Chapter 26: Foundation Classes

  Orpheus stared at me like I’d just grown two heads.

  Actually… maybe that wasn’t a good comparison. For all I knew, Orpheus in her real form did have two heads. Maybe that was normal for her.

  I briefly lost myself in a tangent, wondering if Orpheus saw me as I had constructed my body… or if she, too, was viewing me through some kind of filter. For that matter, was her fairy form even a physical object she was aware of? Or was I simply interpreting her through the lens of what I expected to see?

  That line of thought started to take a darker turn when I remembered all the times Orpheus had sat on my head.

  No. No, no, no.

  I wasn’t going down that route. Even with my dulled emotions, I was certain that was a topic best left unexplored.

  The silence stretched until Orpheus broke it.

  “I must take my leave now,” she said, her tone calm but faintly distant. “I will return after I have attended to other matters that require my full attention. You should take some time to organize your sanctuary into a place of comfort. Upon reaching Rank Five, you will gain the ability to create an Avatar, and you should be prepared for that.”

  This was the first time Orpheus had explicitly mentioned when I’d be able to create an Avatar. I mentally perked up at the idea.

  To be able to feel again… to experience things properly. My current existence felt alive in its own way, but I had no heartbeat. My skin wasn’t warm. The air didn’t even have a scent. I hadn’t exactly missed those things, but now that I realized I could have them again… I was looking forward to it.

  “All right,” I said aloud. “I’ve got some work to do before I can feel comfortable with this universe. But as soon as I lay the basics down and set it running, I’ll do what I can about the sanctuary.”

  Orpheus nodded once. “If you need me, you should have an emergency message space in your interface, but try not to use it unless you are in severe trouble.”

  And then she was gone.

  No sparkle of light. No fading away. One moment she was there. The next, she simply wasn’t. My current body didn’t even blink, so it wasn’t that she vanished in a blink.

  She just… ceased to exist in the room.

  I was alone again.

  I exhaled a long breath… or at least went through the motions of doing so. I was pretty sure this place didn’t actually have air, but I’d long since given up trying to understand how that worked. It was best not to think about it.

  I had a lot of work to do.

  This time, though, I didn’t immediately open the interface and dive into my plans. I’d fallen into a cycle – one I needed to break.

  Every time, it went the same way: I’d come up with something I thought was genius, push it through, and then end up scrambling when the unexpected consequences hit. I’d move cautiously for a while, things would stabilize, and then I’d push ahead again after growing overconfident.

  Maybe if I’d still been human, my emotions and pride would have been strong enough to blind me to the pattern. But in this strange half-living state, my vision was clearer. Detached.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  It did make me wonder why I had rushed so often before. That sounded like an emotional response… but I quickly nipped that thought in the bud before it spiraled into another long tangent.

  Instead, I looked around the sanctuary… then I finally opened my interface, to a different section this time.

  My Sanctuary tab hadn’t seen much attention lately, but now I browsed through it and chose a large desk, customizing it to a pleasant walnut finish. I made it one of those old roll-top styles… very old-fashioned.

  That, in turn, made me wonder when I had died on Earth. I couldn’t remember the date. Or much of anything concrete, really. I almost wandered down another tangent, wondering about alien species in my universe and whether I could draw from their fauna… but I realized it probably didn’t work like that. If it had, I’d have noticed by now.

  So: a desk, and then a very comfortable chair.

  I hadn’t realized how small a ten-foot-square room really was until I tried to fit a large desk, a chair, and a recliner inside it. Still, I didn’t want to expand the sanctuary just yet, not until I’d done some real work. So I settled for putting the desk along the opposite wall and living with the fact that I couldn’t recline without pushing the chair under the desk.

  That was fine. For now. I could rearrange it later.

  I still had plenty of Sanctuary Points for simple furniture, and the desk and chair only cost about ten. Another couple of points got me an endless notebook, which seemed handy, though probably less so considering I already had a scratch pad in my interface.

  But I didn’t want to use that. I wanted the tactile feel of writing—of scribbling things down, erasing, and rethinking. Maybe it would help keep me from drifting.

  I settled into the chair, opened the notebook, and began to write with my final purchase: a simple pencil that never needed sharpening and never lost its eraser.

  Handy tools, to be sure.

  Even with all the ones I already had.

  It was time to do some real design work… without letting the interface fudge it for me. No more ad-hoc development. Not for something as basic and important as what I was about to build.

  Admittedly, I’d already laid the foundations within the world itself, but those had been subtle… broad strokes, unrefined. I hadn’t needed anything more at the time.

  Now I did.

  Changing the structure later might or might not cost energy, but it would certainly be disruptive to the planet. And that could be just as bad as any hit to my own reserves.

  I took a deep breath and started writing.

  First word on the page: Stats.

  Then a few quick scribbles. Strength. Endurance. Perception.

  I almost wrote Intelligence, but stopped myself.

  In my system, there wasn’t really a way to increase intelligence. That would be a misnomer.

  I continued instead: Agility. Reactions. Charisma.

  I was a little iffy on that last one, but I’d noticed that some animals could use their mana networks to influence others in subtle ways. That was probably what charisma amounted to, right?

  Even so, there weren’t many mental stats on the list.

  So I added Mana as a stat… then immediately crossed it out.

  That didn’t seem right either. Not in the same way.

  Off to the side, I wrote Health and MP, then tapped my pencil against the page before finally deciding to add Magic as a category.

  Once I figured out how I wanted to handle it, it wouldn’t be a stat like the others. It would be something that could be checked on the interface instead.

  Because that’s what I was doing, wasn’t it?

  I was making an interface for the people of my world, so they could see themselves broken down into numbers.

  It wasn’t meant to be the be-all and end-all of their potential, of course. Creativity, approach, luck… those were all unquantifiable factors. But it would serve as a simple overview: a way to show how people invested their energy, and how effective that investment would be.

  I moved on to the next heading. Class.

  Then, in parentheses, multiple ?

  Below that: Levels and Level Boosts.

  Then Skills, with a note about how mana conduits could record use and assist improvement faster than ordinary learning.

  Finally, I added Powers, Perks, and Spells.

  Only then did I realize I’d forgotten Stamina, and I squeezed it in next to Health.

  I sighed and leaned back, looking down at my notes.

  Describing it hadn’t taken long, but the scribbles on the page represented hours of back-and-forth, erasures, and revisions… and they still weren’t anywhere near done. But that was fine.

  The clock was still running, but it would be literal decades before my time ran out and the energy curve started to dip negative.

  In the meantime, I wanted to do this right. I could afford to spend a few days – or even a few months – ironing out the details.

  It wasn’t like I had anything else to do right now, right?

  The First People