by Exile
3) Bedpans = empty. 3 XP, 0.15 gold. See below.
4) After Mr. Thule bedpan, go to Yao room: Yao awake, Nurse T checking lines.
After Mrs. Hungerburn bedpan, go to Yao room: Yao eating, Nurse T not there.
After Mr. Mendez bedpan, go to Yao room: Yao sleeping, Nurse T not there.
Close door. Unhook Yao upload line, connect to my brainport. See Mr. Yao upload. Many memories. Five whole lifes. Memories and memories of memories. Heavy load. See why people Upload even when can afford new body. Don’t dwell.
Go to second life. Must move quick so Nurse T no see. Scan memories fast. Is game, is best game. Is maingame.
Find memory: Yao, in young ladybody, dialogues with San Diego man re: Journey to Athenmore. See name of San Diego man: Olivio Sanchez. Yao offers Olivio 1500 gold for Journey to Athenmore.
Olivio: “I won’t sell it.”
Remember name, number, remember everything. But need gold. Total Loufis gold = 47.2.
Go through Yao memory, find bank codes. Remember too. Unconnect upload line from brainport, reconnect to upload machine. Yao still asleep. Door still closed. Me = genius.
Me to Moderator Behan: “Super sick. Butt explode. Home, please.”
Moderator Behan: “Go to the autodoc first, then home. You can’t be around these old people with gastro issues, but we need proof that you are sick to avoid any further XP deductions.”
Me = genius.
PM Quests:
1) Get gold.
2) Find Olivio Sanchez.
3) Buy Journey to Athenmore.
4) Ask Nurse T to play game. CoochParty? All Night Bonagefest? HandholdingII?
Maingame log, 2196.5.23 2350
PM Quest results:
1) Code work. Lots gold in Yao account: almost 3,000,000! Took 40,000, in case Olivio Sanchez wants more for Journey to Athenmore. If leftovers, Yao will give to me. Certain. Use bonus gold to take Nurse T to island and play games (not wait until next life!).
2) Olivio Sanchez dead, in Upland. Went to Upland. Up-land huge sim city bigger than world with many trees and gold roads and fountains of wine and free food everywhere and every place is as close as next. Full of people.
Grandpoppa: “After all these years, you’ve come to visit!”
Me: “Need to find Olivio Sanchez.”
Grandpoppa: “We can do it together.”
Me: “Be fast.”
Grandpoppa slow. Takes time with everything. Grandpoppa takes me to Fiesta de Muertos, where find Olivio.
Olivio: “Sold it before I uploaded. Some woman in Atlantica. She went by Priscilla Sentiva.”
Grandpoppa: “Let me show you my favourite park.”
Me: “No time.”
Grandpoppa: “They have shuffleboard.”
Me: “Tomorrow. Today, boss fight.”
3) Obviously not buy Journey to Athenmore today. Tomorrow: find Priscilla Sentiva.
4) Tomorrow: Nurse T.
Tonight, play HammerSmash. Buy InfiniHammer of the UberGods (5,000 gold). Top leader boards. Best Hammer-Smasher in World (!).
Cheat Accusation Transcript (excerpt), 2196.5.24 1230
Loufis Genlemden (henceforth Accused): Not cheat! Not steal! Borrow gold codes to buy Journey to Athenmore for Mr. Yao at Nordic Winds Retirement and Upload Palace. He confirm. He level 428, he boss in Loufis maingame. Ask Nurse T. Ask Moderator Behan. Loufis not UpUpDownDown. Loufis not cheat!
Mr. Yao (from Upland): This cretin worked his way into my confidence. I should have known from the start not to trust him. A product of inbreeding and crossbreeding and general genetic decline. They don’t make people like they used to.
Nurse T (name redacted for confidentiality): I thought he was harmless. Different, but harmless. I thought he watched me so closely when I was working with Mr. Yao because he had a crush. I never suspected he planned to steal from the man.
Moderator Behan: Please don’t enter his questlogs into the public record. Some of our conversations were confidential.
Adjudicatebot: Questlogs already entered as evidence. State your opinion of Accused.
Moderator Behan: He’s a gentle soul. Dim, but so many are these days. We loved to joke around, him and I. Half the time what we were saying had no relation to reality. Little jokes, that’s all.
Accused: Jokes. It was all just jokes.
Adjudicatebot: Questlog states: “Lies = useful. Lie more.” Why should we trust you?
Accused: Nurse T, please. Tell good things. Not cheat. Please.
Adjudicatebot: ADJUDICATING. ADJUDICATING.
Cheat Accusation Transcript (excerpt), 2196.5.24 1430
Adjudicatebot: Verdict reached. Loufis Genlemden found guilty of two cheats: grand theft gold and upload piracy. Purpose: win HammerSmash. Sentence: life in prison + return gold to Mr. Yao. Accused to serve sentence in body of Loufis Genlemden. Body becomes property of Mr. Yao. Sentence considered complete at expiry of body of Mr. Yao. Loufis Genlemden can apply for upload at completion of sentence.
Prisonlog, 2196.5.26 0630
Mr. Yao move into Loufis body yesterday. Take control. Young body. Rich now. Smart now. Loufis prison now. New attendant cleans up bedpan for old Mr. Yao body, then wheels away old Mr. Yao body. Loufis watch.
Nurse T to Mr. Yao: “Everything working?”
Mr. Yao (with Loufis mouth): “Let me see.”
Mr. Yao grabs Nurse T rumpflesh (with Loufis hand). Mr. Yao gets erection (with Loufis penis).
Mr. Yao: “Oh, I’d say everything is working just fine.”
Nurse T: “Tee hee.”
Mr. Yao: “Once I’m out of here, can I take you for dinner? We have so much to discuss.”
Nurse T: “But isn’t he, like, in there?”
Mr. Yao: “I keep him locked up in a little grey room. He can’t see or hear anything.”
Me: see everything, hear everything.
Nurse T smiles.
Nurse T: “Okay.”
Me: super sorry.
No quests.
BETWEEN THE BRANCHES OF THE NINE
Alex C. Renwick
The sky slowly filled with the dull purple light of predawn, warmth from the woman curled at Sigunna’s back leaching into her bones, heating her blood. These temporary sheaths of flesh the gods fashioned for them were so fragile, so ephemeral, so foreign to Odin’s silver hall or the death-rot darkness of Hel.
She rolled from Kelda’s warmth, pulled on breeches and boots, then blew the embers of the previous night’s fire until it reignited and began to crackle. She tucked tunic into belt and knelt to stroke Kelda’s short hair, the valkyrja-pale skin of her cheek. Though Odin’s creation made happy rumblings deep in her chest, she didn’t wake.
Sigunna stood. As quietly as possible she gathered the sleeping woman’s gear – knives, breeches, worn leather boots – and lowered each without a splash into the creek flowing past the camp. After packing the saddlebags of her mount she unhobbled the other horse, black where hers was dun. She swung onto the dun’s back and gave the black mare a light smack on its rump with the flat of her sheathed sword as she spurred her own beast into action.
That woke Kelda at last. Sigunna heard the other woman’s wordless bellow behind her, drowned by the clatter of her horse’s hooves on the pebbled road. She imagined the look on Kelda’s face when she found her breeches in the creek halfway to the next town, and smiled.
No need to make things too easy for Odin’s creature, after all. Sigunna was what Hela had made her.
Kelda fished her knives and boots from the cold creek, cursing Sigunna with the names of demons from the thousand thousand worlds – the little, inconsequential worlds littering the infinite cosmos stretching between the nine great branches of Yggdrasil.
“Bright Odin, lend me strength,” she muttered, wading through freezing shallows, searching in vain for her breeches as a greenish sun rose over distant indigo mountains. In only her tunic she set her sodden boots by the fire and resigned herself to making break
fast for one. In spite of all, she smiled as she cracked eggs into the iron pot, crumbling into it the single stale roll which had been left her, adding a few grindings of precious salt. Just like Sigunna to leave her salt, which she knew Kelda loved and which was rare in so many of the thousand thousand worlds. Salt she would leave her though she loved it herself; breeches, no.
Sigunna knew Kelda so well, knew she’d cook for her Valhalla-fuelled body the feast of a single meal rather than half starve for three. Breakfast fuelling her mortal sheath, her boots dry, the morning seemed not so bleak. As Kelda kicked apart the campfire remnants, an apologetic whinny sounded behind her.
She patted the black mare when it stepped from a copse of spindly trees. “There, there, old girl. That Hel-puppet and I have chased the gods’ blades across every branch of Yggdrasil. I don’t always fall so easily to bed with her…” Her lips quirked, thinking how welcome it had been, how grateful she was to have staved off immortal loneliness even for a night. “Ah well. In each mortal world I at some point find myself cold, alone, and without my breeches. Can’t blame a horse for running from a woman like that.”
The mare stood still as Kelda threw her blanket over its back and strapped her pack to its side, glad Hela’s demon thought nothing of gold, choosing only to rob her of her knives and breeches. Pulling herself up by the sturdy mane – she picked her steeds for strength over speed – she gripped tight the animal’s sides with her bare knees. She breathed deep, the little world’s morning air reaching crisp and clean into the recesses of her chest. She was surprised by how very much she enjoyed this fragile thing, this fleshly bundle of blood and bone and sinew currently housing her Odin-forged spirit. She remembered with slow fire the feel of her current body against that of the woman riding ahead, the heavy silk of Sigunna’s soft dark hair in her hands, the fierce pressure of Sigunna’s lips against her throat.
She patted the horse’s thick neck as it climbed the incline to the road, muscles rippling beneath bristly hide. “Don’ worry, girl,” she said, as they clambered onto the packed dirt and plodded toward the rising smaragdine sun. “We might yet arrive first to this Jarl Tyrfingr’s hall. A surprise awaits our Hel-spawn in the next town. A surprise she’ll like not at all, if everything goes well.”
She smiled again, combing her thick warrior’s fingers through the beast’s mane as it whinnied in companionable response.
Sigunna made good time. It was rare in most worlds to find free passage on well-kept roads, and not in every incarnation had she possessed so fleet a mount. She liked the feel of the horse’s gentle power beneath her legs, and the illusion the animal listened to her words and made sense of them. She’d grown quite attached, as well, to this frail human body. But it was all so fleeting. She couldn’t afford sentimentality; Loki’s children had fashioned her for the sole purpose of finding their sister Hela’s dark blade. For this gods’ game had Sigunna been made, as surely as if she were a cosmic hnefatafl marker carved from black amber: to reclaim Hela’s lost toy from the infinite lands between Yggdrasil’s branches and return it to Hel before Odin’s valkyrja recovered Valhalla’s bright one. Sigunna didn’t waste herself contemplating her own fate should her mistress lose such a game to her opponent.
The village sprang into view around a bend in the road. Midday stalls lined cobbled streets. Vendors hawked wares from corners and doorways. Cries of “Fine cloth, madam warrior!” and “Hot pies, madam warrior!” followed her, wafting past along with the hundred other sights and smells and sounds of inhabited places and of lives shorter than a blink of Hela’s necrotic eye.
Sigunna led her horse to a public trough and slid from its back. She looped its reins over the post and patted its sweat-darkened side. Around the main square elaborate carved or painted signs swung by chains above merchant doorways, pictures telling all in a land without a written language. Sigunna plainly made out the bakery, the weaver, the perfumery, the inn.
She strolled the bustling street, breathing the dust and sweat of mortal bodies pressed close. She passed the hostler’s and the smithy. She tilted her face to the pale green sun as it warmed her hair, her skin, the lids of her half-closed eyes. Catcalls shrilled overhead from narrow balconies lining second storeys, pretty women with painted smiles and unlaced bodices. “Spend coin with us, madam warrior,” they sang, and tittered and waved, and forgot her as soon as she passed. Sigunna heard them behind her as she continued down the street, calling to the next passer-by, then the next: “Hello, pretty baker-boy… Come, sir plowman, leave your coins here…”
She found the sign she sought: two swords thrust from the painted board as though wielded by invisible hands, hewn in shallow relief into the wood. Hammered metal covered the blades, tips gleaming in midday sun.
Sigunna ducked under a doorway slightly too low. Her eyes adjusted to the dim interior, though with the frail agonizing slowness of mortal flesh.
“Could I interest madam warrior in a sword of Tyrfingrby steel? Forged in the fire of a volcano, madam, and bathed in the blood of virgin maids.”
Sigunna squinted into the smoky gloom. Looking down, following the sound of the voice, she saw a small barrel of a man, his head scarcely high as her belt. His thick hands held a sword of local design. His face was a caricature of merchant obsequiousness.
She smiled. “I think, sir armsmith, that even bloodless maids could swat aside that weapon of yours.”
He frowned with a laugh, pitching the sword into a pile of near-identical pieces in one corner. “Well. Not a tourist, then,” he said. He wiped his hands on his smith’s smock and returned to his hearthfire. Easily hefting a pair of iron tongs, he lifted a cauldron from the flames to set it on the stone hearth. The scent of sweet herbs and sharp spices mingled in the air with the tang of metal and sweat.
“Tisane?” he offered. She nodded. A child stepped from the shadows to set two earthenware cups on the hearth ledge. “Son,” said the armsmith, “run along on that errand we spoke of earlier. Best it be done quickly.”
The boy peered from between his sandy-red braids at the tall woman, at her burnished skin, her long coils of hair which seemed to suck light from the room. Sigunna reached into her pocket for a tiny bluestone carving, a miniature helmeted godling astride a salamander steed with eight legs like Odin’s eight-legged Sleipnir – a creature from another of the thousand thousand. She tossed it and he fumbled to catch it, small dirty hands flashing.
The smith handed Sigunna a cup before joining his son to squint at the elaborate carving, run his callused fingers along the beast’s eight legs. “A strange animal,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“No,” she said. “It’s not a beast from around here.”
The smith folded his son’s hand over the carving. “Go, child. Let’s get that errand done with.”
After a shy bob in Sigunna’s direction the boy wheeled and fled, ducking through a hide flap in the rear wall. The smith drew a dipper from the cauldron, sprinkled another handful of herbs into Sigunna’s cup, and ladled hot water over the top. The aroma tickled the insides of her nostrils, but the heat felt good as the liquid burned the back of her throat.
Her stomach rumbled, reminding her she’d sacrificed breakfast to foil Kelda, intending to gain the gods-blade first. It was true the Odin-forged bright blade would sing with the same power as Hela’s dark one, drawing Sigunna, calling her more strongly the closer she came – but until she found the exact source she wouldn’t know which of the two gods’ weapons languished on this tiny green-tinted world. She’d searched Yggdrasil’s infinite abysses, had been so close to one gods-toy or the other so many times, only to clash with Kelda, to destroy Odin’s tool as she herself was destroyed, and the artifact of their conflict whisked off again to another hiding spot, to tempt and tease the servants of the gods as the gods themselves played their callous cosmic games…
But this time, this time, Sigunna would succeed. She would possess the blade and plunge it into the sheath of her own morta
l chest, claiming victory for her mistress, and be welcomed back into the fiery halls of her birth, her wanderings done at last.
A clank as the smith set his tongs by the fire brought Sigunna’s attention back to the smoky room. The spiced aroma from the cauldron made her stomach repeat its growl as she drained her cup, willing away the needs of her temporary, mortal body. “It’s said,” she began, “across the mountains to the south, that there was a Jarl Tyrfingr who wielded a blade blessed by the gods, a blade that never lost a battle. It’s said his arm never tired and his blood never spilled so long as he held that blade. It’s said the blade was darker than night, its serrated edge sharp as steel thorns.”
The smith nodded. “Everyone knows the saga of the current Jarl’s great-great-grandsire, who bought lasting peace with his famous swords. We haven’t seen war here for a hundred years.”
Sigunna drew a long breath, trying to clear her sight. The room seemed to have grown smokier, the air thicker and more cloying, harder to take into her lungs. “Famous s words? The skald I heard described only one blade, a dark sword with an edge like thorns.”
The smith lunged to catch her cup as it fell from Sigunna’s slack fingers. He set both cups aside as she slumped onto the stone bench by the hearth. “No, madam warrior. The saga goes, ‘And so wielded he in one hand the sword Bright, known by its swirled bluestone pommel… and in the other hand carried he the sword Dark, with teeth sharp like a beast’s, and so vanquished he all enemies and every jarl in four directions, bringing peace to the lands of Tyrfingr.’”
Sigunna’s tongue felt thick and wrong in her mouth. “Swords bright and dark?”
“I’m sorry, madam warrior. So, so sorry,” said the smith, as her eyelids dropped shut.
If Kelda reaches the blades first, thought Sigunna before blackness wholly overtook her, Loki’s children will leave my immortal spirit to rot between the branches forever… forever and ever and ever…
Kelda and her sturdy mount plodded into town as twilight eased into dusk. Lanterns swayed in crisp evening breezes, yellow spheres glowing. Vendors unrolled woaden blue wool to cover wares for the night. Laughter spilled from open doorways. Glancing into the bright squares of light as she rode past, Kelda saw men and women eating and drinking, laughing, kissing. The murmur of skaldic verse and the soft sounds of trysts wafted from alleyways, rooftops, balconies.