ADMINISTRATOR POV
I opened my eyes to see the featureless ceiling of my tiny bedroom in the Sanctuary. I lay there for a few moments, just processing the day’s events from the viewpoint of a small child. Seeing things from that perspective was limiting, but it still gave some incredible insights into how the culture was developing.
I briefly contemplated just turning the dilation back up to return to Tastka’s life, but I’d done that several times in the past few days and decided I should spend at least a few hours working on a possible solution to my problem.
I rolled out of bed and stood up with a lazy stretch, despite the fact that I still had no muscles. My tail waved behind me in a show of one of my new habits that I’d picked up since starting this incarnation. I hadn’t expected my Sanctuary body to mirror the incarnate avatar… but that was my fault. I should have looked more carefully at how it worked.
At least the body was adult, so I wasn’t running around the Sanctuary as a child. The Calen elves didn’t count age the same way humans did, so I wasn’t exactly sure how old she was, but my guess was somewhere between six and eight years old in human terms. That would have made walking around the Sanctuary difficult.
Instead, I was in what appeared to be a fit and athletic twenty-year-old body. It was a female elf, but it was still not a living body, so it wasn’t awkward at all. I still thought of myself as me, even with the memories of the little girl I was living as in my new universe.
I wondered how that worked, but I wasn’t going to pry too deeply at the moment. It would be better to analyze it after her life had run its course. The fact that I still thought of the girl as her rather than me, despite very clearly remembering her memories, was a little jarring… but it also kept me from doubting my identity.
That was probably some kind of safety feature for these avatars. After all, I hadn’t thought to check that I should have specified the sex of the avatar I was becoming. That’s how I’d ended up this way to begin with.
As I pulled up my interface, I pondered that for what was probably the thirtieth time. Even though I hadn’t been doing this job for long, the idea that I was considering a lifetime of well over a century to be a brief exploration was a little strange.
I knew my previous life had probably lasted fifty or sixty years at best—maybe a hundred if I was lucky. Then again, I didn’t know if my home universe did the whole reincarnation thing. For all I knew, I’d had hundreds of lives before the last one.
I tinkered with my project for a few minutes, but only halfheartedly, because I knew I needed more information before I could actually implement the solution… and that presumed the solution would even work. This little community that my avatar was part of would be my test bed, and I wanted to get it right.
I paused to read the notification and blinked. I felt my tail twinge and flick in mild agitation before I managed to suppress it.
Another weird quirk – despite easily keeping my thoughts separate from my avatar, I’d noticed that the elven mannerisms of expression and Tastka’s habits were replacing the small, odd habits I’d carried over from my previous life. At least, I presumed that was where my tendency to rub the bridge of my nose had come from.
Now I had a bit of a muzzle that wriggled instead, which felt natural and only seemed strange when I really thought about it.
I wasn’t particularly concerned about that. In fact, right now my biggest concern was the fact that Orpheus wanted to see me. It hadn’t been that long since I’d said farewell to her. Or it? No, it still felt weird calling Orpheus an it, even if that was technically correct.
While I pondered this, I stepped out of my bedroom into the main room. I’d been slowly making my Sanctuary more comfortable. I had seen the option to make an entryway, so there was actually a door now. It was a plain door, like one might find in any suburban household, though the frosted glass didn’t actually look out into anything. Still, the tooltip had said this was where any visitors would enter from.
Only then did I hit the approval.
It was only a few moments, which made me wonder about the interface. Was there actually some kind of computer in the background doing something? That didn’t seem reasonable to me, even if a lot of the interface features looked like they were running on a server or something. Another mystery about how all this worked.
I brushed the thought away as the door opened, revealing an inky blackness. I guessed that meant I wasn’t allowed to see into wherever Orpheus was coming from.
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She appeared a moment later, stepping through and closing the door behind her, then looked down at herself with a puzzled expression.
“I can see how you are perceiving me this time, since we’re in your Sanctuary. Is this how I first appeared before you?” she asked, raising a curious eyebrow.
I shook my head. “No, not exactly. This isn’t what I would describe as a lovely goddess or anything. This is more how I’d picture a coworker back on Earth.”
And it was. When I had first seen her, she had appeared as a gorgeous, purple-haired goddess… who also happened to be a little overly sexualized. Then she had appeared as a small fairy with similar proportions while she worked with me. Now she was still female, but very different.
I was a little surprised that she still looked like something from Earth instead of an elf or something, but she did appear to be human. The purple hair remained, but now she sported a pair of glasses, a smart white blouse, and a black skirt. She also carried a clipboard. Her proportions were quite a bit more normalized, so apparently my subconscious had stopped sexualizing her – either due to a lack of hormones or simple understanding that she wasn’t truly human. Honestly, I wasn’t sure. My subconscious continued to confuse me.
To be blunt, she looked like an office lady. That part made sense, considering she had been so precise about numbers while staying here as a fairy.
The surprise wasn’t that she looked like that, exactly… it was that she remained human while my avatar had caused my body here to change.
Orpheus nodded and didn’t comment on her own shape any further, but she paused when she looked at me.
“I sometimes have trouble with this,” she noted, “but isn’t that body a female?” Then she tapped her clipboard against her lip. “Oh… did you incarnate without setting proper parameters?”
I flicked an ear, which was a sheepish expression in elven body language. “How did you guess?”
She tsked. “It happens far more often than you’d think. You’re lucky that I’m the one who saw you like this first. I was thinking about bringing a veteran designer in, but none were free at the moment who I thought would help you. Most new Administrators have something like this happen at least once, and many of them find amusement in younger Administrators doing this sort of thing.”
I sighed mentally. Great… a bit of light hazing from other universe-creating beings. My tail dipped low and lashed in irritation. “Not to sound rude, but why are you here exactly?”
Orpheus shook her head and stepped closer. “I just wanted to check on a few things, since you are a nonstandard result.” Then she paused and reached out to tap me on the shoulder. “This isn’t a proxy body, is it? How did you end up this way, exactly?”
Back when she first worked with me, I might have been more smug about this, but now I was somewhat guarded. I answered anyway, since she could likely have just looked up the answer.
“I used an incarnate avatar, but I noticed that it specified I’d be trapped there while it could interact with the environment. Since I added the ability to dream, I used that to hijack the tether to the soul that led to the Sanctuary. I set it up to automatically send my consciousness back here when the avatar slept or was otherwise unconscious, and to automatically slow time so that I could have several hours every day here to work on whatever I wanted.”
Even if I wasn’t as thrilled to show off, I felt my face flush a bit with pride at that trick.
Orpheus didn’t look shocked, but she did raise an eyebrow and then nodded to me. “You aren’t the first to find some sort of means of working in your Sanctuary while having an incarnate avatar, but I admit, I’m a little impressed. That’s usually something Administrators attempt on their third or fourth universe, and they often have to build the world around that trick from the beginning.”
She frowned. “In fact, I used a similar trick the last time I was able to incarnate.”
That tripped me up for a moment. “You’ve built a universe yourself?” I asked. “I thought you just assigned others to do this. Did you get promoted?”
“It’s complicated,” she answered. “We really should get to the point of my visit. Your energy production has been very unstable, just like you said. Have you found a way to stabilize it to something higher than what it currently is?”
The sudden question caught me off guard again. I answered honestly.
“I’m not quite sure yet, but I think I know the reason why the elves aren’t producing. Their production keeps going down, and the only thing keeping me afloat is that the Downside population is still new and trying to carve out their place. That’s nice, but if the elves are going to be deadweight, I should fix that.”
I glanced at my interface and then dismissed it so that I could talk to Orpheus more appropriately. I had the time. “I put in plenty of challenges for them to overcome, but I think that since I put most of the population in relatively safe areas – and because they don’t grow as fast as I assumed, which is my fault – they’re just keeping to the safer zones. There’s not a lot of need to explore, so they aren’t really going into the more dangerous regions or seeing what other opportunities there are yet. I expect eventually they might, but it will be incredibly slow.
“I have a few ideas for how to address this,” I continued, “but I’m going to wait for this incarnation to age a little longer before I try anything. Probably next cycle… maybe two at the latest. I’ll test a solution, and if it works, I’ll see if I can spread it to the rest of the population.”
I paused and then asked, “Since you’re supposedly able to answer my questions more clearly, how am I doing exactly? Am I not providing enough? I remain positive.”
Orpheus looked down at her clipboard while I talked and tapped at it. When I asked the question, she looked up sharply.
“Oh, actually, you’re one of the best we’ve had recently,” she said. “Though I worry about the instability. If it’s as you say, you’ll soon go negative, and I’m sure neither of us wants that.”
She made a big gesture with the clipboard that I took to mean she was pointing toward my universe somehow. “Most new Administrators take quite a bit longer before even starting up their universes, and then they make roughly about as much as you are now. I’ve seen you create a lot more energy, so I think you have potential. Some of the veteran Administrators have even been informed of your success – and a few of the methods you’ve used to get it – and are very intrigued.
“You have a nickname now, by the way. I know you don’t have a proper name because your universe isn’t old enough yet, but the others are calling you Crown. Most of them, anyway. One is calling you Donut, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”
I wrinkled up my snout in disgust. “Yes, I much prefer Crown. Thanks.”
Orpheus nodded, obviously not understanding the reason for my expression. The perception filter could make her look human, but now that I knew she wasn’t, I could see how her reactions were always just slightly off. But now it was my turn.
“My interface mentioned something that worried me,” I said, placing my hands on my hips.
“What happens in an external incursion?”
A Dangerous Question