Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset

by James Osiris Baldwin

  "Sure, I have one of those. Though I need to start thinking about getting better lab glass as I get more into these Medical crafting trees." I took some empty bottles from my inventory and poured the acid inside. Carefully. One brewing made three bottles, which seemed like a good amount for the effort. "Can this be made to different concentrations?"

  "Certainly. You need a Distiller." Lazar pointed at a tall copper tank in the corner of the room. "You can put three Hydrochloric Acid through a distiller to get one Concentrated Hydrochloric Acid. Of course, the more you distill something, the more dangerous it is to work with. If you ever decide to do pursue the path of mastery in Alchemy, you will need to know how to handle the chemicals safely."

  "Right." 'Hector Dragozin: Master Alchemist and Cool Dragon Stunt Dude’ sounded like a pretty good resume to me. "My safety record is admittedly pretty terrible overall, but I'll work on it."

  "I sincerely hope so. Hmm. Let me see..." Lazar went to a drawer and unlocked it. Inside was a stack of leather-bound books, heavily tagged with ribbons. He pulled out two and set them down. "These might be useful: my old school manuals on creating potion bases and methods of refining."

  "Are they skill manuals?" I asked hopefully.

  "As in, enchanted with a Seal of Learning? No. Plain old books." He flipped to the first page of the fatter book. It was a table, showing alchemical symbols alongside neatly printed explanations of what they meant. "This will teach you all of the basic ingredients that go into every potion known to man or dragon. Alcohol, all of the acids and bases, suspensions and oils. You will learn a great deal of Alchemy from this tome, and unlock the Apprentice levels if you can absorb the learning. The other is an Herbal, which details all of the commonly used herbs and the conditions they treat. You are already an Apprentice level Herbalist, but to access Journeyman, you will need to find a Master or attend a college. Either way, to become a Journeyman, they will expect you to be able to recite the information in this book from rote memory."

  It was about two inches thick. My eyes widened with slow-dawning horror.

  "Medicine is an art worth your time and study," Lazar assured me. "And you certainly have the mind for it. They are yours, my friend - I do not need them at my current level of ability. I have no doubt you will excel."

  I picked up the Alchemy textbook. The pages had stains on them here and there, and when I tried to focus on the words, they squirmed and wrestled on the page. There was a table with 26 different alchemical symbols in the front. "Thanks, man. I'll try. I don't think I'll be able to make it, though."

  "It takes time." The man pushed his spectacles up along his thin nose. "Time and dedication, as with all good things in life."

  I let out a tense breath and closed the book. "Yeah... for sure. Don't suppose you know anything about healing magic, do you?"

  "Healing magic?" The Medic gave me a curious look. “I do. I know that mana cannot directly be used to heal. It only harms unless it is heavily adulterated."

  "But mana is used for healing. Alchemical potions can regrow limbs and shit, so there has to be healing magic in there somewhere."

  Lazar thought for a moment. "Not exactly. Mana contains all of the elements in an unexpressed state: the state of Aether. By combining it with other ingredients, one or more elements is coaxed forth from the mana, transmuting it into a different substance - just as the sodium bisulphate and salt transmute into hydrochloric acid."

  I nodded. "The reason I’m asking is because we fought a monster that used healing magic."

  The doctor's eyes widened until they were almost the size of saucers. "Well, Your Grace, some monsters have a regenerative process that strongly resembles magic..."

  “No. This was definitely healing magic.” Careful not to knock over anything that might explode, I leaned back against a bare stretch of counter. "The Swamp Hag Broodmother used a restoration spell to heal itself while we were fighting it."

  "If that is true... well, a dragon and Starborn have reappeared after thousands of years, so why not the Lost Art?" The doctor shook his head. "At the University, we learned that Elemental Darkness and Light are the elements which are most aligned to the practice of medicine. My professor used to say: diseases are cured by the light of the sun, injuries by the solace of the moon."

  "So healing magic that’s usable by humans IS possible?" I pressed. “In theory?”

  Reluctantly, Lazar nodded. "In theory. But if there are Words of Power that humans are capable of speaking that bend mana into healing magic, any record of them disappeared at the end of the Era of Queens.”

  "Era of Queens?"

  "The last great dynasty of the Dragons, when the East of what is now Vlachia was supposedly ruled by Lahati the Wise," Lazar replied. "Do you not know of the dragons’ history?"

  My cheeks turned hot. "Never had a chance to study it."

  "I see. Well, we can rectify that." He beckoned. "Come with me."

  Curious, I followed the man through the ground-floor ward and through a locked door into a suite of spartan, but tidy rooms. The main room was a hall with a table, a hearth with stew and bread keeping warm on a shelf nearby, and a number of clean pallets. The day-shift medics were asleep there, some of them still in their bloody work clothes. There was a storeroom and other smaller, private quarters. Lazar led me to one, where he unlocked a second door and showed me inside his private quarters, where a bed, no finer than the ones his staff slept on, and some chests and other plain and functional furniture seemed all the more spartan in the steady white glow of the one luxury he did have, a mage light. It illuminated the top of his desk, making it the focus of the whole place.

  "I managed to save a few books when we fled Karhad. I had an emergency trunk of manuscripts I’d copied over the years, just in case anything ever happened." He squatted down in front of a chest, opening it to reveal neatly-packed books of nearly every dimension and quality. Some were hardly bigger than a matchbook, while others were the size of my grandfather's art folios. He shifted tomes aside until he came up with an unremarkable-looking brown volume with weathered yellow pages. "Here.‘The History of the Dragons in Vlachia’. It’s almost all myths and stories, folk tales from the Churvi and the nomads of the steppe, but you should be able to recognize fact from fiction. Take this as well - it is a history of Myszno. It naturally focuses on the Vlachian conquest, but there is some elemental information about the land and its history that I think you will find interesting."

  Blinking, I accepted the books. They were heavy enough that I could probably knock someone out if I smacked them across the face. "I don't know if I'll have time to read it while the war’s still going on, but thanks."

  "Try." The medic smiled, then patted me on the shoulder. "If we can retake Karhad, there’s more where this came from. We can only hope they didn't burn the library at Egbolt or the University."

  "Good libraries?" I asked.

  Lazar looked down. "The University holds a unique and truly ancient collection of texts, including a set of plates that are assumed to have been scribed during the Drachan War. That is the war that ended the reign of the Dragons in Archemi: one of the few remaining texts of the Solonkratsu’s great civilization."

  My intuition pinged at me. "When were those plates discovered?"

  "Oh, long ago. I wasn't even born when they were donated."

  "By who?"

  "Why, the Tuun who live near the village of Myszno." He cocked his head, a small smile playing over his lips. "They recovered them while mining in the southern mountains."

  Chapter 27

  I didn’t feel like heading back to my quarters to mope around until Karalti decided to come back and talk to me. Instead, I restlessly headed north and crossed the river, hoping to catch up with Rin.

  There was a great cluster of unit production structures on the islands behind the Fort. The rapids powered turbines and mills attached to the manufacturing complex, which was shielded by sloped roofs that partly camouflaged it from the air. Rin
was in the Airship Hangar, pouring over the Ix’tamo with a group of men, women and Mercurions. They took samples and measurements, monitored attached magical devices, and sketched blueprints. Rin was in the blueprint creation group, gesturing animatedly as she conversed in a sharp, clacking tongue with three other Mercurion Artificers. The warehouse bustled around them, with workers tuning, repairing and building airship components. I edged around the Ix’tamo until I was across from Rin and waved. Her head darted up.

  "Oh! Hector! Hi! Just a second!" She pointed something out on the blueprint, patted one of her teammates on the back, then scurried over to me. "Hey! What's up?"

  "Thought I'd come and see if there was anything I can help you with," I replied. "I did everything I could at the hospital. Netted a good amount of Renown."

  "You aren't going back to hang with Karalti and Suri?" She asked.

  I shrugged. "Karalti probably doesn't want to see me right now. If I'm lucky, she's having a girl talk with Suri."

  "Oh no! Did something happen?" Rin's big blue eyes widened with concern.

  I glanced at the people milling around and hunched my shoulders. "Don't really want to talk about it here. Besides... I didn't come to lean on you. I figured we could talk to the Chief about the Supply Train quest, and maybe do some other sidequests tonight."

  "Oh, come on. You've been there for me through all sorts of things. Kanzo, the boss fights, all of that. Besides, I don't really think that way." She puffed a lock of translucent hair from her face. "Come on. Let's go outside."

  Resigned, I followed Rin out of a side door. She led me up a flight of stairs to a balcony overlooking the river and sat down, hanging her legs between the rails. I hopped up to perch on the narrow edge, squatting down on my heels. The sky was low, clouds obscuring the light of the moon, and it smelled gritty and damp. Like the city just after a rain.

  "So, what happened?" she asked.

  "Draconic growing pains," I grunted. "I think."

  "You had an argument?"

  "No. Not exactly." I sighed. "She got really cold after the meeting with Dumb and Dumber, brushed me off and left. Said she needed to think.”

  “Why? Did something happen?”

  “I kissed Suri goodbye.” I shrugged. “She said she wasn’t mad, but she sure seemed like it.”

  Rin made a face. “You think she likes you? You know, as in…?”

  “I know she does. She’s had a crush on me since she hit Level 5 or so. We have a frigging telepathic bond, so it’s not news to me or anything. But it’s not… I don’t want what she wants. I love that dragon more than anything or anyone I’ve ever met. She’s like my twin, like the other half of me. But I’m her adoptive parent and as far as I’m concerned, she’s family. I can’t give her what she wants.”

  “You’re not related, though,” Rin said. “I mean… relationships evolve?”

  I scowled and shook my head. “No. Parents don’t fuck their kids. No exceptions.”

  Rin made a sound of agreement. “When you put it like that… yeah. That’s terrible, though – I don’t know how I could help. I know that when I’m stressed out, I need to be alone. Sometimes I get so worked up that I shout and pace and stim-“ she flapped her hands for emphasis “-until I cool down. I’d just… let her sort it out. All NPCs are predisposed to love player characters, but I think when she realizes what you have already, she’ll be okay.”

  “Wait. What?” I shook my head, not sure I’d heard her correctly. “What do you mean ‘NPCs are predisposed to love player characters?”

  Rin pressed her lips together, looking out over the river. “Well, think about it from a dev perspective. People want things that are primal, right? Food, violence, territory, sex and romance. Archemi wasn’t intended to be a replacement Earth for a bunch of plague refugees – it was meant to be an escape from Earth: from the Total War, from politics, from your insurance bills and super-expensive rent and stuff. So in Archemi, there’s lots of things to fight, the food’s delicious, and all NPCs are potential love interests for players. They’re coded that way so that Jo Blow from Atlanta can have the elf harem he always dreamed of and then he goes to rate Archemi five stars on PlayerNexus.”

  What she was saying made perfect sense. It also made my stomach churn. I frowned and joined her in staring at the river. "But I thought the characters here were like… real people? Sentient people. I mean, Karalti ACTS like a real person. You said it yourself, that NPCs are crafted from digitized human datasets. They have free will, right?”

  "Technically, they have freedom of choice within their parameters. And Karalti isn’t a single human dataset: she’s a composite of different datasets, like everyone else here. We call them Seeds."

  "Seeds? Okay. But Seeds are still functionally real people from everything I’ve seen." I waved back toward the hangar.

  Rin bobbed her head. I could see her out of my peripheral vision, clear as day. "Functionally."

  “Meaning…?”

  "Well, meaning that Ryuko has this great big database called ATHENA. ATHENA has around two thousand people stored in it... around 4000 petabytes of data."

  I rubbed my head. My gaming computer had barely scratched 500 terabytes. "Holy shit."

  "Yeah. It would have been an impossible figure not even twenty years ago. But here we are, on an orbital server. Ryuko has like… twenty of them." Rin lifted her gaze to the cloudy sky. "I don't think the ATHENA datasets were just used for this game, but like heaps of different things."

  "Where did those two thousand people come from?"

  "All over the place. They were all certified volunteers. Except Suri, maybe." The Mercurion bit her lip, worrying it with glassy teeth. "She worries me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I had a talk with her about her origins. Did you know she speaks fluent Mandarin?”

  I shook my head dumbly.

  “Uh-huh. When she gained the ability to level, she says that she saw an Admin feed spool up. She has a photographic memory, so she was able to remember her Seed String.”

  “What’s that?”

  Rin seemed cheerfully oblivious to my growing discomfort. “Oh! So basically, whenever an NPC is generated, they get a Seed String, which is kind of like a barcode. It tells you which data was used to make them. They always begin with a letter and a number, so you might see something like ‘A42-2298F-900VL-HR’ and then know that this NPC was created out of information in Database A, Archetype 42, personality modifiers 22 and 98, that she’s female and her origin is in Vlachia and she has a Hungarian accent, and so on and so forth. There’s usually a list of tags on the end that can tell an admin if the person is able to issue quests and stuff. Now, the thing with Suri, right, is that players ALSO have Seed Strings, but ours are different to NPC strings even though they carry some of the same information.”

  I thought back to my own Archemi meta experience: seeing my own player Seed String scrolling by my face after receiving the Mark of Matir. “Right.”

  “Suri’s string looks like it was generated for an NPC, but it doesn’t have a database referral tag, which means she’s not derived from ATHENA. Instead of the normal modifiers at the end, she has a player Type code, which is BSRK. You know, for Berserker. I think that when the server reset, OUROS picked up on her and assigned her a player type for some reason, but she’s a NUMBERFETCH error waiting to happen. If her code ever conflicts, she’s screwed.”

  I shuddered. “Yeah. I figure she was trafficked in somehow. A couple of your coworkers had a hate boner for the Pacific Alliance. They uploaded her so they could take out their rage on someone.”

  “I wish I knew who it was. Not that I can report them now, but… ugh.” Rin shivered like a small bird, shaking her head. “It makes me wonder about ATHENA, though. Like, the profiles for villains and criminals… what if they were taken from real criminals? People have human rights, but human rights for data is a serious gray area."

  "Ryuko's a megacorp. They probably bought a bunch of these
‘datasets’ from prisons and shit for pennies on the dollar." I shrugged, surprised at how resigned I felt about it. "I don't really feel like talking about politics. Earth is done."

  "It is?" She glanced at me. “Don’t you have any hope at all?”

  "Nope. Hope is a bad survival strategy. Besides, everything I care about is right here.” I shrugged. “Things are better for me in Archemi. Maybe it wasn’t like that for you.”

  Rin bit her lip and shook her head. “No… I was very lucky.”

  “College? A house of your own? Health insurance, social credit?"

  She blushed a brilliant azure blue. "Is it that obvious?"

  I snorted. "Yeah. You’re kind of sheltered.”

  She gave a musical little sigh. “It’s true. That’s me, just another rich little hothouse flower.”

  “Hothouse? You grew up in an arco?” I whistled. “What the heck did your parents do for a living?”

  "Not my parents. Just my father.” Rin replied haltingly.

  Yikes. Nice one, dude. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” Rin forced a brief smile. “My father was Charles Yu. He was a property investor who worked with greentech and space habitat companies. We lost Mom when I was six.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Cancer?”

  She shook her head. “Suicide. It’s okay, though… it happened a long time ago.”

  There was a short pause in the conversation, a minute of silence for the dead.

  After a time, I nodded thoughtfully. “I can’t imagine what living in an arco is like. Green plants, clean water, everyone living up each other’s asses, recycling their piss and breathing the same air. I heard you can’t take your own car or motorbike on the roads. You have to use self-driving cars and shit."

  She let out a small, musical laugh. "Of course not. Arco roads don’t need signals, either, except for pedestrian signals. The shuttles are much safer than trying to drive something yourself.”