Chapter 27: White Whale

We were walking the slopes of some great big mountain when it happened: an earthquake directly followed by a great landslide, sending us scrambling for cover in a nearby mine. Figures. An easy out from the previously-sieged city? No. Shit out a fucking landslide on Cyl. Thanks, Myriad. I guess we'd just been asking for trouble by joking about the attacks a few days ago.

It was dark inside the mine. Predictably. But since we were a team of adventurers, we had torches and lanterns ready in just a few moments, illuminating the dusty, craggy cutouts and log supports. I was absently glad I was a robot, but quickly mimed coughing and sneezing from the upset dust in the hallways. I also hoped they hadn't modelled the arsenic in a lot of these old mines back home, because I (or at least my biorobotics) was much more susceptible to radioactive and carcinogenic dust than regular dust.

After a few minutes of coughing and exploring a bit deeper into the twisty, turny mine, though, I was fairly sure it was just normal dust. None of my companions had spontaneously collapsed of a critical biological fault, at least. Which was good. What was less good, obviously, was the fact that we might have just been condemned to a slow and painful death by thirst or starvation — probably dehydration, if I had to be honest, but I would take much longer to die. At least a good three months. So... not good.

I guess it was just a game, so I could choose to respawn if I really really wanted to, but... eugh, that felt wrong when it was me in here fully. Maybe if I was playing this as a game. Not me right now though.

Actually, I thought, this was mostly okay? The further we went into the cave, the more it felt like just a normal adventure rather than whatever the hell it'd been recently. I felt like I could say things like... manhandle, again. Maybe. If the tone was just right. I couldn't help but snicker at how I'd reacted when I'd first hit the ground, drawing the immediate attention and subsequent faked glares of my three fucking friend-travelling-companions.

"Thought of a joke?" Flurry asked with a faked irritation. I hoped it was faked. It probably was.

I nodded, still smiling. "Sort of. Just, y'know. In comparison to everything else. It feels more normal the further we go into this fucking cave, like it's just a regular adventure rather than... Flurry, Nora, Wendy, and Cyl's Nightmare Trip Through Beyovaria."

Nora snorted. "Maybe use that attitude to look for a way out."

That earned a chuckle from everyone else, and a pout with crossed arms from me. Wasn't as if we were in any need of finding a way out. I had sonar in my sensor array. We could just send out sonar pulses and they'd probably return a decent amount of information, but noooo. Nobody ask the robot.

Wait, shit. That was probably because Nora and Flurry didn't want to out me as an AI to Wendy. Okay, maybe nobody ask the robot for real this time.

In any case, we were nearing what my non-audible sonar could read as a hidden door now. I stayed at the back of the party, just watching the three in front of me stumble their way through finding the secret entrance (a hidden block combination in the four corners of the mine's wall.) I could honestly get used to this. It felt nice to be the hypercompetent one sometimes, when everyone else was probably ten times your skill level. So I reveled in it until the professional adventurers (and Wendy, the likely professional game tester) found the hidden doorway.

It was a mine in the side of a mountain near a game's starting area, so it had to be a dungeon. I mentally kicked myself, as slimes burbled out of the darkness and into the range of our melee weapons. Nora called it out, and we all hurried backwards in the two-wide corridor before settling into combat positions. Unluckily, I was in the front. That probably meant I'd be showing off my skills, if I wanted to deal damage. At least Nora was with me.

I nodded to her, and we got to work. The slimes were beginner-level monsters, but they seemed to scale to our levels and skill levels somewhat — and what's more, the stronger ones were patterned just like my bodysuit. Which got me some weird looks from Wendy, but I wasn't particularly able to focus on that with the slimes jumping at me and Nora.

Quickly, the two of us fell into lockstep: I covered her, she covered me. Every so often, one of the slimes would jiggle in just the wrong way to inspire acid touches of fear and flashes of burned red in my mind, but Nora sliced them in twain before they'd get me — every single time. And anytime she flinched, I'd send a quick, standardized burst of fire to sear whatever offending party was threatening her into ash. It wasn't like the stakes were high — Flurry was shooting small bolts into the slimes, slowing them down greatly, and anytime either of us got the least bit overwhelmed Wendy was shoving heal spells up our asses. I was pleasantly surprised to realize that the heal spells worked on my very-metallic posterior, because if they hadn't then I'd have been in even more trouble.

As we cut through more gooey masses til a corner, where we could hold out fairly easily, Wendy called something out from the back line. "You know, if anyone here was a strength build, we could probably have just mined out from the landslide!"

"A thrilling point," Nora said, cutting a trio of slimes with her daggers before batting them away with her sword, "However, eat my nuts."

Flurry chuckled, and so did I. "It's allowed for women to have nuts? Boy, am I glad that item isn't gender-locked," Flurry joked, throwing me off my rhythm as I briefly considered the question. What the fuck did she mean by that?

Argh, nevermind! I blasted another slime to cinders just before it reached me — I was really starting to tire of fire magic, it was incredibly dull — and, annoyed with the slow progress, decided to let loose and cut things short. I motioned for the others to stay behind the corner, before stepping just around and letting loose a combination of both intense fire and protective shielding. Even as the firestorm raged, I protected the room (and the people behind me, and also myself) with glowing barriers of magical energy. Two sigils burned beneath my outstretched hands, and I really hoped that nobody saw the bright red glow around the corner and went to investigate.

Once every slime was melted until only a fruity smell remained, I dismissed the shields and stumbled back around the corner. A discreet glance at my style gauge told me I'd used almost all of it up to keep the fire contained, which wasn't good for my precision, and was worse for my immediate ability to walk. Apparently repeated use of intense concentration and control of magic was more tiring than I'd thought without false cortisol bumping up my stress and adrenaline levels to unhealthy amounts.

"Next few rooms c-clear," I coughed, falling into Nora's (and also Flurry's) arms. "Figured it out. Used lot of magic. Rest."

Wendy looked confused, but a quick look around the corner and a sniff had her looking downright flabbergasted. "What the fuck did you do, Cyl???"

Nora and Flurry peeked the corner and then gave each other a meaningful look. "There's a table and some chairs in there... somehow. We should sit," Flurry said.

I'd really done it this time. We were sitting around a dusty, grimy circular table, with wooden chairs made crudely from spare logs — not by us, but by whoever'd made this mine. The room was silent, more than anywhere I'd been in this world before now. At least before there was always the rush of people or the wind rustling through grass. Here, there was nothing but the sound of everyone's breathing. It did set a serious tone, I supposed.

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"Which one of you is going to start explaining this?" Wendy asked, breaking the staring contest between everyone else and me. "Because jesus. I can still smell the slimes, and I'm really really glad that the devs didn't code them to smell like fucking mold or something."

"Actually, I do have to ask. What's up with the whole breaking the fourth wall thing? I thought..." I nodded my head towards Flurry and Nora. "Well, moreso I didn't know how they'd react. What's going on with all of you?"

"Different people react differently. They seemed cool with it. Answer the question."

Flurry sighed. "Okay, sure. Guess it was going to come out eventually, uh... well, firstly, you can't tell anyone about this. Obviously."

"In fact," I interjected, "I'm gonna write up an NDA and ask you to sign it. They do those here right?" Wendy nodded, and I started to draft up the paper as Flurry explained things.

"Cyl is. Complicated, we'll say. She's not exactly a player, and not exactly a... not-player? I'm not sure on the terminology, but she's in a weird in-between. You've talked about how this whole world is a game, right? We'd be the world, like, the board, and you'd be the players — acting through your game-pieces. But since this world is necessarily a really complicated game, there has to be some sort of authority on what is and isn't possible. That, for us, is Myriad and Moira. They're gods here, but I assume that they'd be the closest thing to the game's 'creators' that we could get within the game itself. That means we've got three parties, right?"

Wendy nodded. "Yeah, standard so far. Non-Player Characters, Player Characters, and the Dungeon Masters. What's your point?"

"Okay, so, Cyl is effectively something else. As far as I can tell, she's not one of us — she has a player-like interface, is made of metal and electricity, and an excessively fucked up magic system. But at the same time she's not a Player Character — a PC? She's not one of you, because she can't go out of this world like you all can. So she'd have to be a... Dungeon Master? A DM? But she doesn't have any godlike powers beyond said fucked up magic, which I'll get to in a moment. Anyways, she... I guess is an in-between from this world to yours. That's what I'd imagine, at least."

"Oh!" Wendy's expression was brightening by the second. "That means she's an AI! Like, a sentient one, probably! Holy shit! Er, no offense, you two? I don't know a good way to test for sapience, that's above my pay grade, but... damn, I was hearing about some kind of nightmare code tangle that just popped up someday on their servers. Was that you, Cyl?"

Oh god, what kind of trouble had I caused? "If, uh, if it happened a few weeks ago from their perspective then yeah. Probably. Tell the devs I say sorry, if that's at all possible without blowing my cover even more."

"Will do. Dates match up for sure. Actually, there was something I was wondering. The NPCs in this game have preset stop-codes, sort of like a safeword — just in case anyone with triggers happens upon something, they can safeword out and the NPCs will reword or skip to when they're attacking or whatever. Or just stop. But it's, uh... the NPCs here are controlled by the AI that runs the game, so, it's not a huge deal — we know there's no sapience or anything, I think. No 'self' to effect." She paused for a second. "Just a hunch, but would either of you — well, I guess all three — would you all be willing to test that out? If anything would cause sapience, it'd be close physical, codebase, and emotional proximity to... Cyl."

Nora snorted. "Yeah. If I wasn't alive before I met her, she's definitely made me want to pull out my hairs enough to shock me to life." Flurry giggled. Was I getting bullied? "I'd be okay with that."

My NDA was done. I probably wasn't getting bullied, so I pulled the screen over to Wendy for her to appraise while she talked about the safeword systems. "Nice, okay. The safeword system works off of mental commands, it's something you choose yourself when you get into the game. So..."

A moment of silence followed, and then both Nora and Flurry flinched and shivered. Flurry spoke up first. "Woo. Okay, no, don't like that. But I don't think we skipped anything, did we..?" Still quiet, Nora shook her head quickly. "Right. So, what does this mean?"

"Probably that when I log out, there'll be at least two more janky bits of code. Maybe more. If the safeword system doesn't work on you, then that probably means you're... somewhat sapient at least? Or able to break away from the BALANCE system's control. Er, that'd be Moira, for you. Which is a little spooky."

That was for sure. If true sapience could just... develop out of nowhere, back home would be a LOT more difficult to regulate. I couldn't imagine what it would be like here. Wendy slid the signed NDA back over to me, rolling her eyes, and I reviewed it before storing it safely away in my memory for later. Just in case. "Thanks. I, uh, guess I should talk about the magic thing."

I leaned back in my chair a little, watching the torches we'd placed on the wall flicker. "The short of it is that I'm able to make spells and power them up far beyond their normal scope. In more technical terms, I can manipulate the language which spells come in and then utilize a 'style-based' mana and HP meter to power the spells that I make. The more Style I have, the more powerful my spells generally become. The two I used in there were a modified version of a shield spell, to protect the rooms, and an air-fire mixture spell. That's actually why you all can breathe even though that much fire should have burned out all the oxygen — I set up the spell to re-balance the environment once the firestorm was done.

"And, um. I guess also, I should say that I'm an android. Though I guess it shouldn't matter a ton here, because there's magic species and the like, I'm... well, I wasn't always from here. It's a long story. As far as I know, I used to be in another dimension, so that's why I'm different than most others you'll probably find in Beyovaria. Flurry here's been helping me out with my robotic issues." She grinned, nodding. "She's got a lot of my more technical specs in a human-friendly format. Ask her if you want to get the details, but it's nothing much — just a bit better strength, better speed, and all the digital stuff."

I left out the fact that I used to — er, I guess that I was a guy. If I was a guy, it'd feel weird (especially looking like this), and if I wasn't a guy then it was... it felt weird. Nevertheless, Wendy nodded. "Yeah, that kind of checks out, with like... the skin and eye color and all, I guess. Kind of thought I'd just missed the huepicker option, but I guess it's more like... you're just chalk white or something. The magic thing seems really cool but I think I kind of just want to get out of here before I start fangirling over the potential unintended uses of it all."

Nora stood up and started walking over to the other end of the room without any wait. "Great. Me too. Let's go, I'd rather not listen to you three talk about spells and nothing else for five hours."

Flurry got out of her seat and bounded over to Nora, grabbing her torches off the walls, and Wendy followed them up shortly with just a little snickering. I rounded out our party's back line, as always, and we started walking once again (though Wendy seemed lost in thought, and the other two giggled and snickered due to what I assumed were whispered jokes at my expense). The atmosphere was a lot more calm, now, with fewer enemies and a lot less tension in the air, and I finally opened up my spellcrafter's codebase again — in the open, this time — to tweak a few things with the data I'd gotten from my firestorm and protect spells.