Chapter 21: Chapter 21: A Super Complex Game of Make-Believe

"Now that I have answered your question, Luke, I expect the same from you." Nikola shifted to face him in her seat.

"Uhhh, sorry - what was the question again?"

"Why do you say that people hate humans?"

"Oh." Luke's navy blue brows inched closer together. "The short version is that a human tried to defy The Three long ago and all the humans in the world took the flak for it."

The Three. Nikola had grown up under a rock, but even she had heard of them - they were the three Gods that governed her world.

"What is 'took the flak for it'?"

"Heh, it means that all humans got in trouble for it. All humans are shunned because of what that one human did - which is a damn shame, because I believed in what he was doing. He was so ahead of his time."

Nikola looked down at the browning blood that was on her leggings; her wounds would have sat beneath it, if they hadn't been magically healed. "So this one human is the reason Miss Tarnibou isn't allowed to drink the potions she creates?"

"Indirectly, yes - but it's more like The Three ran a smear campaign on all humans because of one man's actions, and it worked. This is the World of Wills, after all." He grinned, and his cheeks rose with a certain fondness.

"Is that not what you said this game is called?"

Luke nodded tersely, watching Nikola like a hawk since she had a tendency to get spiky first and calm down later. Telling her more about the game world she lived in could very well set her off. "Yeah, this is the World of Wills. It's a full dive VRMMO, meaning humans from my world can join the game as if they're actually living in it. The gimmick of the World of Wills is that if the populace believes something hard enough, it becomes true."

Nikola quirked a brow. "The games I am familiar with are hopscotch, tag and make-believe. I am assuming that this 'World of Wills' is more complex - if it is a game at all."

"Yeah," he loosed an uncomfortable chuckle, "this game is a lot more complicated than tag. It's like a pretend world that was made to hearken back to a simpler time, and you play by living in it. You can craft things, and gain skills in cooking and climbing if you do them enough. It's a lot less 'in your face' than other games with the tutorial and hand-holding - lots of people compare it to Windrim, if you've heard of it."
Luke paused, and then gave himself a light smack on the forehead. "Of course you haven't. What the hell was I thinking? You never realize how much of your vocab relies on popular media until somebody who's never heard of any of it shows up. I guess I'd compare it to a super complex game of make-believe, if I had to choose from one of those."

Processing the specifics of her make-believe world was difficult, but it was something that Nikola recognized that she needed to do eventually. Pandora's Box had been opened, and she was beginning to think she didn't want to close it back up again. "So if I am understanding this correctly, this one human tried to defy the Gods, and so all humans are shunned?"

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"That's the gist of it, yeah. The Three really don't want it spread around that, in the World of Wills, anyone can be a God if enough people believe they can be a God. They're the ones already in power, so it only benefits them to crush whoever tries to spread the word. Books have been burned, people have been killed, yadda yadda - but the tl;dr is just that the Gods hate humans now, so all the people who worship them have to too."

"Why have I never heard of this before?"

Luke shrugged noncommittally. "I guess it wasn't written into your story - NPCs basically only know what the writers write for them. You weren't as much of a free thinker then as you are now."

"I was not a thinker at all," Nikola admitted, her voice weighed down like hair with water in it. She felt uninformed, unimpressed with the version of herself she had been even just a day ago. How had she not known that the world around her had been constructed to entertain people from 'the outside world'? How had she never figured out that her life was too scripted, too planned?

It would have been so easy to corner her, so easy to catch her with her cleaver wedged in somebody's back, so simple for someone who suspected her to simply follow her on the same path she took every week and weekend. Admitting that she had not known that her life was a sham felt like admitting defeat.

"Don't be so hard on yourself," Luke sighed, reaching out to give her an experimental pat on the shoulder, "you were kinda at the mercy of the authors writing you. But you aren't now - you can do whatever you wanna do. What do you want to do?" It occurred to him that this was one of the first times since being Awakened that she had been directly asked what she wanted to do. What would a (formerly?) murderous NPC want to do with its time?

Nikola allowed the brief moment of physical contact without incident, and brought two fingers to her chin in thought.

She felt overwhelmed with the amount of options that were spread out before her. Her comfortable list that the world served to her on a silver platter was nowhere to be found, so she would have to come up with her own suggestions this time.

It was a luxury, of sorts, to be able to leisurely sit down and weigh out her options - simply having options was new to her. Since having 'woken up', she had been in one tense situation after another, with nothing other than her instincts driving her decision-making process.

How did a person decide what they wanted?

She was in a carriage that was on its the way to the Copper Citadel. She was in said carriage with a 'player' of the game she was supposedly written into, and a fellow 'NPC' who had not been 'Awakened' yet - and according to that player, could not be Awakened.

"I want to-- I want to know why I was created. I want to know if I have been useful to my creator, I want to know if I have served my intended purpose-- I want to know why I have been Awakened, and I want to know what 'class' and 'weapon specialization were decided for me and what those are-- I want to know if my father is dead or imprisoned-- I want to know why the slab in my basement is telling me I need to kill people to save him, and what I am saving him from-- I want to know why I like it so much when I feel the tip of my blade pop through a man's flesh-- I want to know everything there is to know about this world I have somehow never noticed is moving all around me--"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Luke interjected, waving his hands in front of her face, "why don't we start with dinner?"

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