Chapter 95: Revise and Invent

  CROWN

  It had felt weird to drop down into the world for a while and not… do anything. Duck had encouraged it, for some reason, but that was even more puzzling. It had only been a few days, but at least I had gained a better idea of what was going on in Chall. I had to think in abstract terms a lot, and I knew I was walking a thin line between being too detached and too invested. It was still good to see some direct consequences of my decisions.

  I didn’t feel guilty for setting up the conditions of the war, but neither could I be flippant about doing it. In the long run, I was pretty sure that my decision would be best for everyone… and the formation of some kind of “Adventurer’s Guild”, even if it wasn’t called that, was a positive sign in the right direction.

  The more pragmatic part of me also knew that the energy generated by the war would be useful in preparing for the incursions, but I had to be careful. Conflict was the easiest way to create energy, but only because significant decisions were often made during conflict. If it became too common, then that became the status quo… and decisions mattered less. Then it was a net negative, because more souls were dying with nothing getting done. A worldwide war would generate a ton of energy. A world constantly at war would drain it.

  Everything was such a balancing act.

  I sprawled back into one of the chairs on the main observation deck. “Ugh. I’m too lazy to bring up my todo list. What’s on the agenda, Duck?”

  That was a lie, and Duck knew it. I could bring up that list with a thought, but I wanted the mental engagement of talking to someone about my agenda. For a fragment of myself, Duck was very good at that.

  I wondered if other Administrators had Terminals that acted this way. Orpheus hadn’t said anything about my earlier query concerning Duck’s behavior, so I still had no idea. I could do comparative statistics now, but that didn’t cover Terminal behavior, just raw numbers… which weren’t always comparable anyway.

  Duck adjusted glasses she normally didn’t wear and summoned a sheaf of papers. She didn’t bother to change her appearance beyond that, so the simple tunic didn’t really gel with the office worker look she was trying to project.

  “Several items of interest,” she murmured while making a big show of looking through the papers. “In Downside, they still haven’t encountered the Polyform Colonies. You may want to push that for security reasons, but they are close. You could likely wait at least a few decades to see if it will happen naturally, and that would be my recommendation given the lengthy list of other things to do.”

  She tossed the ‘paper’ aside so it dissolved in midair. “There is the consideration of another species to put pressure on development, but Downside’s vaskan have developed much like humanity, and the various factions put some pressure on one another. Another variable may accelerate, but you do risk unknown side effects.”

  I made a face, then tilted my head back. “Maybe. But I’m sure there are more important things to worry about first.”

  Duck nodded her head despite still being in elf form, the human gesture looking odd on that body. “Mmmhm. Dungeons are being handled fine now, at least for the moment, but you did want to investigate and maybe fix the problem of the dragons not interacting with the vaskan or the polyforms.”

  “Needs done,” I agreed. “But maybe not today. I can understand the dragons being reluctant to interact with a species that eats monsters, but I would have thought they’d be strong enough to at least communicate. It’s been thousands of years, it can wait another few while I figure out a way to fix that. Next?”

  A sigh, and Duck looked through her ‘notes’ again, making a big show of it. “Monitor Downside for now then. For Upside… let’s see. Dwarf and elf interaction… that actually looks like it’s being handled naturally so I think you should ignore it for now. You considered yet another species here to add pressure, and it may actually be useful here. The elves are a bit conflict-averse.”

  That sounded more like something I should work on now. “They might end up in opposition to the rooken, but I doubt it. The haptix won’t be a problem for a while either. I should put some kind of pressure on them, yeah. Preferably something that further encourages dwarf interactions.”

  “Mmm.” Duck dismissed the papers with a flick of her hand. “That’s probably the most immediate thing to work on. You had some concerns about gods and stuff for the new species, but it’s a bit early for that. I think it’s only been a year or two down there. You should have spent more time enjoying a bit of Downside in your Proxy.”

  I shrugged as I sat up. “I don’t want to get too attached. It was good to see how things were developing, and to get a look at their culture, but the longer I stayed the more chance I’d want to interfere again. My whole ‘spread rumors’ plan was kind of dumb in hindsight. I should have just sprinkled more dungeons around to speed things up.”

  “I thought it was kind of clever.” Duck dismissed her glasses as well. “I know I call you an idiot a lot, but with the information you had at the time, it was a reasonable plan. Unnecessary, sure, but while you were doing it you were also stress testing how far a Proxy Avatar could get involved before penalties started hitting your energy gain. Speaking of which…”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The display of the planet glitched briefly as she placed an information pane on it. This didn’t surprise me… both of us could alter the pane. Duck had acted a little strange for a while, but lately she was being quite professional and quick to act. Maybe she’d just been bored… though I should really grill Orpheus if it was okay to think of her as a separate person like I was doing lately. Did belief matter for that? Would I accidentally sever a piece of my soul if I kept acting like it was already separate?

  Oblivious to my inner concerns, Duck gestured at the pane. “Last cycle was about half a year ago down there, so we had a bunch of things happening. Positive energy gain was a whopping 737 RP, give or take, before Orpheus takes a cut. It probably won’t stay quite that high but we likely will be getting several hundred for a few cycles, at least. This won’t fully compensate for making a new species but it helps. You may want to coast a bit later, though. Get the reserves back up.”

  I nodded, already opening up the interface. “Okay… I don’t think I want to create a new species wholesale, so I need a good base for this one. They need to replicate fast, be individually weak, but kind of a menace in large numbers. I can’t make them too overwhelming, though.”

  Duck flopped into a chair and motioned in the air. I knew she was just browsing her own version of the interface, and she made that clear when she announced the options she’d found. “Looks like we have two creatures that have spread across a large amount of Upside. One is a… uh. Kind of like a wombat, I guess. The other is… gross. Giant pillbug.”

  “Gross,” I agreed, wrinkling up my nose. “Hmm… might not be a bad idea though. Have to make a lot of changes, but if you think about it…” I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “They’re armored, that would make them resistant to most attacks. Magic would be able to take care of them, but a good iron or steel spear or axe would do a lot better than the current crystal weapons.”

  “I like the crystal,” Duck muttered. “But you’re right. Without the right enchantment, it’s bad against armored things, and not every elf knows the right magic to fix that. Just don’t make them too tough.”

  Already, I was pulling up the species in question. ‘Giant pillbugs’ was about right, though they were actually quite different from what I knew of earthly isopods. They were about two feet long, which seemed far too big for one, but at some point they’d developed a sort of proto-endoskeleton. This gave them a spine and support lattice that didn’t map to vertebrate anatomy, but meant the exoskeleton didn’t have to double between armor and carrying the weight alone.

  I wondered why Earth had never developed something like that, but I knew that for all the similarities, my world worked differently. The insects in Downside explicitly used mana-boosted exoskeletons to achieve their size, but these were entirely mundane in their solution. It was mildly confusing, but I didn’t spend much time thinking about it. Life could be strange, and I’d designed Upside and Downside to have wildly different creatures.

  Most importantly, when I increased the size of the bugs to three feet or so, they didn’t fall apart. I uplifted them, but left a lot of their instincts powerful – I wanted them to be a threat, but have the capability to negotiate. Their need to feed and spread would be the major point of friction. They wouldn’t be expansionist by nature, just by necessity – a need for food would drive them toward civilization.

  “I feel a little awkward doing this,” I said aloud to Duck. “I’ve been trying to be nice to my creation and not put deliberate hardship in, but I keep introducing these things. It doesn’t feel right.”

  Duck looked over at me, ears twitching, and stared for a long moment, brilliant emerald eyes unblinking. Then she twisted around and sprawled in her own chair, legs hooked over one arm of the recliner, and her shoulders laying across the other arm. Hair tumbled wildly down as she tilted her head back to stare at me further, upside-down. It was a lazy, casual pose that left her tail swaying to the side as she considered my words.

  “Your problem is you care about some species more than others.” She finally announced. “I know I’m a hypocrite for saying this, because I absolutely love the elves, but you care too much about the elves, most of all.”

  Again, something about that tugged at my worries, but this time I pinned it down and met her stare. “Aren’t you a part of me? Don’t you love the elves because I do? I mean I don’t think I love them that much…”

  The swaying tail paused and gave a small waggle at me, as if shaking a finger. Duck didn’t move from her relaxed position to answer. “I’m a part of you, but not like a subservient Terminal. You didn’t want that because of your own stupid morals.”

  She grinned. “Maybe I shouldn’t call them stupid, because I wouldn’t exist if you didn’t have them.”

  Duck’s face turned more serious as she twisted around, tucking her arms under her head to keep looking at me while she spoke.

  “Don’t think of me as a piece of you running a script. I’m not like other Terminals. You really should talk to Orpheus about this, but if I had to describe myself…” She stopped and flicked an ear, thinking. “Remember how you thought of Tastka as ‘what if you grew up as an elf girl in the Stone Age’ or something? I’m more like you, but with my primary memories being elf-aligned.”

  I frowned. “But you have memories of Earth, I’ve heard you joke about it.”

  She sighed and her tail curled downward. “Yeah, I’m sort of neither. What I’m saying is… the memories of elves are strong for me, and the Earth memories are just kind of distant. You defined yourself by them, but for me the moment I became aware, your life was like a distant memory already. You defined me to oppose you, so I couldn’t align my identity with you.”

  The elf girl pushed herself up and pointed. “But you did spend a lot of time as an elf. You empathize with them. So you try to protect them from themselves, and you favor them. Don’t think of this species as inflicting a pain on the elves. You can’t afford to think that way. You’re making a competing species that has every right to try to live and succeed as the elves. You aren’t making them to hurt the elves, you’re doing it because you’re their world, and you need something more.”

  Was I being psychoanalyzed by my own Terminal? She was probably right, I had been showing a lot of favoritism. I knew that already. Having her voice it at me just forced me to reassess what I was doing. It also made me wonder at just how different she was from me, even if she clearly felt comfortable in her subordinate role.

  I sighed, and adjusted the instincts of the bugs just a little to get them to work together more. Then I started planting the uplifted isopods about the world.

  “I think the next world I make, I’ll take a different approach.”

  Quest Maker