Chapter 77: When It Rains

  CROWN

  When I had first learned about the idea of Proxy Avatars, I’d been looking forward to the idea that I could experience ‘life’ and things like true flavor while relaxing in the Sanctuary. Just the thought of more intense sensations had been tempting, and I’d only hesitated due to the cost.

  The reality was, while the taste and feeling were more intense, the whole experience was also more of a pain than not.

  Every body had small aches and pains at every moment, it was just the experience of life – and getting used to them – that let people ignore them. When I was living in my world I was constantly breathing and tasting and sensing. The novelty let me ignore all that pain.

  Once in the Sanctuary, everything was different. I was still in a living body, but biological processes were suspended here. My heart didn’t beat, I didn’t need to breathe… but the instincts were still there. Every motion had the subtle throb of pain behind it, so minute I wouldn’t have noticed it if not for the utter sterility of the Sanctuary.

  I wondered if there was a way to fix that. I definitely didn’t want to have a body here if this was how it felt all the time, even if food were more flavorful. I wondered if it would be… after all, the ‘food’ here didn’t actually have any substance or calories. If my body were suspended, what would happen to what I ate? Would it just pile up in my stomach.

  I was thinking too hard about all this.

  “Looking good, bossman.” Duck interrupted my thoughts as she hopped in front of me, looking me over as I entered the ‘situation room’. “Could have been more handsome, though. Weak jawline, nose a little big…”

  “I was trying not to stand out.” Then I gave her a little grunt. “Besides, you don’t even know the standards of attraction that vaskan have. Also, you’re me, so saying stuff like that is kind of creepy.”

  She just smirked at me, then spun around and rotated the map to zoom in toward the Chall Domain. “I’ll give you the rundown on what’s happening with the Sisterhood in a minute. I wanted to talk to you about your incursion prep, first, while you’re here.”

  I slowed the flow so that one second out there equaled ten in here… or maybe that was just how we perceived it. I wondered about that, and how this time dilation thing actually worked, for the millionth time. “All right, what’s the problem?”

  Duck shook her head. “For once, there isn’t one, aside from what we already talked about.” She made a vague gesture at the region. “It’s too early to tell if your story is having an effect, but I’ve gone over all the scripting, and as far as I can tell this should work.”

  She zoomed in a little more and pointed to a place a bit further counter-clockwise along the cylinder, looking toward sunrise. “I’ve identified three good spots for us to place your fake incursion. This is a prime spot, but it’s solidly in Chall territory. Not sure if you want to give them that much control over it.”

  “Mmm, pity,” I agreed. “Probably not a good idea. That could lead to an empire real quick.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t have a really good choice.” Duck sighed and scrolled the map over to a spot in the forests, still lush and near one of the tributaries of Chall’s main river. “This spot would be great, but it’s ambiguous on borders. Chall doesn’t control it, but a couple tribes arguably would claim it. It’s a great spot, but…”

  The grumble from my throat sounded more like a ‘chrr’ in this body. “Almost certain to lead to war.”

  Duck flicked her ear in an elven sign of confirmation. “Yep. Probably great for RP gain, but it might be bloody. Your call on that. I know you don’t like setting up wars when it’s already violent down there, but if I had to pick one, this would be it.”

  I flinched. Thus far I’d avoided deliberately setting up wars, even if I had given plenty of opportunities for my people to fight them. Opportunity was very different from setting up something that was a near certainty, though. “The third?”

  Another scroll of the map brought up a largely wild area, thick with forests and more rolling hills leading toward some more distant mountains.

  “This one is further away, and nobody could really put a claim on it.” Duck pointed, and a heat map of the mana density came up, with the potential location deep in a blob of red. “Problem is it’s a little too far in a high mana zone. It’d take a while for them to notice anything is off, and it’s also so far away a migratory tribe might run into it first. Then you likely have the same war problem.”

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  I grimaced at that. “Not to mention the danger of even getting there. Yeah, I see what you mean.” I heaved a heavy sigh and rubbed my chin. “Short term, it may be bloody… but long term, for development and spread of the idea, the second one seems best.”

  Duck looked at me carefully, her ears lifting but eyes narrowing. “Are you sure, boss? I agree, for once, but like… I’m not your conscience.”

  “Mm.” I turned to stare at the map. Chall was big for a Bronze Age nation… but just a tiny part of the map right now. Perhaps, in time, it would grow… provided someone with ambition to expand gained power. I hadn’t gotten the chance to explore the political situation, so had no idea how likely that was.

  “They aren’t little kids any more.” I crossed my arms. “Maybe I’ve been coddling them too much. If they go to war over this, that’s a result of their own failings… and we need them to progress. Better a bloody war than extinction.”

  The look that Duck gave me lasted a few more seconds… but she finally turned away. “All right.” She zoomed out again, and scrolled the map toward the Barrier Mountains that the dwarves lived inside.

  “I’ve designed a few scripts to place that can simulate an incursion without triggering a reality change,” Duck continued while she scrolled the map. “I’ve marked the location and copied the design from my scratchpad to send to you. Look it over and implement if you are okay with it. I made it so it would delay activating the failsafe, just in case they’re slow on the uptake. You should be able to approve it from your Proxy.”

  That news startled me, and I struggled to hide it. I hadn’t known Duck had her own scratchpad in her interface. I’d certainly never seen it, and that… was disquieting. She was a Terminal, supposedly a fragment of me. Shouldn’t I have access to everything in her own interface? At least she’d shown no sign of being able to make actual changes… but was because she couldn’t or because she hadn’t yet?

  Or worse, because she hadn’t bothered to tell me?

  I sent a quick note to Orpheus before focusing on my current problem.

  “The Sisterhood must have only recently started digging into the mountainside,” Duck was saying. “They’ve been content to just live there until now, but maybe one of the visitors on pilgrimage introduced them to fancier metals or something. They only breached the tunnel a few hours ago, local time.”

  I’d actually expected the elves to meet the dwarves thousands of years ago, but I was again undone by my own failure to appreciate scale. The elves had to travel a huge distance just to get to the mountains, so even this far into development they didn’t have any formal nations there. They had monasteries and a small villages of people who were deliberately staying far away from the emerging nations in the birthplace of elvenkind.

  The dwarves had spread, but even with their people being able to dig so incredibly well, my mountains were ridiculously tall. Even with cheating via Cruxis mana to support them, they sprawled across a band averaging 1000 kilometers in width. That was a long way to dig to reach the surface where an elf might find it. In fact…

  “I’d not have expected the dwarves to get that close to the surface yet.”

  Again, Duck flicked an ear in confirmation. “It looks like an abandoned exploratory tunnel, not part of a community. Otherwise the dwarves would probably have figured out someone else is nearby. It’s also high mana, because the Sisterhood is Aravel. Might just be dangerous.”

  That did make sense. The Sisterhood wasn’t the type to dig for no reason, but they were all Aravel, so had plenty of magic to work with. The ‘why’ wasn’t all that important… I couldn’t keep track of every little detail. I only knew of the Sisterhood at all because it was vaguely related to Tastka and the gods I’d made.

  In life, Solen and Kelas had both urged the Aravel community to move away from their weird sexual-bondage-tradition thing. Once Kelas had revealed that the bonding to preserve memories didn’t have to be sexual, it had caused quite an uproar. The Sisterhood was the remnant of one of the resulting rebellions.

  Even with the long-lived elves with genetic memory, the Sisterhood had been around for seven thousand years now. It had likely evolved, but all three of the elves that had taken up my offer of godhood supported them. Apparently, they were still close enough in alignment that they hadn’t lost the approval of any of the trio.

  I was mildly surprised that Kelas gave his blessing to them, considering their religiously all-female identity. Then again, Kelas had always been the one that I struggled to understand, even as Tastka.

  Duck was looking me over again. “Obviously you’ll need a new body. I’ve already designed one based on Tastka, if you want to use that. I wouldn’t use the same name, but being female would probably make it easier to move in the Sisterhood.”

  “Probably,” I agreed. “As far as I can tell they do allow males, but if they’re called the Sisterhood I have no idea how they’ll treat them.”

  The monastery – more like a village-fortress, but I thought of it like a monastery – occasionally had men in it, I’d noticed. Yet it did seem like their permanent population was all women. They’d also been pretty peaceful as an order, but I knew nothing about their beliefs.

  Which was why I needed to be there. The dwarves were technically genderless, but they were designed to have traits that appeared male-identifying to other races. If the Sisterhood encountered them and decided they were another oppressive culture, it could end very badly.

  Great for RP generation. Terrible for actually getting any trade going for centuries, at best.

  I exhaled. “All right, but hopefully it’ll just be a few days. I really want to finish spreading the myth in Chall so we can get that moving.”

  “Think of it this way,” Duck offered. “It’s just a few days. You can see how much the story spreads without you there.”

  My grunt was quiet, but more annoyed, than worried. “Yeah, you’re right.

  “Me going missing for a few days shouldn’t cause any problems.”

  Stranger in the City