“Requested access is denied by your guide for your personal safety. Please listen to your guide and learn how the data screens work. She is very good at these things.”
This time both the male and female voice read the notification together. The strange dissonance between the two made the thing all the more disconcerting. “Hey! Meathead!” Ailia yelled at me. I turned to face her and as I did the lizardman nodded to her, turned himself away, reached a hand out and ripped a hole in the air that pure silver light seemed to pour out of. He stepped through the hole and just as suddenly as it had appeared, the hole and the lizardman disappeared. “Stop fiddling with stuff you haven’t learned about yet!” Ailsa yelled as she sped toward me. Not as quickly as last time, but fast enough I had trouble following her.
“I was only experimenting,” I said annoyed. I was tired of all of it, getting beaten up by a fairy, being kidnapped and brought here weather it was real or not, and the thing I resented most of all the crocodile man who had brought me here had left me alone with the murderous emo fairy ‘guide’ that obviously had some kind of gothic complex. “Quite frankly I'm fed up with being the John Snow around here. Why don’t you start doing your job and teaching me a few things rather than beating me up?” I bit back a gulp of fear as she stopped on a dime in front of my face.
Ailsa, now hovering just in front of my nose and glowing lightly purple wings beating in black blue blurs, sighed. Her shoulders slumped slightly as she said “I understand that you’re away from home and scared human. I know you’re worried about loved ones you left behind, and I know that you want to just be able to go home. Co’le’thel’ka told me all about it. He even told me that there might be a little bit of potential in you if I coax it out carefully.” She stood, squared her shoulders and brought her body up to its full height of eight inches. “And I intend to do just that. It wouldn’t do to have you die on me the first day now would it?” Her question more of a statement. “Now, what do you know of Ethria as it is now? What is your home like?”
I thought about it for a few seconds and then began with what I did know. “The only thing I really know about Ethria is that according to one snarky lawyer guy the entire planet is basically a giant refugee camp for displaced people from multiple cosmoses. Cosmosi? What is the plural for Cosmos?” The goth fairy just stared at me. “Anyway, that and that this place is obviously built around some kind of role-playing game mechanics system. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten the system notifications that I have.”
“What is a role-playing game?” Ailsa asked, and I proceeded to explain all about RPG’s, who I was, and how I had gotten into this mess. I explained about Earth and that there were no system messages or text boxes in normal everyday life. Once she finally grasped the concept of a role-playing game I had to explain what Delving was.
The entire process took about half an hour by my best guess. She didn’t interrupt me once during that entire time, just soaking up the information as she floated along beside me. As we talked, I began walking, and eventually found my way to the side of the river. My explanation left her probably as confused about Earth as I was about Ethria.
“Let me see If I understand correctly. You’re people are some of the most powerful illusionists in the multiverse, that's the proper term for what you were trying to describe earlier by the way, and you use that power to create games that you all play, together, for the sole purpose of amusing yourselves? You don’t use it to train? Or to strengthen your minds or bodies?”
“That's, not really how an immersion pod works. As I've said, my people don’t really have magic as I suspect you Ethrians have it here.
“What?”
“What do you mean what?” I asked.
“What is an Ethrian? You just called ‘us’ that and I’m confused.”
“Oh,” I said as I sat down legs dangling over the banks' edge, kicking over the water below. “Ethrians, you know, people from Ethria. Back on Earth we are all called Earthlings, though we don’t really call ourselves that very often. We usually go by the names of our countries. I’m an American for instance because I'm from the United States of America.”
“Oh, that's interesting,” She said, though it was clear she was just being accommodating. “Well, we don’t have anything like that. ‘Ethrian’s’ isn’t really a thing. If we are anything we are known by our race or the gods we worship.” She said finally.
I nodded my understanding and we sat for a few seconds, and I thought about where I was before I got sidetracked. “You know, I’m also still not sure that this isn’t some kind of elaborate trick, but I’m going along with it for now, as I can’t see any way that an e-pirate gang could turn this kind of kidnapping into monetary gain.”
“Wow.” She said, “If your illusion magic, sorry technology, is so potent as to persist for as long as you have been awake and speaking to me, what, for about an hour or two now?” I nodded and she continued. “Then it must be truly powerful indeed. Stronger than almost any master illusionist in the history of Ethria.”
I nodded again “Probably. It's not magic, and some people can stay in it for days, even weeks at a time. The longest a person has ever Delved for as far as I’m aware was almost two months, but that was in a special pod designed for long term immersion.”
“That’s incredible. I can see why you are as skeptical of the reality around you as you are.”
“Thanks, big mean crocodile face didn’t seem too sympathetic when I tried to mention my worries to him. He just glared and told me how much of a disappointment I am. Is that normal for him?”
“He's not always such a grump. He just has a lot of work to do” she said sadly. “He is the only intelligent celestial in our gods employ you know. He has to make sure their safe, and ensure that their will is done properly, and see to a whole bunch of other stuff that I'm not allowed to tell you about, and others I'm not even allowed to know about.” She stopped talking for a few seconds before asking “How does your world’s technology work? It seems so powerful, it almost needs to be magic. It's hard to imagine even the most complex mechanisms of the dwarves doing anything even remotely similar to what you’re talking about.”
“Yea, it's a complex thing. I only know the theory behind it, you have to go to school for years before they even let you test into the special programs that teach you the things necessary to be able to work directly on a pod. Even then, my buddy who works on pods for a living? He had to do a two-year apprenticeship before they let him work alone. Essentially your body is basically asleep and your mind is in a dream that the pod directly manipulates.”
“So your people aren't illusionists, they are dream walkers? It sounds like your people are quite formidable. Dream walkers on Ethria are among the most powerful magic users that there are, but they are very rare.” She said as she hovered over me. I sat along the side of the riverbank on a small ridge that ran next to the large muddy shoreline below me. The ground and hibernating frost-covered grass under me was frozen solid though the cold didn’t seem to reach me, the lizardman’s spell must still have been working.
“Eh, we don’t use Delving technology for fighting really. I know the military uses it to practice and train people at an accelerated rate, and doctors use the tech to help trauma patients deal with issues like PTSD by lowering a person's ability to feel fear while they are re-exposed to the trauma so they can process what they went through, and in extreme cases I've even heard of them directly rewiring the synapses in the brain. I’ve heard a rumor that some people have considered starting purely online virtual schools or colleges which is a really cool idea if you ask me. But sadly not enough people have their own pods yet to make that viable. Mostly we use Delving for entertainment. If you want to know what we do for war? Well, our style of warfare is very, very different from probably anything Ethria has ever seen.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Ailsa said quietly. I waited for her to continue, when she didn’t I looked up at her. She sat hovering
a bit off of my right shoulder, her legs hugged to her chest in a comfortable position. Her dress draped demurely down beside her hanging to the ground. “War here is quite terrible. Magic, even relatively weak human magic, is very destructive. I’ve seen entire city blocks Immolated by fire, and terrible atrocities of pain and agony brought to people who did nothing wrong. Kept alive by magic, as other spells slowly tore them apart.”
I nodded. “Not to sound like I'm one-upping you on the atrocities thing, that's not a game I ever want to win, but my people have the ability to destroy entire cities in the blink of an eye with a device as small as a satchel. It can turn the entire place to an unlivable mess for generations to come, the residual radiation twists the surviving wildlife into, well describing them as ‘horrific mockeries of what nature intended’ would be putting it nicely.” Ailsa turned to regard me, horror on her face.
“Your people can do all that without magic? There is magic, like necromancy that can do that, but it is rare, only the most powerful magic users can do such things and it takes years to lay the groundwork and store the mana necessary. Even then they can only do so by working in concert with many, many others. I do not think such a thing is possible, and if it were, I would hope that a people smart enough to build such an arcane and destructive weapon would have the wisdom to never utilize it.”
I laughed “They did, twice.”
She looked at me in horror. “Why? What would ever possess someone to ever use such a weapon? Where your ancestors cruel and evil?”
“What you should be asking yourself is what would bring such a powerful people to ever need to use such a weapon? How about to save lives?” I knew this topic well and was more than comfortable discussing it rather than focusing on my current predicament.
“How could taking the lives of hundreds or even thousands of living beings, be saving lives?” she asked, as she stood up, taking on an imperious air as if she were about to lay judgment upon me and President Truman for dropping Little Boy and Fat Man. I realized then that her concept of a city was vastly different from my own. Back on Earth cities were large when they reached over a million people, here? A large city must be around a hundred thousand at most.
“Would forcing one side in a world-spanning conflict to surrender by using the weapon be worth it to save a hundred times as many lives as it would take?” She shook her head, but not in answer to my question, it seemed she disbelieved what I was saying altogether.
“My people, the Americans, used it on two cities of an island nation called Japan and took over 105,000 lives with the weapons. That isn’t including the lives of those lost after to the lingering radioactive effects of the weapons. Had President Truman not used them it was thought that with the Japanese using the type of suicidal tactics that they were using, and having to fight street by street, city by city, and island by island on mainland Japan, it would have cost almost 500,000 American lives, and that is on the low end.”
“We had already lost that many in another area of that war on the other side of the world fighting another great empire, and we had lost many soldiers fighting the Japanese at that point. It's cold math, but the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved more Japanese and American lives then it took. Some say by nearly a hundredfold.” I smiled at her, but she just continued to look at me haughtily.
“Lying is unbecoming, even of a meathead like you,” she said and she buzzed her wings a little harder, a clearly disapproving gesture.
“I’m not lying. Believe me or not, but there is a reason I'm totally okay with my people mainly using Delve technology for only entertainment.” The thought of the kinds of things that people could do to others using unrestricted and unregulated Delve technology made me shiver slightly despite the warmth from the lingering spell.
Ailsa kept looking at me as I stared at the fast-moving water. After a few seconds, she unfolded her arms and her shoulders slumped. She drew her knees back into her chest again, this time not for comfort, but for reassurance as she rested gently on my shoulder. After a few seconds more of quiet she said in almost a whisper, her voice sounding like the crack of gunfire across the empty and quiet plain were we sat “the scale of such a conflict is unimaginable. It spanned the whole of your world?”
I nodded. “We called it World War Two. It was horrible, but it was very much worth it. The atrocities being conducted by the Axis powers needed to be stopped. Hitler had taken over all of continental Europe, and Japan was well on its way to doing the same to the pacific and China. The last two bastions of real power that stood against either were both part of the British Empire, Briton itself, and Australia, both having been weakened by years of colonial infighting and political unrest.
“Anyway, you have no context for any of that, and I don’t have the time to give you a world history lesson before Mr. Crocodile’s spell wears off and I freeze to death. Suffice it to say that Germany under Adolf Hitler and the Japanese Empire under Hideki Tojo needed to be stopped. And so, after the Japanese made the biggest mistake ever by attacking Pearl Harbor and waking up the United States of America, we did everything we could to do just that. It was the closest my world has ever come to seeing total mechanized modern war, and it laid the groundwork for political unrest and upheaval for the following decade or more. Even today my people are dealing with its after-effects and that war was over a hundred years ago. I never, ever, want to see what happens when such a war erupts back home again. It will be, much worse, and much shorter.” I said as I kicked my legs over the side of the ridge.
“You talk as if it is inevitable that such a conflict will happen again. Surely you’re people have learned from it, right?”
I shook my head. “Humans have short lives and shorter memories, and there is no one alive today who lived through that conflict. It's like historians everywhere say, history repeats itself. Besides, why do you think it was named World War Two?” I stopped talking and read a text box that appeared in my vision, as the female voice read it aloud in my mind.
“Congratulations! You have accessed your Trait Eldritch Knowledge , and have been able to flawlessly recall information from your home with near-perfect clarity. Continue to explore the nature of this gift and you will find other applications for its use other than history lessons and stories fit to depress faires, one of the most joy-filled races on all of Ethria!”
“Well, you’re a ray of sunshine,” Ailsa said under her breath. Her words were so light I wouldn’t have been able to hear it had we not literally been the only two living beings for miles. “You have to promise me that you’re not going to bring those weapons here. Ethria has its own problems, we don’t need your worlds dangers on top of it.”
I chuckled a little. “I don’t have anything like the skills needed to make those types of weapons. I know a little about the theory behind it, but the skill in math needed to even begin understanding how they work? It's all well beyond me.” Ailsa’s shoulders relaxed releasing a tension that I hadn’t noticed.
“Why don’t you show me how to access my character sheet now?” I asked after a few, uncomfortably quiet seconds. “I would really like to be wearing something other than just my undergarments when the lizard man’s spell wears off.” Ailsa laughed dispelling the gloom. Her laughter was as the tinkling of bright sleigh bells on Christmas. I couldn't help but smile, as she shot into the air and swirled around me. I stood up and walked a few paces away from the cliff. Best to have all new experiences in this world be on a nice, flat, open space, away from anywhere where I might fall and break my neck. I thought as I brushed away some dirt that had clung to my knees.
“Okay, I've given you control of your basic characteristics sheet. Go ahead and open it.” Ailsa said as she continued to dart around me. I squinted at her briefly and caught the sight of her spear flashing in her hands. She was practicing while she was also on ‘guiding’ duty.
“And how am I supposed to do that?” I asked smiling.
“Just think it, dummy.” Ai
lsa said derisively as she executed a nearly perfect spin thrust at an imaginary opponent over my head.
I thought about my character sheet and then suddenly my vision was filled with,
Name: Daniel Tear
Race: Human
Class: Pre-10th Level
Level: 1
Height: 6'1
Skin Color: White
Hair: Brown
Heritage: Unknown (Earth, Western, Pioneer)
Affiliation: Unknown (United States of America)
Religion: Unknown (LDS/Mormon)
Alignment: Unknown (Lawful, Moral)
Material Characteristics
TOTALS
MODIFIERS
GENERAL
10.25
0.125
Strength
12
1
Dexterity
10
0
Constitution
10
0
Physical Attraction
9
-0.5
Immaterial Characteristics
TOTALS
MODIFIERS
GENERAL
14.8
2.4
Intelligence
17
3.5
Emotional Stability
18
4
Sensitivity
15
2.5
Perception
13
1.5
Luck
11
0.5
Now that's more like it! I thought excitedly. I focused on each of the attributes and descriptions popped up in little text boxes that went away as my attention faded on each attribute. I didn’t want to miss anything, so I took my time and read each description starting with the Material Characteristics.
Ethria- the Pioneer Page 7