Neophyte World Builder

Chapter 115: System Complex

CROWN

The elf girl that claimed to be the System blinked at me a few times. “Wait, really?”

I’d tried to look at her through my interface a few times now, but it kept pulling up either nothing or, after a while, question marks. I wondered if that was her doing – she did say she had been hiding – or some failure of my interface. Not to mention the chat block… which really worried me.

“I’m willing to talk about it, but first I think you should unblock my chat with Duck.” At this point I really didn’t care if Sena knew, but fortunately I’d switched to elvish. A bit rude to talk in another language in front of her, but I’d apologize later.

For her part, Sena didn’t actually seem that bothered. She lifted an eyebrow, but other than a slight frown she said nothing about it. That could mean she didn’t like it but understood… or it could mean she was going to chew me out later. I’d thought being a god would make it easier to understand mere mortals, but apparently I was still clueless.

The System shook her head, but answered in Challian. “Nope, not yet. I’m still talking to mom, because that’s the only way I can. Your inter-chat system is part of me, so that’s one thing I can control. Unless you want to disconnect it from me entirely, you’ll just have to wait a few minutes.”

Beside me, Sena frowned more deeply, glanced at me, then back at the System. “Mom? Should I be jealous? I always got the feeling he wasn’t interested in that.”

Thankfully, the System herself answered while I was still fishing for a way to explain it. “It’s not like the way you’re thinking. They’re more like brother and sister, but the two of them together created me. Father here made me, but mother sort of accidentally made me able to think like a person, I think.”

“I appreciate you clearing that up,” I grumbled. It was interesting to hear that Duck had a part in it though. This needed more investigation. Later. “I owe Sena here a story, can we handle this afterward?”

This time, Sena had an opinion and chuckled at me. “If it is allowed, then I would be happy to just witness this in place of the story. Seeing an actual embodiment of the System is… I’m not sure what to feel.”

“Hmm…” I had to stop and think about that. “If it were the System rules themselves I might be more worried, but I suppose this isn’t anything worse than what you already know. And if I were you, I’d feel disenchanted that the System and the creator of the vaskan were in a familial squabble.”

“I don’t mind,” the System chimed in. “I like Sena. Not as much as Reyth, but she’s still interesting.”

I snorted at the blurted admission. “Reyth, huh? It’s also not polite to compare directly like that.”

Just then, my interface finally managed to give me a reading on the little elf.

That was a whole lot more questions I didn’t want to deal with right now.

Instead of asking about it, I sighed. “Let’s find someplace more comfortable, at least.”

I didn’t have a place ready, but for once I wasn’t all that worried about energy costs. I copied a nice house from Chall, zoomed over to an isolated spot in the wilderness, and dropped it there. Then I just selected Sena and the System Avatar and dragged them along with me when I transported myself there.

While Sena was making startled noises, I flicked a little Lumin mana to the ceiling to light up the room, then pulled up a chair to the table in the middle of the room. It was markedly warmer here, but not uncomfortably so. “Relax, we’re not anywhere near the city. Moving around like this is kind of expensive, but I can splurge a little.”

System climbed into a chair – elves being so short, she really did look like a child compared to Sena and myself. That might be why Sena leapt to her defense so quickly. It was still weirding me out that this Avatar had so much power, but she’d seemed genuinely frightened of me, at first. Had she really thought I’d destroy her?

Though, objectively, eliminating such a wild card would only make sense.

I shook my head clear of that thought and settled in, arms resting on the table. Sena finally took a seat as well while I was musing over thoughts.

| [CHAT SYSTEM ONLINE]

It really did sound like a computer. Was that just because of how I saw my interface?

| DUCK: Well, boss, that was a little weird. What’s your opinion? | CROWN: I don’t know. I think I’ll try to be nice to her. She’s a little immature, but so far I think she means well.

A thought struck me as I sent that message, and now that everyone was seated, I looked at the System. “Actually, what kind of body do you want? Are there limitations in what you can have? Do you uh… have a preferred sex?”

I really had no idea what I was doing. I’d had three kids as Tastka, but her clan raised them communally, and it was dawning on me that Tastka had been a very… absent mother. The idea that the creator of the universe was a bad parent would have been ridiculous if I hadn’t been living it in that moment.

System shook her head. “As long as it’s linked to the System in some way, I can have any body that you’ve used as a Proxy. So just Tastka and Kenta right now.” She tilted her head, one ear lifting as a thought hit her. “I’m not sure I could be a dragon. I can touch them through the Quest part of the System, but they’re otherwise kind of murky. And I don’t really care what sex, I guess, but for my first one maybe a female Aravel? It’d be nice to be around Reyth more without people asking questions.”

I nodded slightly, and then inspiration hit. “If you’re going to show up and talk, then you need a name sooner instead of later. How does Akasha sound?”

The girl tilted her head again. “I only have a vague feeling of what that is supposed to be, but it doesn’t sound bad. It could probably work for a male, too, if I had to take that form. I think I like it.”

| DUCK: This is really weird. The System is acting like a god. A souled god. Where did the soul come from? | CROWN: That’s what I’m wondering. I know we don’t have perfect records, but I’m pretty sure we’d have noticed an entire soul vanishing. At first I thought she was another fragment of me, but it isn’t lining up. | DUCK: No, I don’t think she’s that. If she is it’s a really divergent fragment. She isn’t a Terminal though, that’s for sure. Aside from messing with our interfaces to hide things, I don’t think she can do anything outside of the world. | CROWN: Think you can get to work on designing a body for her? | DUCK: Yeah, she already forwarded the request to me. I’ll get started, but I’m a little worried about this one. | CROWN: You think we shouldn’t humor her? | DUCK: I think we should, but start asking questions about how she came to be.

Sena actually beat me to it, purely from her own curiosity. “So you’re the System, yet you have a personality? Can you… influence things? Change levels and classes?”

Since I wanted to know this as well, I kept quiet. Partially I wanted to know how much Akasha would be willing to share with a mortal, too.

The small elf flicked her tail. “I am, but it’s not like what you’re probably thinking. Most of the time the System just runs on automatic, responding to what the user does. Names are handled by the dragons both here and Upside, but you have different dragon groups – you know about Upside already, right?” Akasha waited until Sena nodded before she continued. “So, mostly I don’t do anything but watch. Sometimes there’s a minor error in the System that I fix. That’s what Sub-Terminals do for the world, generally. So I’m like one of those, but I have fragmented memories from Kenta here.”

“I’m sorry, Sub-Terminals?” Sena interrupted. I’d never gone into depth about those with her, since it seemed way too abstract for her to really care about.

Akasha twitched one ear in the affirmative. “Yeah. I’m not one but I’m a lot like one. They can only affect their domain, and my domain is the System… which is basically everywhere. But one might be in charge of regulating weather, for example, to make sure things don’t get too out of balance. Sometimes they have personalities so you get things that happen like Kassara punishing a village with drought because they abused children. And sometimes they cross domains, like Eyssa clearing bad weather because she’s watching over a traveler. Mostly the ones with personalities give Quests, though.”

I cut in at this point, seeing Sena’s confusion. “Sub-Terminals require certain conditions to exist, and your people never met those conditions. Instead they met the conditions for Spirits, which is why I used them to hand out Quests. I have to personally correct any imbalances like she mentioned myself, so Downside can sometimes be a little more strange than Upside when I miss an irregularity, but I have an assistant that helps me track them down.”

“That assistant being my mother,” Akasha added. “And um, I can affect the System rewards and things, but it’s not something I do much. I can create classes and adjust their properties, and I can give people extra attributes and class slots, but doing that is dangerous and can even kill them. You don’t want more numbers than you’ve earned, because the numbers are mostly there to show how you’ve grown.”

Sena seemed to grasp this part. “Ah. So you aren’t rewarding us for our efforts, you’re reflecting to us what we’ve done?”

“It’s more complicated than that, but basically yes,” I agreed. “There are a few exceptions and ways around it. That’s why dungeons progress people much more quickly. The properties of a dungeon allow them to bend the rules a little.”

Akasha wiggled her ears and shimmied herself in the oversized seat. “Maybe I could get a vaskan body later, but I know they’re expensive. I just like to see what living is like. And I definitely want to help against the incursion things. I haven’t felt one yet, but it sounds like they’ll really hurt.”

“I imagine so.” That comment gave me mixed feelings. I was inviting incursions that would hurt my ‘daughter’ here, but if she could feel them directly then that would make it much easier to fight them. Every time I thought more about this crazy plan of mine, I had more doubts. “Is that what you really want? To just live among people?”

That brought Akasha’s eyes to me again, her ears perked up with an innocent elven ‘smile’ at me. “Oh, not just that. For now, yeah! But I think… I think I’m supposed to do a lot more. I’m not sure how, though.”

Here, she hesitated, doubt showing in her eyes.

“I think I’m supposed to make my own world.”