by Rae Nantes
She raised an eyebrow at me. "You want me to be a politician."
"A fake politician for a fake government to elect a fake prime minister."
"Why not just tell them the elections are done in our home country, and that we're just a colony."
"Holy shit, that's perfect," I said. I gave her a hug and ran out the door. This would be a way to shirk away the problem. In the meantime, I would just have to bullshit our way until we could create a model government. But wait. That would mean someone here still needs to act as a governor-type person. Like a viceroy or mayor. I ran back inside. "Willow!"
"What the hell is it now?"
"We need a governor."
"You be the governor."
And so I became the governor. The glorious Reka Republic had just concluded its first historic election with an overwhelming one hundred percent landslide to the new colonial governor, Alex.
Of course, this all meant that eventually, as all colonies do, we would need to declare independence from our fake home country and then wage a fake war and then we would be real.
Easy.
Once we get large enough, I figured I could just have the Seekers be subject to the government, in the form of a department or an agency. That way, they'll be satisfied that I was technically leading them, and I would be happy that Willow was leading them directly. A shuffling of burdens that pleased everyone, until it would hit me the scale of my responsibility.
I had taken the habit of smoking with boot-hat man, hoping that befriending him would lead to insight on forbidden magic and the like, but also because he was fun to listen to. "Look at em all, buddy," he said. "They're really enjoying it out here."
I stared from our spot in the tower, the fancy pipe hanging in my mouth as the smoky flavor coated my tongue. From our vantage point, the people at the port were tiny, hustling back and forth at the docks, loading and unloading from ships here and there. Just a few weeks in, and we already had a dozen piers set up, each with vessels of all sizes, each busy with seaborne traffic and loading cranes. Another ship filled with people just made shore, and as soon as the gangplank dropped, they poured out - hundreds of them. Hopeful families, some seeking a new start, others running from oppression or war. It's what we were now, an escape.
"You done brooding, yet?" he asked.
And yet the thought returned. I'm the goddamn governor. How did this happen? It didn't seem real at first, hell it still wasn't technically real, but the fact that all those people were my responsibility shook me to my core. What if I fuck up? The trick, I'd come quick to realize, is to simply not fuck up.
As I spent most of my days directing the growth of the town as a bumbling, mustached foreigner, the other half of my day was spent training magic with Willow. The short mornings I spent here with boot-hat man.
"Hello? Buddy?"
"Oh," I said. "Sorry."
He snickered and relit my pipe with his finger. "I guess it builds character. Or something."
I smiled as we stood in silence for a moment. The breeze returned and swept my hair and was chilly on my neck. Though it wasn't as cold here as it was in Nisa, I still had to wear leathers and furs or thick wizard robes. Today, I was wearing a fireproof hooded cloak for my training later with Willow. "Hey, boot-hat man," I said.
He burst into laughter. "My name's Greg."
"Oh."
He shook his head, his shoulders still shaking as he chuckled. "But now that we have bounties on our heads, just call me whatever."
"So, uh, how do you get your hands on forbidden magic?"
"You don't," he said. "Well, I mean we can make scrolls with them, sure, but usually we just make the spells outright."
"Okay, but how?"
He took a deep breath and stared out towards the sea. "A lot of research. A lot of time. And a lot of patience."
"Okay, but how?" I pressed on.
Boot-hat man sighed and glanced at me before resting his arms on the tower ledge. He stroked his pipe in thought, his eyes searching for questions and answers and calculations of who knows what, until he finally found the solution he needed. Nodding to himself, a portal snapped open in front of him. He dug around in the cabinets on the other side, shut the wrong cabinet door, opened the next, before finding what he was searching for - a scroll. Without looking at me, he handed it over.
It was dusty, and on its face it said debug(). "The hell is this?" I asked.
"It'll give you loads of information about the spells or whatever. Coordinates, temperatures, speeds. Just basic stuff."
I set my hand on it. It flashed, and the remnant dust swept away in the wind. It taught me something, but it wasn't clear as to what. "How do I use it?
"It's complicated," he said. "It needs arguments passed in. We've figured out a bunch of them over the years, but the rest is still a mystery." He took a heavy puff of his pipe. The smoke flowed out of his nostrils and mouth as he spoke. "For now, just focus on using coordinates - debug(coords)."
I focused myself as the target and whispered the command. "Debug(coords)." In my heart, my soul, my mind's eye, I could see a long list of numbers preceded by three letters - X, Y, and Z. "Whoa," I slipped out.
"Okay, buddy, now try debug(coords, abso)."
"Debug(coords, abso)." The numbers were now continually changing, so fast I couldn't read them. As I stared blankly, reading them within myself, he explained.
"Those are the absolute coordinates," he said. "Since we're on a planet that is orbiting a sun, that is orbiting along the galaxy, that is floating wherever - likely away from the origin of the big bang - your position in spacetime is always changing. This is why meteor is so tough to learn. You gotta know physics to properly calculate the portals."
"Neat!" I said.
We stood together in the tower for a length of time as he taught me the basics of spell diagnostics and how I could use it to create spells, including showing me the argument insight. As eager as I was to learn, he only gave me the arguments to develop utility spells, stuff that is already legal in the world. But with that, I knew exactly what my first project would be.
The player status screen.
Chapter 31
The Code Seeker
I spent hours toying with the spells boot-hat man gave me, trying to study and synthesize them into something useful. Using the insight argument, I was able to watch the light spell work in action, understanding its parameters and effects to some degree. This enabled me to modify my light spell's shape and density, creating a hologram. With the vars argument, I searched for the variable that contained the light color, which was apparently stored in hexadecimal, and I tested changing the colors. As I did this, something clicked inside me, and I realized that colors could directly be passed as arguments in the light spell itself. With this, I could create a blue rectangular holograph. Neat!
The next problem was to fill the holograph with information. Using a sequence of spells - or in this case, functions - I was able to find the variables that held the coordinates, health, and mana. By focusing my will into the hologram when I cast light, I was able to display the data.
Unfortunately, the health display was utterly unusable. What I was hoping for was an HP bar, but instead, I got some crazy number with exponents tagged to the end. After giving it some thought, it really did make sense. Health bars in old games were really just a shortcut, a representation of a player's health that couldn't be calculated to any realistic degree. But it’s different now. This world was a molecular level simulation, and now health bars were pointless. How could we even quantify health in the first place?
What we could quantify was mana. That was something that was programmed in, certainly stored by a variable somewhere - and it was. After some trial and error, I was able to pull the mana variable and throw it on the screen.
51.72
Was it a lot? Was it a little? I had no idea. I cast flare on a nearby hill and checked again.
50.11
It was neat, but the small
number surprised me. I spent 1.61 mana on a moderate-strength fire spell, so by varying the strength of each cast, the mana cost would also change. I already knew that, but now I could see the numbers. I tested some of my other spells: wall, earth, water, farstep. Each had a differing mana cost that I knew innately, but now it was confirmed. After studying the rate of mana regeneration, I figured that it acted almost exactly like a person's stamina. It actually did have an effect on physical endurance, but the algorithms that defined the relationships were far beyond what I had the patience for.
After a couple of hours tweaking the spell, I finally had a working status screen. It displayed an array of data about my health, such as weight and hydration, and even had a map with a coordinate marker. Just like a regular old video game. I swung open my hand and whispered the spell sequence a few times to test it. When I was satisfied, I pulled out the blank scroll and scribbled the spells - a function of functions with nested functions, each with their own mess of arguments and parameters. I named it statusOpen() and absorbed the scroll.
Instead of having to spend extra mana on finding and pulling variables and editing the light spell, now I could simply invoke the function itself, and now I could share it.
Feeling proud of myself and just a little less useless, I hiked back down the mountain to spread the word of the new magic scientist in town. Maybe they would be proud of me. Maybe they would share even more of their secrets, even taking me more seriously.
As I walked the dirt path down the mountainside, I was at ease with myself. The wind was gentle. The air was brisk. The sea shimmered against the port town, and I felt the gravel crunch beneath my feet. Around me clear blue skies and mountain ranges that flanked plains and valleys. This was my Anatolian home, and it brought me peace.
And as always, my mind brought me back to darker places. Variables, functions, arrays of data locked behind a veil unseen. Was I manipulating and creating things that I myself was made of? I felt the numbers that represented me, pulled the code that pointed to my being. The reality of it all twisted in my gut again that I was just code. I was a program. The players were right about that, of course, but how justified were they in their treatment to us - their treatment of the nipsies?
None. Just because we were somehow less than human, didn't make us not human. Hell, even animals had more rights in Stella Vallis than what we were given here. I wondered if the developers of our world even knew about our plight. Not just us, but the entire multiverse of games had scores of people who wrote the scripts and the code and cultivated the nipsy populations, so what about them? Our god seemed to have vanished from us, but the gods of those other games seemed to have not. I was almost jealous.
I played with the idea that maybe I was special. I was the glitch that reincarnates at the shore, the bug that always returns to find itself to crawl toward some forgotten goal. Perhaps that was what I was to him. He locked us in here like insect specimens, and I was the target ant for him to watch and research and write scientific studies on. These might've been delusions of grandeur, but I needed to think more about who I was and where I was going. Running away from the darkness of my mind would get me nowhere.
I rested my eyes on the shores and the port town. The people seemed to be happy, shouting about some celebration, having some type of bonfire. Were we starting a new holiday? I used one of the spells Willow gave me, farsight, and zoomed my vision at the partygoers.
My heart sank at what I saw.
Chapter 32
The Raid
"Over here!" one of the players shouted. "This one has a bounty!"
I stood on the wood deck at the start of the pier. Shouts and screaming, clashing of metal and popping roars of gunfire. Smoke. Ash. Blood. I watched in horror as the town I had created, I had developed was getting ravaged, pillaged, destroyed by this foreign force. Players who had come to take from us, to take from who they thought was an easy target. They were running into homes and killing who they could, chasing who they couldn't, and stealing what they found.
But now they found me.
One of the players, dressed in high-level knight's armor, charged at me with his shield out, presumably to tank my first spell.
"Flare(left, right)!" My blue flames poured on him from the side, but they were drawn into his shield. It absorbed it! I noticed another group had caught sight of me, and before the knight could cleave me in half, I farstepped away.
"What?" the knight yelled. "This some kinda hack shit?" He looked at his comrades. "This one's using rare spells! Party up on her!"
Roughly a dozen of them split into three groups, each in the usual party formation - two DPS, a healer, and a tank. "Debug(level)," I whispered. They were all past level 40, some even reaching the 60s. I should've been afraid, I should've run for help, but seeing my town and my people get assaulted by these human apes, awakened something within me.
One of the archers drew his bow. "Barrage(fire)!" A stream of arrows manifested around him. Fiery trails shot toward me, screaming with speed.
"Wall(ice)! Farstep!" I landed on a rooftop. Behind me, the arrows slapped into the ice shield before both vanished.
"Where'd she go?"
"Up there!"
"Javelin(earth)!" the knight invoked.
"Wall(earth)!" I countered. "Insight.” As the rocky spear hurled toward me, I read it. I read the numbers, the variables, the functions, the essence. Then I learned it. The stone javelin smashed into my shield, piercing through just inches from my chest. Bits of rock splintered into my face, covering me in dust. I dropped the earthen wall. "Javelin(ice)! Javelin(flare)!" Twin lances spawned beside me, one frosted over, the other engulfed in blue flame. The players tried to scatter. Two were impaled. A knight to freeze to death, a healer to burn alive.
These were my enemies. These were the devils that plagued my people. These were the ones that I would relish killing. I wasn’t fighting to protect the town, I was fighting for me.
"Revive!" another healer yelled.
I targeted the bodies. "Pyrolize!" As their souls were returning to their corpses, they found themselves burning away. It was a shame. My skill with that spell was still weak. Now they screamed in pure horror as the burn eased across their bodies at a leisurely pace.
"Heal 2!"
"Pyrolize!" I countered.
"Provoke!"
The entirety of my focus yanked over to one of the far knights. Though I targeted the healer, the knight stumbled to his knees, his sword and shield clanking against the wood deck beneath him. He was turning to dust, but he pulsed with a shimmer. The healers were struggling, but with their skills, I couldn't keep up.
One of the mages aimed his staff at me. "Wind(back, front)!"
The wind came from behind, tossing my body like a rag doll off the house. I crashed on the deck below, just in time to face the charge of a swordsman. I farstepped away to the mouth of an alley. I was getting tired and out of breath.
"Barrage!"
"Insight. Wall(earth)!"
A gunshot.
As I waited for the volley of arrows to clink against my shield, something stabbed me. It pierced through my side, shredded my guts and ripped out the other way. I fell to my knees and felt my stomach. My hands were scarlet, the blood caught the sunlight. "Wall(fire)," I coughed out. It seared an opening to the house, and I crawled inside.
More gunshots. The fresh lumber of the buildings erupted in splinters and puffs of dust where every bullet hit. Another ice javelin thumped against the wall, almost scathing me. The cold pulled goosebumps from my skin as I struggled up the stairs. I gasped for air. I clutched at my sides as I shuffled along the wall. My entire body was burning hot, and I was dying.
Then I saw them.
The father from before. He was crouched in the bathroom, huddling over two terrified little girls, protecting them from the unknown, the killers, the ones who wished them harm, the ones who I should've been protecting them from, but I was too weak. And now I would likely die from my m
istake. My mistake of not getting stronger. Not getting stronger quickly enough, not having the drive to try harder, to try faster, to be better in every way that Lord Gaia was and I wasn't.
They stared into me with those scared little eyes, and I stared back with my own.
Then I felt the rage.
Footsteps pounded up the stairs. I spun on my heels. "Broil." A wave of heat hit the knight in front, but it was too weak. He pulled his hand over his eyes as if too close to a fire. But that wasn't my intention. "Insight." I felt the wave pulse from me, the propagation, the particle dynamics. I stumbled from the bloodloss but sharpened my resolve.
Broil was an area-of-effect skill. It would explode it out and travel far, melting those who were caught within its wave. Pyrolize wasn't - it was only single target. But not anymore.
"Pyrolize(left, right)!"
It sounded like a wave crashing, and in essence, it was. A wave of ash ripped across the building, erupting into dust. The spell traveled through the wall, through the players, and out the other side sending flurries of gray flakes that fluttered out like butterflies. This was magic.
I coughed and tasted blood. My vision blurred, I stumbled and fell to my side. My head thunked against the hardwood floor. Outside, beyond the gnashing sounds of battle, beyond the metal clashing and the gunfire, beyond the shouts and screams, I heard them. Muffled voices - broil(blood), erupt(blood), disintegrate(blood). The roof creaked and groaned and started to cave. There was a snap beneath me. My body fell through the floor, and I landed on my kitchen table. Silverware and dishes clanked and shattered. I was back home again, far from the port town and far from the fighting.
"Ah, shit," Yun said. He tossed his cup aside. "Heal!"
Then the darkness came.
Chapter 33
The Development
Cinnamon rolls. The sweet, savory smell invaded my senses and roused me awake. My stomach whined. My mouth salivated. I grunted as I sat up in bed. Bandages wrapped my torso, and my ribs were sore, throbbing even.