Neophyte World Builder

Chapter 129: The World at Large

CROWN

I felt a light jab in my side.

It didn’t hurt. Here in the Sanctuary, I didn’t need to feel pain unless I wanted to, so the poke was more informative than anything else. It did yank me out of where I’d been zoomed in on another skirmish between the pillbug and the rooken.

Duck was there at my side when I looked, her ears dipped in the elf version of a frown. I just lifted an eyebrow at her wordlessly. She didn’t fall for the waiting game I was trying to play, though.

“You need to take a break,” my Terminal informed me. “Not a Proxy or anything, just stand up and walk around and take your mind off of work for a little while. Or at least do something that isn’t poking in your interface.”

I zoomed out and sighed. “Guess I am getting a little deep into it. How’s things Downside anyway?”

The elf-Terminal gave a dismissive flick with her ear and hopped onto her own chair, straddling one arm of it. “Pretty good, all things considered. Some of the polyform hives are fighting the vaskan, but others have made alliances, so it’s like… I guess as normal as you can get for monster eating humanoids and giant bugs meeting one another. A lot of communities are starting to form something resembling deity worship, finally, but they aren’t quite like anything I’ve seen before. We’ll see in a few centuries.”

My arms slid behind my head as I leaned back and considered that. “I guess I couldn’t ask for any better outcome. It’s hard to say which is better in the long run.” I made a face and grunted at myself, “Though I hate how I’ve had to think of wars as valid.”

“People will be people, and you want them to be people.” Duck snickered at her statement. “You’re just maturing past the fiction of a benevolent god. You can be benevolent and allow them their mistakes.”

I grunted again while I looked at my interface. Over 13,000 RP in there, and it would have been a lot more if not for my using Proxy Avatars so much in the last few decades. Even doing that, I’d made a tremendous amount in the last century, and it looked like next Cycle would be an even larger amount.

The scenery sped by as I casually ‘scrolled’ through my world, ignoring Duck’s warning look. I was just browsing, not actually looking for anything this time. She was right that I needed to take a break from hovering over the shoulder of everything happening.

“The problem with the last few decades being so busy…” I muttered. “Now I wonder what other amazing stories I’m missing.”

Duck chuckled at me, her tail waving a few times. “It’s like missing an episode of your favorite show, huh?” Her ears lowered as she took on a more serious tone. “You know, I tried making a Proxy to see for myself. I thought that weird unlabeled ability we got might be that. No dice.”

I could hear regret in her voice, and it suddenly hit me that she might have been living vicariously through me. I scratched at my chin thoughtfully, remembering the multiple times lately she’d nudged me into going down to the world. Either that or she just wanted alone time to muck around. Orpheus and Duck had both claimed that I was the only one who could implement actual changes, but I still had the faintest doubt. Even Orpheus admitted that my Terminal was strange.

“The thing is,” she continued, “people will always be doing amazing things, and the threshold to get us to notice them is pretty high. The world is big, you’d never be able to catch all the interesting stories going on even if you slowed down time and looked for them.”

My eyebrows lifted as she gave her little speech. “Why do I get the feeling that you’re trying to teach me some kind of lesson? I’m the older of us, remember?”

Elfin ears lifted up in amusement. “I wasn’t doing that intentionally. I’m more like you… faking it until I make it. It’s just in hindsight I think it might have worked out pretty well. And it indirectly did lead to us figuring out the source of the fluctuations in RP.”

Again, I grunted. I was doing that a lot lately. The temptation to look in on Akasha flared, but I pushed it aside. Last time I’d done that she’d gotten very annoyed with me and complained at me for years of her time. Since she didn’t ‘speed up’ like I did when I adjusted time dilation, this meant I got a storm of angry messages over chat in a sudden deluge.

Duck had thought it had been hilarious, but I’d felt distinctly uncomfortable throughout.

“Anything to report on the Chall side?” I wasn’t in the mood to talk about Akasha right at that moment, so changed the subject.

Duck got the hint and hopped off her seat, flicking her tail at me. “Now that is an interesting situation.” She spun the view of the world around and rotated it to settle on where Chall was, though she didn’t zoom in. “Chall itself is a bit more egalitarian than when you last visited. It’s still a very hierarchical society, but the lower casts have more representation in the government. I’m not sure of the details, you’d have to pop down there to see for yourself.”

She glanced over her shoulder at me. “Not right now. It can wait. Things seem pretty stable right now.”

I held up my hands in a gesture of surrender, smiling. It was a hollow smile. My last trip down there had been the goodbye to Sena, and I wasn’t ready to take on that form again so soon after that. Despite Duck’s teasing, I’d never grown close to Sena the way Akasha had to Reyth, but she was still the closest thing I’d had to a mortal friend outside of my first Incarnate Avatar.

It would be a lie to say I didn’t miss my yearly meetups with her.

Duck continued with her status report. “So that’s Chall, but the magocracy next door is a lot bigger and more powerful, and it does look like they’ve become an economic powerhouse. A lot of the less magically-inclined flee to Chall, but from I can see from way up here, they aren’t exactly encouraged to stay anyway. The way they farm the dungeon, it’s made them both powerful and wealthy.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Isn’t that dungeon scheduled to shut down in a decade or so? Could be a problem for them.”

She shrugged. “Yeah. Dungeon of Warning already did last year, but they haven’t changed their schedule or behavior. It’ll probably completely collapse their economy once they lose their main advantage, but… fuck ‘em, they’re all assholes anyway.”

That made me snort lightly. It was rare for Duck to make moral judgements like that. She usually left that to me. She must really not like this place.

“Not our business, then, if it isn’t a long term issue. Keep an eye on it I guess. So much for impartial gods.”

The elf squinted at me. “You never were one anyway, I’m just being more honest about it.”

I… shrugged, as I tried not to turn the grunting into a habit. “Fair enough. I’ll take that walk, now.”

Even though Duck had suggested I detach from ‘work’ for a while, that wasn’t actually possible. I could do other things, but running a universe was a full time job that required me to be always available. I could sleep, and sometimes did, but it wasn’t the same. I had no retirement to look forward to, just continuous work on universe after universe.

Then again, I did get effective immortality out of it.

The trips to Chall and such had been jokingly called a vacation, but had actually been working vacations and also rather short. Kenta’s original life had been harsh and focused on growing up. Only Tastka’s time felt like anything resembling a vacation, and that had still included serious work time.

Maybe it was time for me to do another Incarnate Avatar spin. For real this time.

I sighed as I reached my bedroom, flopping onto the bed with a sprawl. I knew I couldn’t do it until after the incursion surge. I didn’t trust that Orpheus would hold things as long as she believed, not after everything else had been going wrong. If the incursions started while I was in my Avatar, I wouldn’t be able to do anything until my vessel died. Duck couldn’t pull me out early, either.

Maybe Akasha could? That would require me to rely on the flighty young system, who was old enough to be an adult but seemed stuck at a playful and immature age. I wondered how Reyth put up with it, since she didn’t seem to be the kind to tolerate that sort of thing. Then again, I hadn’t expected Akasha to be stuck on the girl for so long either.

Romance, I decided, was a particularly weak point with me.

“Uggggh…” I groaned aloud and rolled over, burying my face in the pillow. Even ‘off the clock’ I couldn’t concentrate on anything but my concerns. I really needed to switch off my brain for a while. Or my mind, since I was pretty sure I didn’t actually have a brain.

Fortunately, this was easy in the Sanctuary. I started to drift off immediately, surrounded by the scent of honeydew on my pillow. A leftover from Orpheus resting in my bedroom, I lazily realized…

And just like that, sleep was gone and I snapped awake, jerking my head up sharply.

Orpheus didn’t have a scent. Few things here did. Why did I connect that scent to her?

Where had it come from?

I tentatively took another sniff. It was faint, but still lingering… which made no sense at all. Orpheus not only never had a scent, but she wasn’t anything close to human or from Earth. It certainly wouldn’t be a scent I’d recognize, if she had one. She’d probably smell like ‘corners’ or ‘addition’ or something abstract like that, from what she’d told me.

Snatching the pillow up, I rolled out of bed and lifted it high, trying to examine it. Unfortunately, my ‘Examine’ ability didn’t really work for mundane items in the Sanctuary. I had no way of analyzing why this was happening.

Calm down. Maybe there was another explanation.

I tucked the pillow to my side and stepped out of the bedroom, heading for the door out of the Sanctuary. I’d never left unassisted yet, but apparently I could. The door opened easily to show a blank grey-paneled room, about two meters deep, with another door at the end.

I wasn’t sure what I had expected.

So much for that idea. Ember couldn’t help me here. I selected ‘N’ and stepped back, slamming the door shut. Oddly, I didn’t have access to a chat interface to her, only to Orpheus, so I couldn’t call her here.

The deep sigh that escaped was resigned. I only had one option for double-checking this, and I wasn’t sure I trusted her judgement. Reluctantly, I trudged up the stairs again and into the control room.

“Duck! Smell this!”

The startled Terminal caught the pillow easily, despite the brevity of the warning, and gave me a strange look. “Uh, boss? You’re acting pretty weird.”

I glared at her.

“Fine, fine,” she sighed, tail giving a dismissive flick as she lifted the pillow up to snuffle curiously… then pause.

“Some kind of fruit?”

I rubbed my forehead.

So much for time off.