Chapter 27: The First People
I set the pencil down and slid the notebook away.
I wasn’t sure exactly how long I’d been working, but I knew I’d slept for at least eight hours several times. Considering I didn’t need to sleep unless I wanted to organize my thoughts – and that only happened occasionally – I guessed I’d been at this almost continuously for several months.
The result was a dense book of notes, references, diagrams, and interlocking designs. Of late, I’d been transferring most of the finished pieces into the scratch pad. Between that and the notebook, I finally had a pretty solid idea of how my system would work.
Leaning back in the chair, I spun it slowly around to take in the room.
I’d parted with a few more Reality Points – exchanging them for Sanctuary Points – to expand beyond the cramped ten-by-ten box I’d started with. I could now color the rooms as if painted, though the perfectly smooth walls still gave everything a faintly surreal sheen. Without the subtle texture of paint or wallpaper, it all looked too clean. Too even.
Still, it was a lot more homey than before.
The office now contained more than just a desk and a chair. An empty bookshelf stood along one wall, added mostly on a whim. My original idea had been to fill it with my results, but since the notebook could hold everything, the shelf looked a little bare.
The lighting didn’t help. There was no lamp, no sun, no visible source at all… just a flat, omnidirectional glow that erased every shadow. It made the place look faintly cartoonish, like I was living in a painting that hadn’t decided where the light was supposed to come from.
Still… it was mine.
Expanding and shaping the sanctuary had been far more expensive than any furniture – several hundred points to carve out each new space – but it felt worth it.
Now I had an office, a main room with my recliner and a few pieces of decor to make it feel lived in, and a small bedroom tucked away off to the side. It wasn’t exactly a large house… but then again, I didn’t really have anything to store. And it wasn’t like I needed plumbing, or a kitchen, or even a bathroom.
Not yet, anyway.
It was a complex system at its heart, and as I added it to the interface, the various features had needed a few tweaks that required changes to my design. Overall, I was pretty happy with how it would go about, though despite Orpheus’s warning, I did cheat a little and had the belief of sapient beings influence the system somewhat… but not in a way that would directly touch my own interface.
It was the belief of people in general that would allow the creation of new classes, and those classes would be reviewed, named, and described by my dragons, just like abilities would be.
I had, of course, created a few basic classes as models, but I hadn’t named them, only focused them. They had yet to be put into the queue for naming, mostly because no creatures could actually select a class right now, which meant I had to do that next.
I’d originally planned to just have a typical fantasy spread… elves, dwarves, goblins, and so on. Now I wasn’t so sure about that.
As I’d been working on my system, I realized that in many cases, those didn’t serve any real purpose beyond setting dressing. Technically, I maybe shouldn’t have made dragons as dragons either, but it was a little late for that now… and besides, dragons were cool.
But what purpose did a dwarf really have, other than being a grumpy short person that lived underground and made things? What purpose did elves have, other than being superior? Actually, I knew some answers to that one… but it didn’t feel like enough of a reason. Neither of them did.
Even so, I didn’t feel confident enough to just jump right into making my own intelligent species fully formed. It would be best if I at least modeled them on something I knew and made changes from there.
I explicitly didn’t want to add humans yet, so that was off the table—but I could use humans as a basis. Or, of course, I could see if there were something similar enough to what I wanted already in existence that I could adapt, much as I had done in creating dragons from the large, lizard-like creatures in various places of Upside, and the equivalent – but very different – species in Downside.
I opted for the latter approach, bringing up my interface.
I made sure that the dragons were still doing their job and not killing each other in a war or something ridiculous, and then I took a deep breath.
I had an interesting species on Downside that I wanted to use, but I was saving all of Downside for the really interesting species – the ones that I worked on all by myself and didn’t draw from the generic fantasy filling my head.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Right now, was that really fantasy, though? If that was the way this world worked, that would make it what… contemporary? I wasn’t sure. Whatever.
While I mused about that to myself, I looked through Upside for anything interesting.
I finally found something on one of the continents in Upside about two-thirds of the way toward Downside. It was a large area that tended to have strong waves of mana, but the more dangerous monsters there hadn’t developed into giant, rampaging beings. Instead, most of the region had become dominated by smaller monsters… and a particular fast-moving, nimble furred creature that, helpfully, had long tapering, pointed ears.
Making it upright would give me an elf.
Really.
Of course, there were differences.
The skin of these creatures had a faint, pale-blue hue to it. Their eyes often glowed one color or another – usually yellow or green – but I saw some more exotic shades as well.
Pulling them up on my interface, I adjusted their stance to bipedal and began shaving off unwanted details. I got rid of the claws, of course, but left them with slightly pronounced canines… more than humans, at least. They ended up a little short, so they weren’t Tolkienesque elves, but they did have that willowy, elegant build people tended to associate with them.
I didn’t see much point in calling them anything but elves… even if, in the end, they were going to be quite different.
I let them keep the tails – though all but the tip were furless now –and made a few other adjustments. The base species were fairly fragile, and I was fine with that; it matched what I was going for.
They also had very, very powerful mana conduits.
Of course, as an intelligent species, they didn’t use a monster core. Dragons were the exception there, not the rule. I replaced the monster core with what I’d originally envisioned for intelligent species: a mana core, much like the dragons had, along with mana-control organs in the brain and a few other structures that would serve the same general purpose. These handled the retention and refinement of abilities, essentially doing what the monster core did for monsters.
I also gave them the ability to channel mana, but unlike the dragons, their replacement for the core would handle their Class information and internal distribution. It was also tethered to another script in my interface… one that would give them the ability to view themselves through the system.
I’d been serious when I told Orpheus that. I really did hope the urge to see their own numbers go up would encourage self-improvement.
Not that the interface would necessarily display letters or numbers at first. Initially, it would communicate through a mental voice… but once writing developed, I expected it to shift to actual symbols and text.
Just like with monster cores, this feature wouldn’t fully activate until adolescence. That was when they would gain the ability to see their own status.
After that, I had to make a few behavioral adjustments to the species itself.
They were already a little more communal than humans from my world, and I didn’t want to change that too much. The dragons, I’d gone ahead and modified heavily… but they were more stewards than participants, and they weren’t hooked into the system anyway.
This time, I refrained from adding xenophobia. That would make them too much like the classic haughty elves, and I had other plans in mind.
I did, however, make them deeply protective of life… not in a moral sense, as I couldn't actually directly adjust their culture, but a simple biological predisposition toward understanding the cost of taking a life. In essence, I made them empathetic predators. It created an interesting conflict considering their claws and teeth. They were omnivorous, just like the base species, but the pronounced piercing and tearing teeth – not to mention a subtle muzzle, once I looked more intently at the species – spoke of a predatory species.
It was the next part that was particularly important, because I didn’t want immortal elves like so many fantasy worlds had. Their lifespans were already extended somewhat due to magic, but I set it up so that they would hit adolescence and then maturity at about the same rate as a human on my world would.
Shortly after maturation, however, their bodies would enter a sort of mana-powered stasis, biologically paused until they reached roughly two hundred and fifty years of age. After that point, they would begin to age normally, with a typical lifespan of around three hundred years.
I wanted them long-lived, but not ridiculously so.
Of course, the really interesting part was that the original species had possessed the ability to share their developed powers before those abilities had been passed down genetically. That was how they had been able to dominate the region… and why I had selected them in the first place.
They had been able to adapt more quickly than the others; despite their small size and relative fragility, they didn’t have to wait several generations for a useful ability to standardize into their bloodline. They could choose to share it directly ahead of time. I didn’t want my elves doing that exactly, but I gave them something different, adapted from the same concept.
It took me several hours of work in the interface. This sort of complex scripting wasn’t something I really knew how to do, and I leaned heavily on the tooltips and simulations to guide me.
Eventually, I got it to do what I wanted… or at least, I thought I had.
My elves would indeed appear ageless and immortal from an outside perspective, but only because of how they preserved knowledge.
They could imprint a trace of mana onto another of their kind, creating a sort of tether between the two. When one died, if the other later had a child, that child would – upon reaching adolescence – inherit the memories of the dead elf. In this way, they would appear to outsiders as if they possessed the same knowledge through the ages.
It wasn’t true reincarnation; they were still different people. But being influenced by older memories would doubtless shape their personalities to some degree. Since adolescence was when the inherited memories surfaced, the personality formed up to that point would blend with the older recollections to determine who they became.
The whole mess of identity was a little unclear to me, but if it was a different soul each time, then I was sure the results would be distinct enough.
The elf didn’t even have to be the same gender.
I wasn’t sure if that was a good idea… if having a male’s memories in a female body, or vice versa, would cause problems… but given that their fertility rate was already lower than humans, I decided not to restrict it to the same sex as the original. It wasn’t like the memories would be truly lived by the new one, but more a reference of knowledge, similar to how I remembered things from my previous life without the weight of the choices themselves.
I think?
Besides, who was I to decide how they viewed identity? Okay technically I was their creator, but the whole point of this exercise was to preserve free will as much as possible.
Culturally, I was sure they’d adapt.
Splintering
What gender should the MC settle on?
