Neophyte World Builder

CROWN

The message had come through right before I’d taken Sena back.

I had no idea why Akasha said I needed to meet with her so urgently, and especially in private. The messaging system should have been able to carry anything personal or secretive just fine, especially since she controlled the local one. Maybe she didn’t trust me to accidentally send a group text or equivalent.

What was even more surprising was how I ended up materializing next to her in a Mirror location… a place where the afterlife perfectly matched the current state of the living world. They were more common in the dream realm, and very very common in the underworld, but in the afterlife they were few and far between.

“Is something wrong?” I asked immediately, looking around the small clearing next to an old road that she’d selected. A single-person home sat nearby, the domed architecture reminding me of some of the older elf tribes. The materials were more modern, but the structure was quite similar to what I’d grown up in when I was Tastka.

“Not exactly,” Akasha muttered, hands on her hips. “Come on out, Artemis!”

The immediate question I had was why she was calling out a name from Earth mythology. My mind had enough time to race to the panicked conclusion that she’d somehow had a child with Reyth… or even worse, somehow split off a terminal of her own. I was in the middle of deciding which would actually be worse when the actual reason revealed itself.

The small elf that emerged was… recognizable. It was the same form that Orpheus used, though slightly younger and smaller than I remembered. I immediately raised an eyebrow and looked at Akasha curiously. “Artemis?”

Instead of Akasha answering, Artemis did. “Akasha named me that for some reason. I am a self-aware terminal of the one you call Orpheus. I can’t say much more than that right now, I’m still getting my memories organized.”

Akasha crossed her arms. “The crafty old hag made a terminal that was inert, and split the activation into two conditions. One was that you had to be awake and able to respond—she must have guessed you might strain yourself too much. The other was tied to Fisk’s soul, so the first elf born with his soul after you were awake would feel the need to find the terminal.”

I knew the real implications right away. Even if Artemis was much more independent than the terminal I’d been left with before, she was still a terminal. She would have some kind of connection to Orpheus, at least so long as she didn’t develop a fully independent soul… and even then for some time afterward.

And that connection could be traced far more easily than the one I had with Orpheus.

My excitement ebbed as I looked at the girl again. “Why does she look like a child?” Duck was the only other self-aware terminal I’d ever interacted with, and she’d never seemed like a child. Even Akasha had appeared as a full-grown elf when she first manifested.

“I have no idea,” Akasha admitted. “This is your area of expertise, not mine. When she woke up she just manifested like that, I didn’t have anything to do with it. What do we do with her?”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose as Artemis wandered up closer, peering up at me. I was in elf form already, so she was really short to be looking up at me. The childlike expression didn’t help matters, and I had to force myself to ignore the appearance.

“This isn’t like Orpheus left herself here,” I mused. “You’re here for a reason… presumably to help us get her back or run the cluster without her. Which means I was her backup plan… or maybe you were just the only one she had a chance to lay the groundwork for. Now it makes sense why she was so quick to jump on the idea of coming with me toward the end…”

“To tie herself to a mortal soul in a way that could wake up her terminal,” Akasha finished. “Yeah it’s pretty clever. I guess I can forgive her, finally.”

Artemis blinked a few times while Akasha and I talked, then she finally spoke up. “I am still getting all my memories back, but she did think she might end up taken away. I think I’m supposed to help you with defenses if that happened.”

I turned around, facing away from Artemis, and groaned. It was unlikely that Orpheus had realized it would be over one hundred cycles before her terminal woke up. Artemis was here to help with information for a long-outdated situation. And that was assuming she managed to get her memories in order sooner rather than later.

“How is the counterattack going, anyway?” Akasha asked, her ears dipping in concern. “Is there anything I can do? Maybe Artemis can help you figure out how to strike back.”

I glanced back at the tiny elf who was staring at me. Couldn’t hurt to ask the real question.

“Since I can transfer souls between worlds, could I bridge two worlds and send inhabitants from one into another?”

Artemis blinked.

Akasha blinked.

“Is that what you’ve been trying to do?” Akasha whispered. “Is that why you put that soul on Downside? As a test subject?”

“Not entirely,” I held up my hands defensively. “I had a number of reasons for that, but this isn’t even the biggest question.”

Artemis shook her head, “You can do that, but they need to have some kind of anchor to attach to or they’ll be pushed out. You would need a firm and stabilized incursion already in progress, or perhaps just one that had so much local weight it could support their existence long enough to get a foothold. Either one is difficult, unless you want to risk pushing yourself into their world directly.”

The small elf paused a moment and glared at me. “Which is something you might try, but this time I really think you shouldn’t. It exposes every one of your worlds to whatever counter they might have, and you’d be on their home ground.”

While she spoke, I looked around for a place to sit. Akasha started to step away, but I motioned for her to stay. I needed her here.

“Right, so you know some things about incursions and doing it offensively that you can help with,” I mused. “Well, I wasn’t planning on sending anyone important right away, but I was wondering if we could make incursions that actually invaded like a physical army. Or if Orpheus even wanted us to go after her.”

Artemis just dipped her ears slightly. “You have such strange ideas. You could transport beings without free will more easily, but they still need an anchor. You need to have that and they need to be able to survive in a foreign universe, and if they’re that closely related to the universe you’re assaulting then you’re probably in the same cluster anyway. It’s something that I’ve heard of in very specific cases, but unless I’m missing that memory or it hasn’t surfaced yet, my original self never saw it happen.”

I couldn’t help but notice she referred to Orpheus as her “original self” rather than a partner or parent entity. How much self-awareness had my old boss given this terminal?

The tiny elf wasn’t done yet, her tail swaying in nervous energy. “And of course getting creatures with free will to attack is difficult. You could guide them, but the more directly you tell them what to do the less energy they create… and you’re going to need that for sustaining them in another universe. This has all been tried before, so your questions aren’t that strange.”

She stopped talking and looked upward at the iridescent sky of the afterlife. “Could we continue this in your sanctuary? I feel strangely limited here.”

“No,” I replied. “I need Akasha here before I finalize this, so it’s more convenient this way instead of trying to figure out how to get you on chat, even if Switchboard can probably do it easily.”

“I’m surprised the interface works at all without my older self here,” Artemis murmured, her ears folding down. “Orpheus was sure that she was a major component of the operation, maybe the interface itself.”

I had to shake my head at the guess. “A major component, almost assuredly… it didn’t work while she was gone. I had to replace her functionality and take over as High Administrator, a job I still haven’t found the time to do properly yet. I’m sure the other administrators are still struggling, but I need to handle my preparations here before I dive into something completely new.”

Artemis just stared at me for a long moment, then clasped her hands in front of her. “I see.”

Her lack of further reaction worried me a little, but I didn’t have time to deal with it. “What if the denizens of my universe are used to dealing with foreign constraints, and their anchor specifically applies corrections for it? Like a special subterminal to adjust for any inconsistent local laws and a natural inclination of my invading souls to adapt to strange situations? And what about physical bodies? Can they even help an incursion or is it just needless slaughter?”

“You’re asking a lot of questions that rely on things that don’t exist,” Artemis grumbled. “But I suppose that matches my memories of you. First, that would help, but if you have such a subterminal, they would need belief to sustain it… which they would need to generate from having some reason to believe it was needed in the first place. You would need to guide development very carefully, which would generate little energy and your sustainment would collapse.”

I waved a hand as if that question were irrelevant. With any luck, it would be.

“As for bodies, that is… possible,” she continued. “If you have an active incursion you can spend energy to manifest or even directly transfer, but it can be expensive. It’s much easier to simply recreate a body within a world you control or that you have permission for. This is what we did for our failed recruits when we found you and Ember. We returned them to the core seven worlds, though their damaged souls and difficulty in getting the target universe right likely caused some confusion.”

If this had been back when I started, that would have worried me. Now that I knew souls could “heal” that damage, and the desperate position they were in, I was less concerned. I gave her a gesture to continue.

Artemis tilted her head, then flicked her tail in a shrug-like motion. “If you do manage to get them there physically, and they have any sort of significant effect on the world… it would be much more effective. I think. I’m not sure if they would funnel the resulting energy directly to you or just firm up control of the universe, because no one has ever actually done it.”

“First time for everything,” I chuckled. “I’ve solved most of the problems… and I think I even know how to extend a subterminal in there. We just need a subterminal that does that normally that they’re all familiar with… and that the natives might want to welcome with open arms because it helps them fight the invaders.”

Orpheus would have understood immediately, but Artemis definitely felt younger than her. She was staring at me with a puzzled expression, her ears twitching to indicate confusion and mild but uncertain disagreement. She hadn’t figured it out yet, even with all my hints.

Akasha did, however.

My “daughter” stared at me as well, but her eyes were wide in shock. “You’re going to send a System there to adapt them… and power up the locals to fight your own heroes. Even if the other universe wins… you win because they take in the System. You’re giving them what we have in some kind of… System Incursion.”

I flicked my ears up in an enthusiastic smile.

“I think you mean… System Invasion.”