Chapter 97: Anomalous

  CROWN

  Things were moving very fast.

  I’d already brushed away first contact notices concerning the rooken and elves. Dungeons had spawned and started to hand out their own Quests… which was especially good for Downside, since they were getting Quests at last. I’d also been tempted to drop down to see why the dwarf-elf situation was accelerating so quickly, but hunting down a specific answer to that was likely to be a pain. I’d settled on letting it ride for a decade or three to see how it shaped up.

  “I wish the interface had better energy reporting tools,” I grumbled. “Waiting thirteen local years for feedback from a change is just painful.”

  Duck, who was zoomed in on part of the world, looked over her shoulder at me and waggled her tail. “I agree, but I guess in most cases that’s a pretty fine-grained level of detail. Most of the time things don’t really settle their energy return for a while. Or maybe something is weird with our world and the step level is different for others. You should ask Orpheus.”

  “Maybe.” I browsed through my interface for a little while longer, then looked at her. “What are you working on over there? Things are a little too smooth over here.”

  She laughed, and stepped away from the map. “You’re just too used to fighting fires lately. Ever since you went Downside you’ve been running around. I guess we don’t have the luxury for another seven millennia cruise.” A tail flick gestured toward the map. “Just checking out the polyform colonies. Interesting stuff, but they don’t seem to need any handholding.”

  I grunted back and took a glance at the energy return for that species, even though I knew it likely hadn’t changed much. “Yeah. They’re weirdly steady. No big crests but just a steady and slow upward curve. No reason to poke at them, but now I have no idea how they’ll handle running into the vaskan.”

  Briefly I wondered if I should have payed more attention to them. It was easy to put it off repeatedly because there was just no big event that needed my attention. Also, being largely humanoid myself, I wasn’t sure how I’d fare in a much less humanoid body. Same reason I hadn’t touched the hive minds… especially since I couldn’t even do an Incarnate Avatar to learn the ropes for them. New fungal colonies weren’t ‘born’ very often.

  “Uuuuughh…” I groaned aloud and stretched, even though I wasn’t feeling any pain at the moment. I’d been up here long enough I’d stowed the Proxy Avatar’s body in storage, so I was just a projection right now. The mental fatigue was real, and I should take a nap or something soon. “Why did I make so many totally nonhuman species? I’m not sure I can handle them.”

  Duck gave me a look that resembled a glare much more than I liked. Then she sighed and turned to face me fully, hands on her hips and her tail whipping back and forth in clear annoyance. “You know, you really need to stop thinking of yourself as human. It’s holding you back.”

  I shrugged at her and settled back into my chair. I’d put recliners in here because I’d discovered I liked them, but tails always got in the way when I laid back. I didn’t have one right now and looked more human than usual, which was why Duck always sprawled or lounged in weird positions, like a cat. She never got rid of her tail.

  “I don’t like the idea of becoming something that just… exists.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose as I worked through this with her. “If I lose touch with my humanity, then I worry I won’t treat my people in the universe as people. Like Diamon treats his like a number.”

  That comment made Duck stare again, then hang her head and hold it in her hands. “Dear you, why are you this thick sometimes?” She heaved a breath and looked up again. “I said give up your humanity, not become an intelligent geometric proof or something. You don’t have humans in this world, so trying to be human is just fucking things up. You need to think like a person.”

  I frowned and rubbed my chin. I heard what she was saying, but it sounded contradictory to me. “Didn’t you just tell me I was favoring elves too much?”

  “Augh you’re impossible!” Duck threw her hands up in the air and turned around, taking a deep breath before she resumed. “I was saying you were inconsistent there. You spent a lifetime as an elf and you empathize, but you’re still thinking of yourself as human who created elves. You’re the progenitor of all the species, you need to act like it.”

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Duck had needled me plenty of times, but now she seemed genuinely frustrated at me and it was… surreal to see. Was this really normal for a Terminal? I really would have to make sure. I opened up my interface and sent a more urgent note to Orpheus, but got a canned response saying she was in high time dilation at the moment.

  “Hmm…” I mused over what Duck had said. Was she really just my subconscious berating me for something I was avoiding?

  Was holding on to being ‘human’ really that important?

  I thought of Ember, the other Administrator from Earth. She was still early on in her world creation, but the construct she used to greet me was starkly inhuman. Was I better than her for keeping my own mental image? Or was I holding myself back from fair treatment of…

  An entire planet of sapient beings.

  Once again I felt a pang of guilt about the pillbug creatures I’d made. They were meant to be pests, not a major power. I’d basically intentionally crippled them from being a major player, just to boost up the others. Perhaps that had been a mistake. The only problem was that making an attempt to fix it now would be prohibitively expensive in both time and RP, and I’d been burning through my reserves a lot.

  Thinking of that made me glance at my RP again. It was again lower than I remembered, but only a few points this time. When I’d returned from the meeting and noticed that, I’d added in a sort of logging functionality to the interface. It was a bit clumsy, but the default one was pretty awful.

  Though that made me wonder when I’d started thinking of my interface as a customizable experience.

  I scrolled through the log, applying filters to typical maintenance tasks that drained RP to look for weird outliers. It wasn’t much, this time – only a handful of points – but I felt that I should take a look anyway. It’d be just my luck if an incursion found a way to vampire points or something while I were preparing for some other method.

  The list made me cluck my tongue. A lot of Quests. That made sense, after I’d given dungeons the ability to give out Quests as well. Each Quest took a minute amount of energy to create, so a lot of them added up. If that was the cause, then I didn’t need to be worried. Quests were intended to be quantitative in nature. Even if nine out of ten failed and didn’t return any energy, the tenth would give enough to cover the losses and then some. Quest success rate was a lot higher than that, more like six or seven out of ten. In a little while, I would be rolling in generation at this rate.

  I paused as I filtered out dungeon-issued Quests. Dragons had also been issuing more Quests lately. In fact, a lot more over the past year or so of local time. That was a little weird. My world was basically running on everyone doing epic Quests for dungeons and dragons.

  What had caused them to start issuing Quests so much more often? Was it a reaction to the appearance of the dungeons?

  “DONUT!”

  The yell made me jerk back to attention and dismiss the interface. “Oh, right, I got sidetracked. You were saying I needed to think of my own species, not the one I’m not a part of?”

  Duck sighed and rubbed the side of her head, just in front of one ear. The small elf girl looked… stressed, somehow. Also annoyed at me, which was strange. Usually she expressed her annoyance in pestering or even physically, but today she’d been lecturing instead.

  Now she hopped up, knees landing on my thighs, so she could look me in the eye despite her height difference. One finger tapped me on the nose, but her eyes were harsh and her ears turned down in an elven frown.

  “You need to align yourself with all your people… and not through incarnations.” She huffed softly and crossed her arms. “Do that much more you’ll probably get another me or something, and neither of us want that. I know I’m insufferable.”

  That got a smile from me, but she wasn’t done. The elf-shaped Terminal wagged her finger. “So. Proxy Avatars it is. You already said you needed to check on the dragon situation Downside. I want you to pop down there, investigate anything in their culture they might have, and meet some nice people. Relax, socialize, enjoy yourself, maybe get laid.”

  She stopped, tilted her head, then her ears twitched. “Okay, maybe not that last one. The last thing we want is you making decisions while hormonal. And maybe don’t get too attached to the mortals who will croak while we aren’t looking. But make a few acquaintances so you have some personal memories, not some other person’s life.”

  I stared at her… then shoved her off of my lap. Duck fell to the floor with an inelegant thud, but her tail wiggling told me she was pleased she’d gotten me to react. The problem was, her lecture was probably right.

  “I’ll think about it.” That was all I was promising for now. “I’ll advance a few years to see if these bugs I made are actually spreading, maybe watch for anything weird… also give Chall time to rebuild a bit and cope with other dungeons existing, or at least hear about them. Then I promise I’ll handle the dragon thing on Downside.”

  Duck hopped up to her feet and shook herself off, not that she was dirty. Completely uninjured, of course – I wasn’t actually sure either of us could hurt the other, even when we tried. She’d punched and bitten me often enough, and I’d never felt pain. Then again, I knew she’d only done it to emphasize something, and had never attempted to really hurt me.

  As a Terminal, even a weirdly independent one, I wasn’t sure she could try to hurt me. It was probably against her fundamental nature or something. Another question I should ask Orpheus when I got the chance.

  This time, while I was thinking of it, I added that to my todo list instead of promptly forgetting about it with all the other stuff going on. Why did a higher-dimensional god-being have to worry about being forgetful anyway?

  Seemed like a major design flaw, to me.

  “Let’s give them a few years,” I said. “See how the rooken do, and how fast the bugs spread. Downside can wait that long.”

  “You’re the boss!” Duck said that with newfound enthusiasm and went back to studying the polyform colonies.

  Was I, though?

  Sage Advice