Chapter 82: Helicopter Parenting

  CROWN(Wryna)

  The flare of white light flooded the tunnel as several elves, including myself, activated light spells. I didn’t bother to chant for this… it was a simple spell, and while it wasn’t common, Power Without Words – or what had been Chantless Spell in ancient times – was a known ability. It only worked for spells known extremely well by the caster, but light was pretty common.

  Two of the other elves didn’t need to chant, either. The group was sixteen strong, so that was a pretty high ratio of elves that didn’t need to chant. They were sending some experienced sisters into this exploration.

  Me getting a slot had been sudden, and a few still looked at me oddly, but the Quest Eyssa had given really did make this easier. I reflected that I shouldn’t be so stingy with Reality Points when it made my job simpler. Since the Quest involved me, I’d have to pay it off with my own personal energy instead of a fraction of what would be generated, but that was a tiny amount compared to my normal income.

  It turned out that the tunnel had been discovered for reasons I couldn’t complain about. The Aravel were heavily dependent on magic, but the Sisterhood constantly tried to find nonmagical ways to do things. The reason for this was couched in some kind of religious parable they repeated, but I didn’t care about that. The point was, they’d dug out a large area to experiment with food storage without magic. Not a bad idea, to basically make root cellars.

  The tunnel they’d found was old, but solid. The edges were perfectly rounded and smooth, showing how adept the dwarves had gotten at digging. Of course they would be. I’d designed them to lean toward that. It wasn’t very large, barely big enough for five elves abreast… but with how slender elves were, that was pretty small for dwarves. It was big enough that going in two lines left plenty of room.

  I was midway down the second line, and as we started to move forward with cautious slowness, I let my mind drift. I knew the tunnel would take a while before we ran into anything. That gave me time to mull over last night’s conversation. I’d opened chat after my bath and food, so I could concentrate fully upon it. Now I reviewed the chat history.

  | ORPHEUS has joined the chat. ?

  | ORPHEUS: This is an interesting way to talk to your Terminals and Sub-Terminals. Is this how your interface always works? ?

  | WRYNA: Yeah, pretty much. The Sub-Terminals are here, so it may confuse them. ?

  | EYSSA: Is this another being like Duck? ?

  | DUCK: Nah, I’m basically like a piece of Wryna with attitude. Orpheus is more like Wryna’s boss. ?

  | KASSARA: So Orpheus created Wryna? ?

  | ORPHEUS: No, a… friend of mine created Wryna. Inasmuch as Wryna created all of you, which is a vastly simplified way of viewing it. ?

  | WRYNA: This must be important for you to link up while I’m in an avatar. ?

  | ORPHEUS: There have been some developments. Do not worry, you are still protected for some amount of time. A few dozen cycles, at least. ?

  | ORPHEUS: I am calling a meeting of all Administrators in the Cluster. You have a little over 34 hours to finish what you are doing here. ?

  | ORPHEUS: What are you doing down there, anyway? I don’t see anything that warrants your attention. ?

  | DUCK: Boss is worried about this first contact situation. ?

  | ORPHEUS: That’s what Sub-Terminals like Eyssa and Kassara are for. ?

  | ORPHEUS: You created your beings with free will, let them make their mistakes. ?

  | ORPHEUS: For your own sake, you can’t mother them forever. ?

  | SOLEN: I don’t know who this is, but they speak wisdom.

  That had given me some food for thought. While we all investigated the tunnel that I knew to be mostly empty, I chewed on that. It had been a laser-focused jab at what I was doing here, specifically.

  Was I worried about this encounter? Sure.

  Had I designed the world to have this tension? No.

  This was technically out of my hands. Even the whole mess with the gender division that spawned the Sisterhood in the first place wasn’t my fault. They hadn’t needed to act that way… I’d explicitly made the bonding work without any sort of sexual connotation.

  In fact it worked best that way. An elder Aravel could bond with their son, and then the son could have a child with someone and that’d work out fine. Most Aravel settlements hadn’t made the leap to connecting it to the act of sex. Only a few had.

  And this had spawned the Sisterhood. A result of the Aravel’s actions.

  Did I have some responsibility for it? Maybe. But only in the sense that I had created the species at all. My intention hadn’t been to make that inequality, and it wasn’t even something I’d unintentionally put in. It was entirely a result of the people misunderstanding their own gift, and the relative rarity of it meant it wasn’t even a common misunderstanding.

  The elves had exercised their free will, and had done something I hadn’t approved of. That’s it.

  While the results had been more terrible, it was in effect no different than the time Tastka and her friends had run off to raid a strange bush, without telling the adults.

  Free will, I once again decided, was a huge nuisance.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Not that I had any intention of messing with it.

  Yet, wasn’t that what I was doing here? Isn’t that why Orpheus and even Solen, my closest friend from my Tastka lifetime, called me out on it? Was my presence here really to help them, or to make sure that the world developed the way I wanted it to?

  I’d been making excuses. Interfering whenever I wished, playing around with the lives of my creations. Then when I didn’t feel like interfering, just excusing it with ‘free will’ and they should ‘learn for themselves’ or something.

  I had to pick a lane.

  | WRYNA: Do you all think I’m getting too involved in this? ?

  | EYSSA: We don’t know your rules, sister. But I don’t think you need to do anything. We’ve been doing fine for seven thousand years. ?

  | EYSSA: You could visit more often, though. ?

  | SOLEN: What is it you do when you aren’t here?

  I paused at the question, then stumbled forward before the elf behind me ran into me. Distantly, I noticed we were seeing some traces of the glowing fungus that kept the tunnels lit. The dwarves had long ago encountered the fungal hive mind, and chose to keep their distance, but it had led to a few discoveries.

  The air was getting a little stale, but I knew the team had accounted for that. If it got too bad, someone here was a [Wind Raiser] or similar class. Just another thing I noted to distract myself.

  | WRYNA: I design the world. I make changes when something isn’t working properly. ?

  | WRYNA: Remember how the sun used to be more visible, but we only had a short time of full daylight? I felt we needed more daylight, so I changed it. ?

  | KELAS: Just like that? Just change the sun over thousands of years? ?

  | DUCK: You make it sound so easy. That took a lot of work! ?

  | WRYNA: It wasn’t hard to do, but it was hard to do correctly. ?

  | WRYNA: I really thought the elves would encounter the dwarves earlier than this. How do you know about the dwarves anyway? Can you affect them? ?

  | KASSARA: We cannot, but we can sense them. Like shapes just outside our reach or sight. ?

  | ORPHEUS: If the dwarves do not believe in you, even a little bit, you will have no means to grasp them. ?

  | KELAS: You’re still here? ?

  | ORPHEUS: I have curiosity too. It has been a long time since I’ve observed an event like this. ?

  | ORPHEUS: I miss it.

  Was it me, or was Orpheus sounding more human lately? Or… was I becoming more like Orpheus, so interpreted their statements more easily?

  All the walking I was doing was giving me too much time to think. I’d gotten used to doing things almost constantly, so having a night to sleep and then a leisurely stroll – at least for me with my OP cheat stats – was basically a vacation.

  I settled myself back against the tunnel wall as we all stopped to rest. A quick drink of water helped clear my head, and I looked around at the others talking and conjecturing amongst themselves. They’d already figured out that the tunnel was artificial, and that it wasn’t of elf make. I guess that shouldn’t have surprised me. They knew dragons were a thing, so another intelligent species wasn’t a great leap.

  That was good to know for when I introduced more.

  | DUCK: Heads up, boss. Looks like the dwarves aren’t waiting.

  My ear twitched, and a quick glimpse with my mana sense caught on moments before another elf did. A rare few had a simpler, more primitive version of Pattern Sense, likely because they were my distant descendants. One of these was in the group, and sat up straight.

  “Flux… there’s Flux mana in the walls!” she cried, as she grabbed her spear.

  She was right, but just a little too late. The dwarves tunneled with picks and shovels, normally, but they had an affinity with certain kinds of mana. I knew this because I’d built it into them. They were adept at manipulating stone and metal.

  Holes opened in the walls, in the floors. Dark, cloaked shapes – clad in some kind of leathery hide of a subterranean creature – erupted from the yawning orifices, rapidly surrounding the group. Those leaning against the wall lost their balance, tumbling backward into the arms of the shrouded figures, where the clink of chains wrapped around them.

  My moment of warning let me activate one of the abilities I’d made sure to give myself: Shroud Presence. A high-level Umbral ability, it let me vanish instantly from mundane or magical senses. It had a high mana cost, but I had a lot of that in this body. Not limitless, but it would give me enough time to see what was going on.

  Within moments, the sisters were reaching for weapons, struggling with the larger hands grappling them. The struggle didn’t last long, though. We were in the dwarven domain, and I could see they outnumbered us. I glimpsed the hard, craggy features of the dwarves for the first time, their beards dusted with powders to decorate them. By the length of the beards, this group had a few middle-aged dwarves and a number of younger ones.

  The leader of the expedition rapidly realized they had already lost. She threw her spear to the ground and lifted arms, showing she was unarmed, and barked out an order for the others to do the same. Literal bark, actually… the elves had largely left behind their more feral features, but kept that sound.

  “Be easy on them!” The gravelly voice of the eldest dwarf called out. It sounded odd, but the translation came through fine. I knew the elves had no idea what he was saying, but the heavyset dwarves – barely shorter than the petite elves, but far heavier – relaxed some of their grip, keeping a firm but not rough hold.

  “They look fragile,” one of the other dwarves said. “But they have weapons.”

  The eldest one grunted. “Take all but this one back to the end of the tunnel. Leave this one, and I will try to find out what they want. It is the leader.”

  Now I had to decide what I would do. If the dwarf was going to interrogate the leader of the elves, that would take a while. It did look like they were letting the others go, so it shouldn't be interpreted as a hostile act. Then again they were kidnapping the leader.

  I had to make a decision now. I could intervene and try and smooth all this over in some way – either by speaking to them or some other ability. Or I could trust that my creations would work it out. This was not the most peaceful greeting, but they hadn't immediately killed anyone.

  Or I could leave. There were no other options because I couldn't stay too long before I had to go back with Orpheus. This whole trip had been informative, but my entire purpose had been to make sure this went smoothly.

  Orpheus was right, though. I couldn’t keep stepping in. Not just because of energy… but because these were adults who could make their own decisions.

  I took a deep breath, inhaling the musty, stale air and the gritty scent of the dwarves, sweat and a faint acidic stench lingering to them. So different from my elves, but… also mine.

  I shouldn’t take sides.

  | WRYNA: I’m headed back. See you in a moment, Orpheus. Eyssa, Solen, Kelas, Kassara… I’ll speak with you soon.

  I stepped out of reality before I could change my mind.

  Unanswered Oddities