Was it a copy, or had I summoned and altered the original? Moreover, how could I ever tell the difference?
It was nevertheless what I needed for Test #3. I sketched a new rune stone and added kanji for massage and another for healing. Out popped a blue rune stone. I’d conceived healing stones as specialized to distinct types of medicine—different stones for antitoxins and suturing, for instance. But many operated on the principle that water poured over their surface became enchanted with the stone’s magic. I placed the stone into a shallow dish in the cart Tammagan had dropped off and poured water over its surface.
When I sank my fingers into the water, I sighed at the warmth. I undressed, splashed the water onto my limbs, and lay flat. The magic seemed to spread through my body until all the soreness from swimming, dragon-slaying, and running around faded completely. It took two more treatments to fix my ankle, but soon the swelling was gone and I could walk normally.
I’d skipped lunch to work, and Elsie brought me dinner. “You sure pissed off the Captain,” she said, and when she smiled her eyes twinkled.
I put a lot of mental effort into not wanting to marry her. “I’m not mad about the Akarri being women. For the record. And I’m sorry you all have to wear that stupid armor.”
Elsie laughed. “Don’t apologize to me. I don’t wear mine. It pinches. I’m naked under this robe.”
I think my gulp was audible back on Earth. “What?”
“Just kidding,” she said with a wink, knocking on the metal breastplate beneath. “As embarrassing as it is to wear something a bunch of lecherous old men designed—probably specifically to shame women into not joining the Akarri—and as much as I’d rather have functional armor, it does attract the eye of recruits. When we’re little, I mean—before we realize how not-nice arrows and sharp blades are. It’s flashy; draws the eye of a certain type of girl. One who sees it as a chance to flout society’s rules. It’s…” She bit her lower lip. “It’s one reason I joined. So it blew up in the Council’s face a little bit.”
But something else bothered me, and while it was picking at a scab, I had to ask. “How many of you have died because the armor didn’t cover everything?”
Elsie frowned. “Too many.” She glanced down at the cart and her eyes widened. “My stars. Is that a rune stone?”
“Yeah. It’s for sore muscles and busted joints.”
“I’ve never heard of such a stone.” She dipped her hand into the water and gasped. “The ache in my hand from writing reports—it’s gone. Entirely. Where did you find this? This rune—it’s totally unique.”
“I know a few unique runes.” I wasn’t sure how she would react to the kanji dictionary, so I didn’t tell her about it.
“The Queen is going to love you. Hell, I already do.”
Don’t hit on her. Don’t hit on her. Well, hit on her just once and see if it sticks. “I like moonlit walks on the beach if you ever want to go out on a date. Wait. Do Korvians have dates?” I’d forgotten to write about courtship rituals.
“By ‘date’ do you mean ‘stepping out’?”
“Um. Getting to know one another. Possible hand-holding.”
Elsie giggled. “Is that all you do on ‘dates’? It sounds like a very tame version of stepping out.”
I struggled for oxygen. “They can range on a scale of tameness, depending on the mutual interests of the two… participants.”
“Let me assure you, Magister, our interests are too mutual.”
“Too mutual?”
Elsie leaned in to stage whisper: “I’m still trying to get the good Captain to step out with me.” She blushed, searching my face for a reaction.
“Oh. Oh. I’m sorry, if I’d known, I wouldn’t have—”
“Don’t be. You didn’t know. Most of the Akarri don’t. It’s a common stereotype about the Akarri that we’re all backwards women. Probably since we’re prohibited from marriage until our service concludes. Silly me, I joined up thinking it the case, but it turns out most of them despise the stereotype.”
“They don’t… despise backwards women, do they?” I asked, not entirely enthused by the term.
Elsie shrugged. “It’s touchy. And I can’t figure out how Tammagan feels about me. I can’t tell if she wants to protect me, or screw me, or be my superior officer–slash–sister, and it is confusing.” She poked me. “I like you. You might stare, but you also listen. Say! Do you know any runes for detecting a woman’s sexual proclivities?”
“No. But there’s always asking,” I said. “I would, but I’m pretty sure she’d decapitate me.”
“At minimum.” Elsie beamed at me. I found I could withstand it now that I knew she was unattainably gay, easing all the pressure to present myself a certain way. “Now eat your dinner, you skinny, weird little man.” And she left.
I ate a plate of cold fish and some kind of enormous, blue bean whose contents tasted like mashed potato. Once finished, I felt simultaneously better and worse. Better because Elsie had cheered me up; worse because of what she’d said about Akarri dying. Why do I ask questions when I know the answers will make me miserable?
I needed to talk to my best friend. Partly to decompress and partly to confess. Dak and I had been tooling around since the eating-Play-Doh years and I trusted him to give it to me straight. We had long ago passed the point where either one could quit the other.
Summoning Dak was out of the question. First, I could never be sure if I’d copied or transported him. Second, the trip was one way, which wasn’t fair to him or his family. Third, much as I loathed thinking this way, the wheelchair was a problem. I’d almost been killed two or three times, and Dak couldn’t run away. I mean, on the right surface he could roll away faster than I could run, but no place here was particularly wheelchair friendly.
Dak couldn’t come here and I couldn’t draw a portal home, but maybe we could still chat. My idea took shape on paper, springing from the tip of a freshly shaved HB pencil. I worked with the whole page, blocking my design until I had the rough shape. The key to blending modern technology and magitech would be the aesthetics. It had to look like it belonged in Rune. To that end, I designed it as a gyroscope with rings but no visible axes to support them. At the center of the three swinging rings was a place for a floating rune stone.
I searched for a kanji that would make the rune stone into a computer—but the only kanji for “computer” appeared to be for calculators. For computers, there were only syllabic kana, which I wasn’t certain would work. I went with “calculator,” but also sketched my own desktop computer from home, connecting the image of my machine to the stone with a thin dotted line. Maybe that would give the magic enough to work with.
I refined the rings with runic scribbles and brought out the handcrafted appearance. I also spent time imagining how it worked, making certain to have a clear idea in my head. I included a dial on the gyroscope’s base, and the dial could be set to read RUNE or EARTH. That would permit the computer stone to contact my home dimension. The rings were supposed to spin continuously when it had good reception.
I finished and exhaled on the page.
The gyroscope and stone lit through with silver fire and pushed their way onto my lap. I straightened, adjusted the cart to make room, and set the gyroscope at my feet. The rings spun and the stone rose into the air amid the humming gold dials. A shimmer of light shone from the stone and a holographic image of my computer screen appeared. I was delighted to see it was my computer I’d created and poked around on the touch screen. I found old Word documents, my stories and poems, setting notes, and a massive folder of adorable cat pictures. Everything in place.
Setting the dial to EARTH, I tapped a video chat program and saw Dak was online. I placed the call.
The crystal emitted sounds from the program. I’d forgotten speakers, but apparently all my computer’s functions were housed in the rune stone. It pleased me to see this world’s magic had translated my intent.
There came the sound of
a pick-up and Dak appeared before his web camera. He squinted and leaned in to examine me. “Are you on a pirate ship?”
I realized he could see me too and waved.
“Did you seriously sneak out tonight to LARP without me? Not cool.” He disconnected. His away message changed to “FURIOUSLY MASTURBATING TO PICS OF ISAAC’S AUNT.”
I sighed. “I hate you, Dak.”
Chapter Seven: Meta-Gaming
It took three calls to reconnect. When Dak answered he made a show of being out of breath, presumably from frenzied masturbation. “So where the hell is the LARP?” he asked. “You guys went all out. Your room looks like a pirate cabin.”
Dak thought I was engaged in a live-action role-playing game—playing make-believe in costume. I frowned. “I’m not LARPing.”
“You’re definitely not in Old 88 like you said you’d be.”
“Of course not, that was two days ago.”
“That wasn’t even two hours ago.”
“Wait. Are you saying it’s still Friday night where you are?”
“Saturday morning, technically. Why?”
“I went straight from your room to Old 88. It’s been… about sixty hours since I hopped dimensions. How long since I left your dorm room? Exactly?”
“Maybe an hour. You left around one and it’s two now.”
I did some math. It had taken me five minutes to make Old 88 from Dak’s and longer still before I’d been sucked into my painting. “There’s a hundred-to-one time difference,” I realized. “Every day on Earth is one hundred days here.”
“Full-immersion LARP, huh?” Dak shrugged. “All right, I’ll play along. First of all, the time dilation isn’t in effect right now because we’re interacting. So it only occurs if there’s no connection between our dimensions.”
“Good point.”
“Second of all, your pirate costume is outstanding. Third, you’re a giant dick for not telling me about this.” I realized how that might look after Dak was booted from Kevin’s game, and I winced. “Fourth, you’re obviously calling me for a reason. What’s up?”
He still thought I was playing a game, but the great part about nerd friends was that they took your imaginings very seriously if you asked them to. “To start, let me hang up and call you back. Time the difference and we’ll see if the dilation returns while we’re disconnected.”
“Whatever.”
I disconnected and waited ten minutes. It was a long ten minutes. When I called again, Dak confirmed it had been ten on his end too.
“As long as my gyroscope stays set to ‘Earth,’ I think our dimensions will stay synced,” I said. “That’s handy. Means we can keep in touch easier.”
“So you expect me to make myself available after you left me out of your game? I’ve got studying to do. I’m not majoring in English Lit this semester.”
“I thought you switched to Philosophy. How hard is it to Google ‘Plato’s Allegory of the Cave’?”
“Philosophy was last semester. I’m switching to Engineering, remember?”
“Oh, yeah. Didn’t you start freshman year in Sociology?”
“I contain freaking multitudes. And those multitudes don’t have time for games I’m not invited to.”
I had to keep him engaged. I needed a friend right now. So I held two fingers up and crossed them, the typical signal in a role-playing game that someone was speaking strictly out of character. I had to make this good. Dak had a fine-tuned bullshit detector and far too hard a skull for the truth. “No one cut you out. You are part of the game. Your job on Earth Prime is critical to our success. So c’mon, play along. You might have to stay up late and help with the riddles.”
At the word “riddles” I knew I had him. But he played coy. “What do you take me for—someone who’d drop his coursework just to play your stupid game at the drop of a hat? I have homework.”
We both laughed for a while. I wiped a tear away. “So you’re in?”
“Naturally. I’ll pull some all-nighters next weekend to catch up. So what kind of world am I breaking this time?” Dak had a unique approach to role-playing games.
“It’s actually Rune, the setting we’ve been talking about the last two semesters.” Technically, Dak was also a subject-matter expert on this world. A few of the setting ideas had been his suggestions, including an extensive workup on orcish culture that I’d—to my shame—stuck in a drawer without reading in much depth. I’d gleaned from our conversations enough to illustrate The Wedding Ceremony, but Dak’s file had included a thirty-page discussion of orcish philosophy and another forty featuring detailed anatomical drawings and sundry notes on their biology. He used the phrase “gene-culture interaction” three times on page one. It was truly eyeball-drying stuff.
“Someone else is running your setting?” Dak whistled. “I thought you’d be too much of a control freak for that. All right, what’s your back story?”
I explained everything that had happened to me so far.
“Let me get this straight,” he said, stopping me when I got to my drawing powers. “You can make a computer with an operating system and all your old files. Why are you not drawing eighty jet fighters right the hell now?”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Yeah. Doubt your storyteller would let you have something so broken. The key to breaking a setting is subtlety. Got to be sneakier than jet fighters.”
“Except it interprets stuff, too. I drew toilet paper and it gave me fantasy toilet paper. I don’t think this world would reproduce a jet fighter.”
He snapped his fingers. “Two words: Steampunk. Mech.”
Not a bad idea. I filed it on a mental “to do” list.
“Ooh. Maybe you could draw yourself some minions,” Dak said. “Summoners are almost always overpowered. How about it? Why fight when you could just snap your fingers and have your boys roll a chump?”
I thought of Dracon’s minions and shuddered. “I don’t want to make people. I… well, I’m bad at this.”
“What do you mean?”
“It translates my intent, but I also think it’s drawing from my subconscious. There are holes in my world, and the stuff that’s getting filled in… it’s disturbing. The society I built has laws that imprison women for wielding weapons. That came out of my head. And here it’s real.”
Dak tilted back in his wheelchair in thought. “Have you considered that it’s a medieval world and women’s lib might just be underdeveloped?”
“It’s not medieval, it’s fantasy—they have plumbing, sanitation. Probably because I’m super particular about that sort of thing. So I could totally have imagined it a thousand ways. Instead, I imagined and drew it in a way that screws over women.”
“Did you draw it that way or did your storyteller misinterpret your drawings?”
“Does it matter? Clearly, I didn’t explicitly grab it and tell it that feminism happened. It reads the soul of my work, and I feel like I’m staring into a kind of… darkness.”
“Jung’s shadow,” Dak mused. “Creativity often comes from our shadow. But no, I don’t buy it. That’s too big a leap. I could buy something more subtle because, hey, being born with a dick in a pro-dick world is going to take its toll. But not imprisonment. So maybe your storyteller is just… one of those feminists even I don’t like.” Dak’s eyes lit up. “No, he’s not stupid. We are.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were so busy kicking your own ass, you missed the obvious. Dracon. You told me he knew what ‘American’ meant. And ‘firearm.’ Does your storyteller know you were working on someone else’s paintings in Old 88? That your inspiration involved other artists?”
“Uh. Yeah, probably.” Of course, there was no storyteller—this was just the world’s magic.
“Time passes at a hundred to one. How long’s Dracon ruled?”
“Thousands of years.”
“No. Thousands of years in Runic time. A few decades on Earth Prime. How old would you say t
he original paintings in Old 88 were?”
“Thirty or forty years. Oh my God. Dracon’s another artist!”
Dak leaned back, spreading his hands as if to say exalt in me. “Boom. Spoiled your asshole storyteller’s plot twist in hour one. Tell him he can suck it for not inviting me.”
“If Dracon’s an artist, he started this world. And the Cataclysm the Brets told me about from a hundred years ago happened when I added to the setting. My art’s changed the world. That’s why he’s so angry—that’s the thing I ‘took’ from him. I messed with his artistic vision.”
“And the misogyny,” Dak said. “It was here before you. I saw those paintings he did and best I could tell, he populated the whole world with chesty slaves whose unnatural spines have wrecked their posture. Given the starting point, maybe you’re not doing so bad.”
I bit my lip. “Dak. I drew this one picture… Now the women are wearing video-game armor.”
Dak sighed. “Individually molded boob plates?”
“Yup.”
“Even though it creates a deflection pattern that redirects arrows and sword blows into the woman’s heart?”
“…Yeah.”
“Did you read the article I sent you? With pictures of women in real-world body armor?”
“I might have skimmed it.”
“This is why you never draw with your dick, man. Because it might turn real and then magically transport you there. Then you feel like an ass. Lesson. Fucking. Learned.”
“Okay, okay. You’re right about everything forever, Dak. I get it. Moving on.” For a brief moment I’d felt better, but now it was backfiring.
The Accidental God (A Pygmalion Fail Book 1) Page 8
