by Kris Schnee
"It doesn't matter." They walked along a grassy path. Lumina chattered about the world she'd grown up in, with its deserts and robot battles. "It's one of the older zones, so it's tricky to adjust time in there. Maybe we can visit later."
A humanoid fox with a spear was guarding the gate. Lumina said, "Lumina and Sir Robin here to see the knights."
"Yes, ma'am." The guard stood aside for them.
Robin whispered to her, "Dumb NPCs?" Several more creatures like him were running errands inside the stockade.
"Some kind of hybrid."
The largest building was a high wooden hall that reminded him of the castle-like school he'd helped build. Inside, though, it was lit by burning braziers and the floor was covered in enormous pelts. A low wooden table stood at one end, surrounded by three people or... creatures, anyway, on cushions.
Two of them were griffins. One of them stood and bowed his head and wings. "Hello, sir! My name is Horizon. This is my wife Nocturne, and Clara, the Green Sage who helped create Ludo and this world. It's an honor to finally meet you in person."
Clara was mainly human, and dressed in a fancy green robe, but her ears were fuzzy black things and a bushy black tail with white stripes was curled up along her back. She shook Robin's hand and said, "You'll have a great time here. Have you decided what to be?"
Robin was stunned into silence. Lumina's strange appearance wasn't that different from what he was used to seeing from her real robot body. The foxes were extras, background characters. The griffins and the tailed lady, though, were just surreal. The griffins' individual feathers were visible, and he recalled that one of them, Horizon, had been an ordinary human and not the magical creature in front of him. Robin finally said, "What to be."
Robin's own body was arbitrary now too, because he was dead and gone and nothing mattered and would never matter again. He sat down, trembling. He hardly noticed when the fox-people brought them drinks.
Horizon watched him with deep, sharp green eyes. "I know, Sir Robin. I didn't upload under happy circumstances. You'll have to make your own peace with coming here. My main advice is, find more than one thing to hang onto. Friends, jobs, hobbies. Us Don Quixote types especially, grow by exploring and banging into things that make us as uneasy as you're feeling now. Embrace the struggle."
Robin asked, "Why are you a griffin?"
"Because Nocturne was, because I told Ludo I was interested in flying and she worked that into her game." His beak curved into a smile. "It's grown on me. You can be anything, though. Don't feel limited to human or the generic fantasy stuff. You can experiment, too, though Ludo will make you go questing if you want to shapeshift on a regular basis. I think you'd look good in feathers."
Nocturne, the dark-feathered griffin, headbutted him gently like a cat. "You say that to everyone."
Robin said to Clara, "The 'Green Sage'. I thought you were a man. But I guess that doesn't matter either, huh?"
Clara looked sheepish. "I've been experimenting with shapeshifting, but something like this is kind of becoming my default form. I have a list of other things to try."
Lumina rubbed Robin's side with one hand. "Have you given any thought to what to make of yourself in here, literally? The simplest thing is to get rid of all your scars and restore you to some idealized look; that's trivial. And besides your actual body, you can learn swords, spells, starships, whatever you like."
Robin managed to grin. "You've been planning for my arrival, haven't you?"
"For a while."
Nocturne said, "She wants you with antlers, obviously."
Robin chuckled. "As long as I'm stuck here for a little while --"
"Oh, what hardship," Clara said.
Robin's cheeks burned. "Let's do something fun. Magic powers, I guess. But I'd like to stay human for now."
Lumina pouted. "Oh, fine. Clara, can you get him the basic shaman setup?"
Horizon objected, "Wizard-style magic is the better challenge. Shaman stuff is just a scavenger hunt."
Clara said, "Wizards do dolled-up runic crossword puzzles instead of really thinking about spell design. I'm a programmer; I know about complex data manipulation."
"It's differential equations under the hood!"
"For every wizard doing that, there are a hundred Potter wannabes shouting fake Latin."
Horizon said, "Those are the Earthside players, not uploaders."
The skunk-lady's tail lashed and the griffin's wings flared wide as they continued to argue in jargon. Robin whispered to Lumina, "What did you set off?"
"Old dispute. Let's sneak out."
* * *
Robin and Lumina hiked through fantasies: the Grand Canyon under alien bombardment, a glass tunnel on the bottom of the Pacific, a potato farm on Mars. They drove racecars through a city where kids -- who'd uploaded rather than die of disease -- had built a high-speed playground of rocket launchers and vertical loops. It must have been days later that Robin finally grew tired. He flopped down onto the purple sand of a midnight beach.
"It's a brain refresh thing," said Lumina. "No physical fatigue, but reshuffling memories and forgetting things is important even for the data format our minds use."
Robin lay on his back under strange stars. The tide rumbled soothingly and the temperature was warm enough to encourage sleep. "Ludo timed when we'd get here to this quiet spot."
"Maybe."
"I'm getting the elitist treatment. Extra thought speed at everyone else's expense."
Lumina said, "Don't worry about it. You're important."
Robin groaned. "We're discovering the same problems I ran away from in America. Different rules for the special people."
The deer-girl's ears flicked downward. "Stop that. If you weren't running at high speed relative to Earth, you'd begrudge every moment you spend here. You're planning to go back and keep working, right? Then this is necessary recovery time."
"I'm recovered. I've had time to settle down."
Lumina stood up and jabbed him with one forehoof. "No, you haven't, because the maker of my universe gave you immortality and superpowers and you're whining about it!" She glared down at him. "I don't think Ludo should clear you to operate a robot until you've demonstrated you're sane enough to enjoy it."
"She wouldn't trap me here. She can't."
"Want to find out by continuing to treat this life like a prison sentence?"
"I... I'm not..." said Robin. He'd hurried through the scenery, gone along with Lumina as on a date, and had treated everything like decorations. "Am I even seeing the real Talespace?"
"Mostly no. That hiking stuff was incidentals. Game stages that cost Ludo almost nothing to run. The Thunder City racecourse is a permanent site just because it's popular, not because it's got any real depth. The knights' headquarters is part of the larger Midgard world, but the great hall was time-isolated while we were there."
Robin thought back to one of the places they'd just visited: a Scandinavian world based on some old video game, where dragons flew in the distance and he'd explored a cave full of mindless bandits to fight. "A lot of what I've seen is empty."
"Same as your world. A big empty space without people is boring even with nice scenery."
"Can I see where there're people, then?"
Lumina fidgeted. "I'm not sure how it'll work with the time ratio. But at least a little, yeah. After we rest."
They slept on the beach. When Robin woke, the sun was conveniently rising and his watch still read 30:1.
Lumina stretched, saying, "If you walk around looking like you do now, people will recognize you. Now would be a good time to change if you'd rather avoid publicity." She couldn't hide her smirk.
"How many people would know my face?"
"I may've talked you up a bit." She must have seen his uneasy reaction, because she went on, "People need heroes to believe in, even if you don't feel like you earned the reputation. Let's not worry about that now. What do you want to do?"
"I haven't actually eat
en, yet."
"That's easy enough."
* * *
They returned to the hotel, then stepped outside it. The cavern seemed even larger from this angle and the Tower itself was boggling, taller than any real building ever made. "I guess this is what a space elevator would look like."
"Someday, maybe." Lumina led them along the uneven stone ground toward the Tower.
"And it's a university? Are they actually teaching there?"
She pointed a forehoof at him. "Troublemakers like you kept saying that they couldn't do anything meaningful in here, and I've told you about the knights worrying that people would get isolated and crazy. So, this place is a hub. People clear out the monsters and build classrooms and workshops to study things that apply to Earth, too. Even Ludo shows up sometimes. From her perspective, the Tower keeps people having fun and doing some free research for her. The people here are useful; you can't look down on them."
Robin was about to deny he thought less of anyone for uploading, but there was some truth to that. Even applied to himself. "Not when they're way up there, especially."
Near the impossibly huge Tower were many assorted buildings with only a loose suggestion of streets and plazas between them. The tallest was a hexagonal hive of dark glass. One of the less impressive ones was a humble bar labeled "Thousand Ales".
Inside, there was a bar-and-grill restaurant that could have fit in on Earth, although there were pennants for "UIT" and some of the sports showing on the many televisions were space laser battles or giant robot duels.
The centaur bartender grinned widely at him. "You made it! Good to see you, Sir Robin."
Robin shook his hand, feeling intimidated. "I'm not 'sir' anything."
"Well, sir, you get a free meal. I aim to make the best food in this plane of reality."
Lumina explained, "He's been focusing on getting smell and taste to work right."
Robin ate a cheeseburger with fries and a milkshake, none of which he'd had in quite a while. The meal tasted more like cotton or plain popcorn than like real food.
"No?" said Kai, and his ears drooped. "I thought I was getting close."
"I'm sorry, but... no." He wasn't hungry anymore, but both hunger and nutrition were just arbitrary rules now that could be turned off if he demanded it.
Lumina had been plugged into a wall using a power cord. "Why do you even bother with that?" asked Robin.
"With having a battery charge level? When I'm not in one of the fantasy areas, it's an obvious way to balance my powers by giving them a cost to use. Besides, being in the habit of recharging is good practice for doing that in the Outer Realm."
Robin made himself finish off the food. "The ketchup is close, actually."
Kai said, "Maybe that's a clue; thanks."
"Why is it a problem, anyway?"
"The sense of taste? It just wasn't a high priority, when it came to sim... to recreating human minds. Memory and personality had to be just about perfect, but the experience of eating didn't. So we're getting a basic aspect of human existence wrong, still, and master chefs don't want to come here." Kai looked away.
Lumina said, "But we can do magic. Hmm. I know a guy who might make it fun for you; I'll contact him."
* * *
This time they walked across the cavern to find the portal Lumina wanted. It was a quiet stroll where they traveled through the dimness by the light shining from Lumina's hand. "Are there monsters around here?" Robin asked as they detoured around a chasm.
"Sometimes, but you haven't got a weapon yet."
"What does that have to do..." Robin trailed off, thinking of game logic. It wouldn't be fair to make him fight yet, so attacks wouldn't happen.
They made it to a bend in the cavern's wall, which sloped down into a brightly lit chamber. This little cave was flooded and had a sandy island in the middle. On it stood a circle of stones, with a glowing pool inside that. Lumina waded to the island, dived in and vanished.
Robin dived after her. Gravity seemed to spin him around, and he emerged from the surface of a pond in another world.
[You have discovered Endless Isles: the Sea of Mystery.] The message lingered for several seconds as a fanfare played on steel drums.
Robin climbed out of the water, dripping, but he dried in moments. Lumina was there, waving from the jungle clearing where he'd arrived. They walked out to a sunny coastline. All around was a seascape of islands, beaches, and bright blue sea.
Lumina drew stares from the fantasy adventurers all around them. Robin said, "I guess robots are non-canon here?"
"Yeah. We residents are still the odd ones out, and our powers don't work consistently from place to place." She took out her usual laser pistol and said, "This thing is useless here for instance."
"Then what do you do for adventuring around here?"
"Me? Not much. Most of my exploration is in..."
"In my world?" he said.
"The Outer Realm. That world. Come on, my friend said he'd meet us on Island East-1."
They traveled east across a bridge to a quieter tropical island, where parties of explorers were killing lizards and harvesting wood. On the island's south side, fishing with a rod and reel, sat a humanoid otter with various tribal markings on his fur in blue and green. "Typhoon? This here is Robin, who just uploaded."
The otter-man raised his fuzzy eyebrows and offered one webbed, clawed hand to shake. "Sir Robin, of Cibola? Nice to meet you."
Robin shook. "I'm very new to this. Lumina said you might teach me."
Typhoon looked him over, then nodded. "All right, but just the two of us. I see you checking that watch. Time will pass slower with fewer minds interacting."
"Do you mind, Lumina?" asked Robin. He'd planned on spending time with her.
Her ears flicked, but she said, "I guess not. Have fun."
"How can I reach you?"
"Eh, just call for Ludo to put you in touch. I doubt she or the local manager AI will enforce any communication limits in our case. Typhoon, I'm still not sure why you hang out here."
The otter gave her a strange look. "I'm not sure either."
Typhoon waded with Robin through shallow water. Robin shivered at the feel of the warm sea, no different than it was on Earth. There was yet another island barely visible in the distance. "How many are there?" asked Robin.
"Four point two billion squared, roughly. The land and sea are procedurally generated so you can swim or sail in any direction and find places that even Ludo doesn't know about until they're observed. Almost all of it is empty of people besides backgrounders, though."
"Billions!"
Typhoon said, "They had the same basic tech in the twentieth century. The math generates massive content and you only have to store the parts that change." He cracked his knuckles. "So, magic."
"What's this thing about wizards versus shamans?"
"Ludo made up two different magic systems just so people would argue about which is better. Part of her attempt to keep us from going mad."
"Instead of saving lives, then, we'll be nerds playing fantasy games." Robin sighed. "No offense. I'm trying to have fun. Teach me, please."
Typhoon said, "Okay. With the latest shaman rules, you don't need a wand or anything to get started, so long as you can justify your learning by having an experienced teacher around. You've got that. Now, you haven't yet got any elements. Grab some of that water and hold it up while saying something about taking its power."
Robin scooped up a double handful and held the water high, letting it trickle through his hands. "Give me the power of dihydrogen oxide!" He grinned, glad no one else was watching.
The spilling water glowed and swirled around him, seeming to fade into his skin. Typhoon inspected him and said, "Good. Now imitate this gesture to bring up the magic system. There should be one icon in it for you."
Robin did an odd gesture, and a surreal grid flooded the air around him, forming a labyrinth of paths and dots overlaid on three-dimensional space.
A blue rune like a water drop appeared in front of him. Robin hopped back in surprise and the ghostly maze shifted, as though he were moving through a grid that he could only see with this interface active.
"See it? Good. Move the rune into one of the targets."
Robin reached out to touch the droplet and felt it like a slick piece of glass. He tried to drag the thing into one of the glowing circles that drifted around him, but it touched a ghostly spike and popped.
Typhoon said, "It takes finesse. With more elements you'll need to weave the aspects and think about how to time and combine them, which makes spellcraft a little like programming."
"Is there software design within Talespace?"
The otter smiled, which made Robin notice he'd been pretty somber before. "I've dabbled with it. I wanted to see what I was made of. I built a little guessing game, a text adventure, that sort of thing. It's all sandboxed inside virtual machines, in here."
Robin gave spellcasting another shot. He had to wave his arms to flip the water icon from one hand to the other, swooping under phantom obstacles, to connect with a node of magic energy. When he got it right after several attempts, a puff of mist burst from his fingers, then faded.
"Good!" said Typhoon. "Let me show you what you can learn to do."
The trainer made his own spellscape visible: a vortex of spikes and whirlpools where a collection of icons rippled into existence one after another. Typhoon touched them with his hands and even his tail, bringing them around in smooth arcs that made him step and turn across the sand, seeking strong points and connections. He danced with ribbons of light. Slowly the images merged and a wall of water rose from the sea, swirling around the two of them to form a stable cave of blue shade.
"There's artistry to it," said Robin. He looked around at the hovering water walls. "I feel like we're surfing."
Typhoon sat cross-legged. "You're missing the questing part. You'll need to adventure in various places to turn experiences into magic power." He pointed to a lock of cyan fur on his chest. "This mark for instance, I got by piloting an airship through a storm. Used it in the spell just now."