Neophyte World Builder

Chapter 138: Interdimensional Warfare

CROWN

I’d done all I could to fight this war.

It turned out, I wasn’t really a good commander. I’d always been weird about delegation. True, I’d delegated the naming of things to the dragons, but that was different from delegating the operation of my world… or how it fights the invaders. That made me nervous. I could always fix a bad name, but if my magicite shell broke or something, that would be a bigger problem.

And now, sitting in my Sanctuary, watching the world go by, I was… deep in the war.

It was incredibly boring and nerve-wracking at the same time.

“So um… do we just sit here and watch while these things pop up and then get countered?” I drummed fingers on my armchair while I asked that, watching the readouts of dungeons popping up and then getting resolved. I’d managed to configure my display to show unresolved ones as red, and resolved ones as green. It gave me a sense of progress to see the green spreading.

“Not normally, no.” Orpheus answered with a bored tone of her own. “But for now, yes.”

Orpheus and Duck were, for some reason I couldn’t fathom, both dressed in a t-shirt and denim shorts. On Orpheus this looked fine… she looked more human than I did, at the time. It was interesting that after all this time, and all these memories of being different people, Orpheus was the one who showed me the greatest connection to my old life. Even Ember didn’t look much like a human any more, not that I got to see her often.

On Duck, the outfit just looked… weird.

“It just seems kind of… anticlimactic.” I scratched behind one of my ears as I watched. “After all this buildup and you practically working yourself to death – or whatever kind of exhaustion our kind can feel – it feels strange to just sit here and watch my world’s belief system do all the work.”

“It’s the wonders of automation!” Duck had sprawled herself on a small coffee table, and had a tub of never-ending popcorn set upon her belly to munch on. I was really starting to wonder if that’s all she spent her Sanctuary Points allowance on was junk food. I wasn’t sure if it was better or worse that the junk food didn’t have an effect on her body.

Though part of me was happy to see her back to her normal irreverent self. She’d been pretty locked in and serious lately, in general. A return to form was nice and stabilizing for me.

Maybe that was what she was trying to do.

Orpheus chuckled, “It makes sense, doesn’t it? You used the interface to automate some matters, and now you’ve used it, in a way, to let your world defend itself.”

“I actually wonder if this isn’t something like what Pleiades intended.” I rubbed at my head quietly. “Akasha has an identifier in the interface, and I’ve been thinking about that for a while now. I just kept putting it aside to work on the defenses. It identified her as an Avatar of a World System-Derivative. It took a while but it did have an actual name for what she is.”

“The interface will filter everything through your understanding, so…” Orpheus started to explain, but she trailed off before finishing. Frowning to herself, she considered what I’d just said.

I nodded. “Exactly. It can only do that if it understands the concept itself. If Akasha were something truly new, how could it filter at all? And why the delay? I think the interface had to figure out what Akasha was, and she was close to something it knew… which was a World System-Derivative.”

Duck rolled over to stare at me, while Orpheus just looked thoughtful for a few moments.

“What you’re saying is that Pleiades eventually planned for something like Akasha? That he intended a defense system like yours to be added in case of incursions?” The High Administrator shook her head. “I’d… like to believe it, but even if he was a genius, I don’t believe he could have planned all this out.”

I shook my head vigorously. “No. I don’t think he came up with my System, that would be… actually maybe, but I don’t want to theorize on that. My pride says I came up with this myself and it was just similar to something he’d planned. Some unfinished feature of your interface – the World System, apparently – that never got implemented but was planned. When mine showed up, it tried to map it to the nearest available thing it knew… because the World System does process things, even if I’m not sure it’s truly a thinking creature like Akasha.”

Orpheus looked at my world as it slowly turned by, another red light winking off and flaring to green as she watched. “I see. He planned a defense, but never made it… that makes more sense than leaving me with only the ability to reinforce the outside of the cluster. When you did this, it adapted. I wonder how many other half-completed functions it has?”

“Probably a lot,” Duck said in her cheery tone. She’d rolled onto her belly, tail swaying up high, and perched her chin in her palms. “Even before I split off from Donut here, he’d had thoughts about the interface existing somewhere. I’m pretty sure it isn’t a where, but something a little more complicated, but this information has to come from somewhere, right?”

“You’re thinking in terms of places and geometry native to your old universe,” Orpheus reminded gently. “Yes, it exists, but not in a ‘place’ as you think of it, and I myself am not sure ‘where’ it is. But if you are envisioning a room where this World System ‘thinks’ about things, no such thing exists.”

It made sense, but I wasn’t giving up on the idea, even if Duck was the one who first voiced it. I backed her up. “She’s right. It doesn’t have a room, I get that, but we aren’t in a room right now either, are we? This is all just a mental construct, anyway. Isn’t it? This isn’t a ‘place’ either, exactly. Maybe the World System has some kind of way to envision itself that we could one day work on it more. Otherwise what would the other clusters have to steal?”

Orpheus considered me carefully, but right then the cycle ended, and I took a look at my reserves. This was the true test of whether or not my idea was working. It was the third cycle since the incursions had started, and the first one since I’d put my old friends on the case. For the first time in a while, I took a look at my actual income and expenses summary.

That was about 250 more than the previous cycle. Things were getting busy down there.

“I think you are right,” Orpheus finally said, breaking into my thoughts. “I do believe that there is some way to manipulate the ‘World System’ directly, rather than through my own interface. I do have access to something like what you propose, but it is… incomplete. I have searched all throughout the worlds of Pleiades and aside from the more developed interface he had access to, I have yet to find anything that would be a source of how it operates.”

I rubbed my chin. It wasn’t something I knew a lot about, but it was good to see that Orpheus had at least thought to look. I didn’t have much more to offer for that at the moment. I wondered if she grieved for her old companion.

I wondered how long it had been, for her, since his disappearance.

Time could be strange here. I wasn’t even sure how long I had been active in the Sanctuary. While I did ‘sleep’ after a fashion sometimes, it was difficult to say how much I did that.

Duck had been watching both of us, and she set her popcorn bucket down to sway her tail, drawing the eye. The elf made a little clucking noise to pull Orpheus’s attention her way.

“If I made some invention that completely changed how universes were created, and I wanted to keep it away from others for some reason, I sure wouldn’t store it somewhere obvious.” She flicked an ear and looked at both of us. “Maybe you should think about how it could be stored, how it works, and where it could be.”

I chuckled, “I’m pretty sure she’s looked everywhere, Duck.” I sat back and sighed, pondering the implications of such long-term planning. The lights on my map were almost all green… no new incursions were flaring up. I didn’t dare think that this was the end, though.

“It looks as if they are retreating to consider the information they’ve gained.” Orpheus stood up, turning around to try to see more of my world. I helpfully rotated it further, since I was also looking. “They will likely try a different approach next.”

Easing to my feet, I considered the world. It had been roughly fifty years since the incursions had started… about thirty since I’d awakened my old friends to help. Fisk had done well, as far as I could tell, since the dungeons had been tackled faster and faster toward the end. I could tell he was still alive.

Similarly, a quick check on Reyth’s soul showed that the rooken it was inhabiting was still alive, though settled down. Plume was in the same settlement, so I presumed he had done his job and watched over the clueless former elf. I wondered how many lives Reyth would live before she was ready to come back to Akasha.

Maybe I’d ask her next time she died.

Away from Akasha, of course. The whole reason Reyth had chosen this method was to give the ‘young’ System time to emotionally mature more.

“Maybe we should take this time to go down and visit Fisk and Vedas?” I looked at Orpheus uncertainly, since I wasn’t clear on how large a gap we would have. I turned down the time dilation to a 1:1 rate while I awaited an answer.

I saw Duck’s ears twitch downward and winced. She could never meet her ‘friends’ in the flesh, since she couldn’t go down in person. Nothing I could do about that now, but it did make me feel bad. I wasn’t sure why she didn’t complain more.

Just as I thought that, I once again had the oddest sensation that I was forgetting something vitally important. Some stupid detail that I’d overlooked, but I knew was important. I wasn’t sure how existence as a soul could even give me a subconscious to try to kick me into remembering, but the sensation of that was only growing as time went on.

Orpheus derailed my train of thought.

“So long as Duck is up here to inform us of any new ones, that should be fine.” The High Administrator shrugged. “Sometimes they back away for cycles, other times they try immediately. It depends on how their local clusters are set up.”

Right, because time was a finicky thing across universes, let alone across clusters. Annoying.

I pulled up my interface to prepare for the trip, but already had a message to look at.

| AKASHA: Father. ​

| AKASHA: Something is going wrong. ​

| AKASHA: We need to visit Cayla. ​

| AKASHA: Come now. ​

| AKASHA: Orpheus can stay an elf if she wants.

At first I scowled at Akasha telling me what to do.

Then I realized she never told me what to do.

“Change of plans. We’re visiting a dragon.”