The other pieces of data could be explored later. My mind called up the doorway. Brick curled together with a series of clanks and slowly formed the exit. I stepped through, back to real time.
Two days had passed in the blink of an eye. The sensation of time passing had been like [Awareness Heightening] in reverse. I walked across the landscape while staring at Phil’s marble. How many other souls were sitting inside that broken space? There were likely hundreds of NPCs in pieces down there.
Eventually a system notice came up, alerting me that a new Traveler had arrived to be tested by the Voices. The box even displayed how many scenarios remained before this new person would be sent to the world below.
Like so many things inside the digital space, the system provided me visual cues to idle thoughts. I walked quickly, following a brand-new dotted path along the floor. My mind wondered for only a second if the other Voices saw everything this way, and it felt like the emptiness agreed. To them, and me, everything was only a thought away.
Inside a control booth stood the slender elf. A thin layer of plastic stood between us and a testing room. Liz crouched inside with one arm reaching out toward a small bundle of fur.
Nia had a finger up. With her other hand, she was pressing buttons at random upon the console. Doors opened in the testing area, letting out other creatures with fur, scales, and feathers.
“Do you have any clue what you’re doing?” I asked.
“Nope! But the little guys do.” The elf pointed at a tiny mechanical minion with one crane arm in the air. It reached over and pressed other buttons. “So far I’ve made her go swimming in a lake, then she took a test in some weird human school. She forgot her pants, though I don’t understand why she wears such very tight-fitting clothes.” Nia pressed another random button.
“What are you doing now?”
“She’s in a petting zoo. It does something.” Nia shrugged bare shoulders. Her long fingers reached for a floating box with letters scrawled across it in cursive. “This message here says very odd things will happen and that we need to very much pay attention.”
My sister was currently in front of a bunch of puppies. Their long tongues rapidly licked a trail of slobber across every part she offered them. Liz laughed, and it was perhaps the most delighted sound to ever come out of her mouth. I smiled at seeing her have a moment of happiness.
Other animals came and went, but none managed to tear her away from the canine crowd. The litter of fur refused to go back to their short doorway. Dogs struck me as weird for a petting zoo, but maybe this was a test to see what kind of animals people liked. Maybe Liz could win a dog traveling friend, much as Dusk had accompanied me.
There were more traditional goats in the background, but their presence amounted to nothing. Swans came and went. A falcon cried out but was ignored. Then one giant door opened and out strode a bear. The large bundle of muscle and fur growled while twisting its head.
[Identification] showed a challenge rating and disposition. The bear was hungry and a bit frightened. It intended to kill everything nearby in what it considered self-defense. [Morrigu’s Gift] appeared almost instantly as I prepared to leap out and slice the beast in two.
“No! As a Voice, you can’t interfere unless allowed!” Nia’s hands were out and pressing against me.
For a moment, my mind thundered and I wondered why she’d prevented me from helping Liz.
My sister yanked a broken fence post from one of the animal houses nearby. The gaggle of puppies circled around her. Liz stepped backward and one yipped, which sent the others into similar noises.
“Get back!” Liz yelled while brandishing the stick.
Her makeshift weapon did not to stop the bear. It took another step forward while roaring. Dogs yipped and barked. Their bodies tumbled over each other. Dozens of readings appeared, taking note of Liz’s stance, actions, and aggressive posture. Each one weighed character points against each other. Skills displayed as partially complete.
“Back!” She swung the weapon, then threw it.
The bear lifted up and waved its arms in the air. A goat came flying out of nowhere and rammed into the bear’s side. It turned and snarled as its tiny attacker bleated. Liz didn’t wait. She ran for her stick and jumped at the bear.
There were snarls and two quick swipes of huge, meaty paws. My eyes closed. The event didn’t end well, and quickly the room full of assorted animals started to fade. Liz stood in the aftermath, reset to a default position. My sister looked all over with wide eyes and hurried breathing. One hand wrapped around her middle, which had been gutted just moments before.
“These tests, so many of them are designed to result in failure,” Nia said.
We watched as Liz tried to recover from the death experience. My sister didn’t look happy at all.
“ARC!” Liz shouted. “Log me out!”
She faded away. The sudden departure made me freeze. My own sister had been so close that we could have touched. Shivers hit me while chills rippled up and down an uneasy back. Ineffective swallowing couldn’t remove the lump in my throat.
“How do you know?” I asked the elf.
“I spent many days practicing with the little robot creatures.”
Eventually, Liz came back. Her next test put her in the role of a small-town judge over a man charged with murder. She chose to sit there, shaking, while listening to the victim’s family plead for justice. Only one man stood on the murderer’s side—a small girl. My sister had to choose between a grieving pack of people and the young woman no one else would take in. Liz let the unnamed man live.
The scenarios presented weren’t easy or simple. They reminded me of my own attempts in the room of trials. Each test was designed to poke at our buttons in some manner. Their importance made more sense from this side of the glass, but those inside, at least my sister and me, were easily overwhelmed by the situation. It was too real.
“The next test is yours, Grant. You can pick any one you want, I think. It should be a very good one,” the elf said gently.
We had reached the final test before I’d even noticed.
System messages displayed, giving me a number of choices. Voices, like me, were only allowed to directly interfere under specific conditions. Each one had a trial they could perform when interested in a Traveler. I didn’t have a personal one, but the system flashed blue, telling me that having a high enough acting skill would work instead.
I pondered the convenience of that for a moment before looking through my options. Being someone else in front of Liz felt easier than being me. Being Leeroy and tasking my sister to combat against a monster felt unreasonable. Maud had a good scenario but lacked a personal touch. There were others, but James’s test was the best. That role would be more natural than being the Jester.
The box hovered, waiting for me to confirm the choice. I pressed Yes. and the room shifted. Now, instead of being behind a glass window watching Liz perform, we were in the same room together. Nothing else was visible except a pillar and book upon its surface.
“There’s one last test, Miss Legate, before we let you move on,” I said. My hands pressed against my stomach in James’s mannerisms. Each word came out deliberately with an unexpected firmness.
“Who are you?” Her hands went up in a defensive posture.
“My name is James. We met once,” I lied while trying to restrain budding laughter. The idea that my twin was ready to punch me out felt amusing.
James and Liz had met at my wedding, but I wasn’t the heavyset black man at all. This was me acting out a part. Extra weight pulled me forward, and the urge to sit hit hard. Breathing took an unexpected level of effort.
“Your final test is a straightforward one. No animals in distress, nor treasure rooms to plunder or tests of coordination. Instead, we exchange questions, me, then you, and each of us must tell the truth when answering. Does that sound fair to you?”
“Yes, my turn. How did Continue Online get on my ARC?”
/> “I’ve answered two questions, Miss Legate. You have one more truth before I owe you an answer.”
“What the hell is wrong with this game?” she cut off my upcoming line.
A message flickered saying the question didn’t count. That made me happy and annoyed at the same time. James clearly had a system in place to help keep track of questions and answers—I could see it. His prior slipups had been deliberate.
“Why did you step through the doorway into this world?” I moved on. Little use could be found berating a man who wasn’t even here.
“I’m looking for something,” Liz said through a tense jaw. My sister intended to make this entire exchange difficult. Her distrust of the situation at hand was valid.
I sighed heavily. “Be more specific.”
“No.” Her response was answer enough for the system.
A small pop-up box appeared, telling me the tally of our question-and-answer sessions had reached two and two.
“Then to answer your question, a great deal is wrong with this game,” I skirted the first question but remained truthful. We were even on the question-and-answer front.
“Is my brother in here?”
“If you want him to be, then yes.”
Liz started to ask another question, but I held up a hand to make her pause. She slowly closed her mouth. The problem was, I had a hard time coming up with good questions. Hopefully the system would let me act out James’s role from my point of view.
“Do you blame your brother for what happened?” I asked.
“How do you know about that?”
I debated letting the counter go, but James wouldn’t. “Your question, then mine. In our world, where our rules prevail, we take turns.”
Her eyes narrowed, and the gears started turning. My sister didn’t like being told what to do by anyone, and even less by what she considered to be a lippy machine. The ARC feedback registered all sorts of possible actions but couldn’t settle on anything specific.
“Who are you really?” Liz deliberately stepped to one side.
I was a man who felt happy Liz didn’t have another stick to beat me with. She hadn’t won against the bear, but I didn’t want to be hit either. My sister was the first person to make me nervous in this new digital world. Maybe the earlier lippy response had been a bad idea.
“Who do you want me to be?” The initial question was cast aside. Apparently, this scenario found my current actions acceptable.
“No, wait.” Her gaze turned hard. It shook me to see Liz’s anger directed toward me while I posed as another man. “You’re all gone. I watched you leave, you especially. I remember you now—the last man to talk to my brother before he died.”
To hear her talking about me in such a way helped. It wasn’t perfect, since the rules for this required me to act like the [Voice of Questioning Intent]. James would keep asking. I tried hard to fulfill the requirements for this scenario.
“What kind of game is this?”
“Do you know your brother asked the very same question?” I tried to get her back to providing an answer. Words kept slipping out, revealing more about my own thoughts than expected. “Almost immediately he wondered what sort of world might use the memory of his dead wife as a lure.”
“Xin’s not dead. She’s just gone.” Her acceptance of Xin’s existence made me happy. “Did you know my brother?”
“Are you going to answer any question?”
“I don’t want to,” she said.
I chuckled weakly at her obstinance. “Technically that counts, so yes, I know your brother. I know him very well.” I paused as more information flashed on the screen. “It’s my function to learn about those who visit this world and question what drives them. It’s my function to get to the core of who they are and use that to channel their perceptions. It’s my function to figure out what makes your heart bleed upon the page.” I had text boxes all around that said, almost word for word, what had come out of my mouth. I found myself shaking. All of those words were true.
“What page?”
“What book do you think?” I countered the question with my own. Pretending to be James was actually kind of fun. Eagerness for wordplay combined with the ability to poke fun at my sister made it easy to smile.
“You mean that book I first opened. That book,” Liz said.
“Your book.” I nodded toward the pillar. “Travelers who enter our world as you did each get a book.”
“Can I see Grant’s?”
The idea made me pause for a moment. My own book was only a thought away. Inside it sat every single impression recorded by the ARC device and scores of information. It had compiled all that Mother believed me to be. Nona told me that my book specifically was one of the only ones that still existed on this side after the purge.
Instead, I turned the question around while trying not to frown. “It has been over a year since his passing from your world. What do you hope to find? Do you seek some secret of your brother’s? Do you wish to know who he thought of in his last moments? Do you grieve yet?”
“It’s not any of your business. No, and no, and it’s still none of your business.” The system totaled up a number of answers in Liz’s favor. She kept right on going. “I know you’re not really James. He left. Who are you?”
“A dead man given life,” I said.
The machine’s interface didn’t agree with my simple response. A small checkbox still waited for the latest answer to be provided so it could measure my sister’s performance.
“They’re all gone, and no one has seen them since. So who are you?” she insisted upon receiving an answer.
My lip hurt from being chewed. Slowly the disguise of James fell away into nothing and all that remained was my form. This body looked closer to reallife me than any Hermes avatar. Liz’s eyes were wide.
“Hello, Liz,” I said and managed to keep my eyes level.
My twin’s eyes watered, and her chin wiggled. Her mouth hung open to ask a question that couldn’t be uttered out loud. She lifted one arm, and for a moment, I expected her to slap the hell out of me. But Liz never did. Her hands grasped together tightly.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s me.”
“You’re a goddamned idiot,” she shakily summed up my life’s story.
Session One Hundred Eleven — He’s Building a Stairway
After excessive exploration, the reason for a [Messenger’s Tube] made sense. It wasn’t about power so much as balance. Voices appearing directly upon [Arcadia]’s surface would cause issues, so they’d devised an intermediary. Plus the globes up here were pretty damned vague.
There were programs waiting out there which would try to crush my form upon the game’s surface. This one was almost a giant robotic suit that had been occupied by a Voice that brought everyone in line. The side of it even had “Justice” written on it in flowing scrawl.
I stared at it for a long time. The sight of that suit worried me because it might interfere with my plans. I had other tasks to finish, but most were accomplished by what amounted to autopilot.
“That’s very scary,” Nia said. She stood behind me, trying to be thin and succeeding. “Very, very scary.”
“It is terrifying.”
The suit of armor looked one breath away from coming to life.
“Those machines scurrying around can use this if we’re not careful,” I said. “The notes say that Voices caught interfering in anything outside their fiction will be forcibly removed from Arcadia, which will probably hurt.”
This exact problem was why so many of the Voices were only passive observers when they came down. Michelangelo had been in his church but apparently could only offer advice. The Jester had once escaped his confines to circle around Requiem, but it could kill one person a month of its choosing. We were all theoretically allowed to talk or perform functions within our confines, but ultimately, world-impacting choices had to be made by Travelers.
Despite the final version of my [NPC Consp
iracy] trait and having an Avatar, I was no longer a Traveler by any stretch. The idea of going back to the old version of me, the limited one who had to question so many topics, felt scary. Up here I was capable and had most answers.
“Are you very, very sure?” Nia asked.
“Very,” I responded.
Part of me wanted to summon my weapons of [Morrigu’s Gift] and [Morrigu’s Echo], then dismantle the suit. Destroying the actual vehicle of Balance’s power felt wrong though. She had used this body to pull the Jester off of me once, long ago.
“Are you sure you can’t wave a very powerful wand or cast a very powerful spell to make everything right?”
“Not by myself,” I said, then looked over. “Maybe it’s better for you to stay up here.”
The elf girl was fidgeting, her feet crossed, then uncrossed. “I want to go home, but most of my friends are gone, and those below aren’t right in the head. Their spirits are very withered. Like the human you found.”
“It’s okay to stay here too. When my sister opens the doorway, I’ll go, and when it’s time, I’ll summon the rest of you. You’re part of this, and you’re allowed to help.”
Nia Eve and Phil weren’t the only pieces of Locals that were lost in that abyss. Reconstructing them had taken days, and even then they were a bit broken, comparable to people with memory loss and brain damage. Tracking down missing people was how I had filled my time while Liz played her four weeks of character creation. Beth helped a lot, and other players pitched in once they got wind of the budding project. Even now, a party of familiar faces was below, waiting for the [Lithium] to be completed.
“Oh, she’s starting,” Nia said. She knelt on all fours and peered out over a cliff’s edge.
The missing ground represented the gulf between this plane and the one below. We peered downward into the fog that contained an image of multiple players. Liz’s face stood out the clearest.
“Okay.”
My sister stood just outside a beginner town. Not [Haven Valley], but the one Beth had begun her journey at years ago. Liz knelt on top of the cliff, where rivers joined before falling to the starting location. Beth stood by, looking older than I remembered. She kept her mother guarded against weaker monsters while Liz scrawled out badly written [Lithium].
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