since I could see the data it was easy to follow. So far nothing new, but I knew she was leading up to something, so I kept my mouth shut.
As expected, she continued by scrolling further up. “Here’s the weird part. I found another blip here that matches a body creation and destruction, but no transport. I thought maybe it was just something else that resembled it, but I haven’t been able to track down what else it could be. So I started looking for smaller irregularities.”
Finally, she highlighted one in particular. “Quests have a very specific signature, and I couldn’t help but notice that one was issued Downside. We can’t see precisely where it came from, but someone gave a Quest well before you gave Dungeons any tokens.”
I sat up and frowned. “So you’re saying someone else is handing out Quests? What kind of Quests? Should we be worried?” In reality I was already worried. Irregularities were basically the first sign of an incursion, but Orpheus had insisted the barriers were holding for now… and she’d been here since all this started.
“Maybe.” Duck dismissed her own interface and shrugged. “This is all a lot of guesswork, and maybe I’m just putting a pattern into some perfectly normal blips. We’re definitely making a big profit otherwise, so the problems can’t be too bad.” She held up a finger. “Also, there may be some other explanations for it. That dungeon you had to patch the system for? She hung out with an Elder Dragon of Downside before becoming a core. So clearly some dragons associated with vaskan. Maybe one of them gave a Quest.”
The explanation made me pause and rub my chin. “Yeah… that’s a good point. The world is huge and we’re getting a lot of noise here. We have a lot of complex systems going on. But still… we should both keep an eye out for things like that. We are a tempting target.”
Duck groaned and sprawled facedown on her own chair. “Don’t remind me. I’m not looking forward to when all this starts.” She rolled so she faced me again. “Anyway, Donut. I’m really trying to help you out, and I think this will be good for you. I promise I don’t know all that much more about what’s going on down on the planet. I have guesses, and when I find something that I think is worthwhile down there, I’ll let you know.”
I laid my head back. “All right, what else do we have to do? We’ve prepped some dungeons, spread new species, started some interactions… trade is starting. It looks like the polyforms are finally interacting with the vaskans… what else?”
This time, it was Duck who sighed and flicked her ears. “Nothing.” She looked over at me again. “I’m serious, you need to do nothing. Unless a crisis pops up, you can relax and watch the RP rake in from all the stuff going on.”
I was about to protest, but she held up her hand and continued. “I know you’re worried, but think about it for a second. What would you do?”
That had the intended effect. Duck lecturing me didn’t actually have the strength of me thinking it through myself, and as she’d said, I had to do most of the actual work. She’d been a big help, but the end decisions were mine, so I’d been running myself ragged doing them.
Except… at the moment I didn’t have anything I could do that would be an informed decision. I’d set so many things in motion that needed time to mature that I wasn’t sure where the holes that needed to be patched were going to crop up. I would need another cycle or two, at least, before I could make a clear decision.
Previously I would have just accelerated the timeline, but I’d stupidly made a deal to stop in with Sena every year.
“I suppose I’ll just skip from meeting to meeting with Sena…” I mused aloud.
That got Duck’s attention. She perked up and waved her tail to get me to look her way. “Actually, I think you should speed things up only a little and see what goes on. I was a little greedy and I wanted a mortal viewpoint as well. Sena is serious and secretive enough she can give you that perspective, if you really need it. She’s already helped you out twice.”
I grunted. “Yeah, I suppose. I still owe her another favor, but I’m not sure what to do. I can’t even offer her godhood, the Downside belief system won’t support it.”
“You think we should have added ghosts? Ghosts would have been interesting…” Duck muttered, rolling onto her back as she sprawled and vaguely watched a volcanic eruption.
That got a snort from me. “You know I don’t like the undead, but maybe I should have. If you want a project for the next few years, see if you can tweak the Entropic and Vital mana colors to get something that might work, and we’ll consider it.”
I turned back to my interface and grumbled to myself about what I saw.
I could have really used another thousand years of prep time.