Chapter 9: Tea Time

  I took a deep breath. Functionally, I knew I didn’t have to, but for some reason it still felt calming.

  Briefly, I wondered how far this modeling of my personality went. If I could still feel anxious, if I could still soothe myself with a breath… how much of me was me?

  I had a feeling that if I thought too long about that, I would give myself a headache – whatever that meant for a nonphysical body.

  “I’m going to take a small break,” I said to Orpheus. “Is there a time limit on getting this started? Should I be rushing? Maybe I should’ve spent more time studying the interface and planning this out.”

  I looked at the fairy, then around the small room. No time like the present to check out the Sanctuary tab, I supposed.

  I mentally clicked on the tab and looked over the options. At the moment, there wasn’t much… I apparently had zero Sanctuary Points, which would make it hard to do anything.

  Focusing on the Sanctuary Points, I saw that I could turn one Reality Point into one hundred Sanctuary Points. That didn’t seem too bad, and I really needed something to focus on aside from my interface.

  I tapped the option and gave myself one hundred points to see what I could do with them.

  Orpheus answered me while I was handling that. “Some choose to study the interface much longer and plan things out more carefully. In truth, your method is not right or wrong. Impulsive decisions such as what you are doing tend to be more creative in some ways."

  She floated over to my shoulder and, in a weird display, sat down upon it. She didn’t actually weigh anything. I wondered if she were more like a hologram, but I supposed it didn’t matter.

  "To answer your question, you are not on a strict timetable. Time does flow differently here, but you will be expected to make progress. You have enough time to take a short break if you would like. You could even sleep if you feel the need to do so.”

  "It would be difficult to do that without a bed, but let’s see what I can do here. I have one hundred Sanctuary Points… not sure how much that really is." I glanced at Orpheus, still sitting on my shoulder, but she just looked at me oddly.

  “The idea of Sanctuary Points is something unique to your interface,” she said. “It isn’t a particularly strange concept, but even others who have a point?based system usually have different levels of granularity.”

  She quieted and looked around the room, then back to me. “Also, many of your options will be unique to you. The only standard options that Sanctuaries have are usually related to lighting, size, and shape.”

  “That makes sense,” I granted. “How about this: I’ll look through my options and you look over what I’ve done for my world. I’m about to start it up… I guess technically it hasn’t been created yet, and it will do that when I initialize it.”

  The small fairy finally lifted from my shoulder and floated to the center of the room. “That is correct. I repeat, I cannot give suggestions.”

  “That’s fine,” I argued. “I’m not looking for suggestions. But do you think you could look it over and tell me in general what you think about the systems and creativity or anything else? I’m just looking for a rough benchmark here.”

  Orpheus was silent for a long moment, staring at me. Finally, she bobbed up and down. “There are limits to what I can tell you, but I believe I understand what you are looking for. I’m not sure that what I can tell you will be satisfactory. But while you decorate your Sanctuary, I will consider your construction.”

  I nodded as Orpheus resumed her silent, almost robotic vigil.

  I presumed the so-called “real” Orpheus was looking through her own interface. That made me wonder a few things – like how much attention she was actually paying to me – but I didn’t want to interrupt her now.

  Instead, I browsed the Sanctuary menu.

  True to what she had told me, the immediate options involved resizing, reshaping, and otherwise altering the environment of the Sanctuary room.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  I might want to be able to darken it or change the lighting at some point, but right now I wasn’t interested in that.

  Instead, I clicked the surprisingly mundane tab labeled Furniture.

  Immediately, I was confronted with a listing of… well, furniture. Coffee tables and end tables, sofa tables, and of course, numerous chairs and beds. All of it was organized in a way that made perfect sense to me.

  Which, I guess, made sense.

  They were probably pulling this from my mind and memories – or I guess the interface was. I doubted there was any real intelligence behind it. It was using my own mind to organize the menu, so of course it made sense to me.

  I shook my head. Too many tangents.

  That’s why I needed to sit down.

  That’s also why I ended up in the chairs section, selecting a few. Most of them cost about the same… it looked like mass was the main determining factor.

  One hundred points would go pretty far.

  A nice, comfortable recliner only cost me seven points. That seemed pretty reasonable. I selected it, adjusted the color to a nice dark brown leather upholstery, and clicked Purchase.

  A ghostly image of the chair appeared before me, allowing me to mentally move it where I wanted, tilt it, turn it, and otherwise adjust the positioning before I clicked the hovering Confirm button.

  It really is like a video game, I reflected.

  I flopped into the chair with a sigh. I didn’t have muscles to actually get sore, but the mere act of lounging there still passed on some sense of relief. Psychologically, it was nice to sit down.

  I kept my menu open and, for a couple more points, selected a nice, simple end table and placed it beside me – a dark walnut color to go with the leather of the chair.

  I looked through the other tabs and was surprised to see Refreshments on there.

  I didn’t feel hungry or anything, so that puzzled me a little. I also couldn’t remember what I actually ate or drank in my last life, so it was hard to consider what I might even enjoy.

  I didn’t order anything for now, though. Even though I had plenty of points left –eighty?nine, to be specific – I didn’t feel like it was a good idea to waste them on things I wouldn’t use immediately.

  Orpheus stirred and floated back, perching on the table beside me.

  “I have completed my assessment,” she intoned. “Would you like my thoughts?”

  I flopped my head back against the chair’s backrest. “Yeah, I would. But first I’m curious… why is there food and drink in the Sanctuary menu?”

  The fairy shrugged. “It is true, you cannot get hungry as you are. But many people perform the act of eating and drinking to center their thoughts.” She paused for a moment. “After referencing your species, I have also determined that food and drink cause a physical stimulus of pleasure. While you cannot feel that, you can still enjoy food and drink to some degree. The effect will be very muted without the biological reinforcement.”

  I waved my hand. “Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.”

  She tilted her head and then smiled. I hadn’t seen that in a while.

  “Once you have an Avatar, you can choose to have that Avatar include many of the same biological functions. I am allowed to advise you not to get too attached to any Avatar. They can compromise your decision?making process.”

  That brought a grimace to my face, but I nodded again. “Yeah, I get that. It would be nice to have a body again, I guess… especially if I could choose what kind. But I suppose I’d have to be very strict about not doing any real work while I was wearing it.”

  I sat up a little straighter. “Anyway, what have you got for me?”

  Orpheus folded her hands together.

  “You’ve devised an interesting system. I have seen similar closed, non?expanding systems before, but the choice to use a custom material for occlusion is a rare one. Your choice of shape is also interesting. It is far from the first to use that shape, but it is rare enough to be considered a non-standard choice.

  “You’ve also been careful to introduce variable elements into the system, which is necessary considering its otherwise limited entropy. So far, it is very efficient in design for a first world. It is very possible that this one will provide net positive energy. However, it may take serious renovation to become capable of high levels of generation.”

  She lifted a finger into the air. “Keep in mind that this is only my opinion, based upon what I have seen from others. It is still very possible that you will quickly fail and need to restart, losing most of your invested Reality Energy. It could also be possible that this is much more effective at generating Soul Energy than I realize.”

  I grunted in mild agreement. “Okay, so I haven’t stepped on a landmine yet, it sounds like.”

  I pulled up the interface again. After all I’d done, I was just shy of spending one thousand Reality Points.

  The maintenance cost was also extremely low… but not zero.

  While the magicite managed to reroute a lot of the extra energy from the sun to help push the system into a cycle, entropy appeared to be a multiuniversal law. It needed some small amount to keep things running and stable without decay.

  At this level of maintenance, I could run the world completely empty for millions of years, at least. I didn’t bother to do the actual math, but with the maintenance cost being much less than a single point per year, it would take a long time to run out of my reserves.

  My attention hovered over the Initialize button on my interface.

  I paused only long enough to look at Orpheus. “You said you’d warn me about any potential fatal mistakes. Is there any reason I shouldn’t start this up?”

  The fairy shook her head, then gave another small smile. Maybe she was attempting to be more friendly now that I’d noted her distant attitude.

  I smiled back.

  “Okay. Let’s fire it up.”

  With a mental nudge, I clicked Initialize.