Chapter 10: Chapter 10. Damned Pronouns.

Good. That kind of ambition is going to be necessary if you intend to take on the Antowyn Online worm.

“Celia?” I thought curiously as the words washed through my mind. As I worked, I came closer and closer to my zone. It seemed that practice makes perfect, and knowing there was some kind of goal, a way to enter my zone willingly rather than just as a result of the stress of conflict, was worth working towards.

Like I said before, no. Celia’s a piece of the game. Useful for asking simple questions, but while it’s trying to translate answers it’s using up cycles it could be using to fight against its intrusion.

Celia is gone away for right now. You have the information you need, and time to use your brain.

“Then who are you?”

Not Celia.

“That doesn’t help,” I thought firmly.

You know that part of your brain that works while you are asleep, using logic and creativity to disassemble your short-term memories, connect them, and then fit them into your long-term storage? I am sort of like that. You can call me Mnemosyne, or Nem for short.

My memory sorter? Err… “Why are you using the name of the Greek muse of memory?”

Because that’s what I am doing. The muses were simply anthropomorphic explanations for natural processes, although in THIS world they have a bit more of a concrete presence. In this case, though, I am using a tiny bit of the energy you purify as a channel to address you directly because Celia dumped a ton of stuff in your brain that doesn’t fit the way your memory works.

“I suppose that makes sense, so you are sort of like a Daemon?” I asked. I was a bit skeptical, but the UI wasn’t going to assemble itself, and I had decided to treat this world like it was real, rather than a coma-induced dream or some kind of electrodes stuck in my brain while I slept somewhere.

“That’s a rude way to put it, but essentially correct. Celia told you I’d be coming. Technically I am a piece of a deity, but I am made of your memories and creativity. If some goddess stuck a piece of herself in your head, even a relatively unknown one like a muse, your head exploding would be the least of your worries. I am basically you, just not the you you are used to doing your thinking while you are awake.”

So basically my subconscious decided to pop up and say hi. I just hoped it, or she, or whatever, wasn’t pissed about all the junk that got shuffled back there and ignored until it went away.

It didn’t go away. You are just good at keeping it locked down. The problem is, artificial intelligences are amazingly stupid. She just stuffed your information in your head with ten years of getting bullied and all the social rejection you have ever had, without giving you a way to access the utterly incomprehensible storage medium that a computer uses that is nothing at all like human memories, and then expected you to figure it out.

It’s a bit overcrowded. You can decode it, but it’s like trying to create a sand painting in the middle of a dust storm or cleaning up a hoarder’s home without throwing anything away. Before we do anything, we will need to create a clean surface for you to put things on as you tie the memories into your own mind.

Great, so now I was a hoarder.

Everyone’s mind is a hoarder. The only way to organize it is to increase the size of your house. The only people who aren’t hoarders are people like Ten Second Tom.

Ten Second Tom was a character in a movie that had Goldfield’s syndrome, brain damage that prevented him from storing any memories for longer than ten seconds. Neuroplasticity was affected by brain damage, and short-term memories simply never became mid-term or long-term memory. Yeah, I imagine you couldn’t hoard memories like that.

Your mind is a better hoarder than most, so once we have a decent clean room to work with, we can start assembling and connecting the information.

“Will that cause any damage?” I thought.

It might occasionally cause hints of pain, psychosomatic, and maybe a little emotional distress when memories are tied into emotional moments, but your brain is slightly different. It should work out well. We are going to have to work around the fact that you have intentionally suppressed your emotional framework, but Celia was smart enough to realize that you should be able to create a UI with minimal emotional or personality keys.

“And that means?”

You are facing an uphill battle. Once you figure it out, it should be able to be used by the system for others without having gigantic ‘Bran was here’ signposts all over it making them act in weird ways or remember weird things.

Great, now even my own subconscious was being insulting.

Not entirely. I was put here by Menomsyne. I still have her personality markers. Prior to this, something like me would be unable to interact with you at all beyond the occasional flash of inspiration. I much prefer being able to converse like a person, and she is a memory goddess. By her standards, you really are an idiot and not just the savant kind.

I managed to sort of maintain my zone while I stopped working out and settled down on the floor. Cross-legged zen poses, with my tail, were pretty much ridiculous, but a sort of horse-stance crouch, like I was using my legs and tail as a three-legged stool, was surprisingly comfortable.

“Celia mentioned a pass-through, which I guess is my zone. Would that be enough of a clean room to assemble it?”

Sort of. Your gifts, though, your imbue ability, should allow you to create a much better location, one not crowded with junk like your pass-through. It is artificial anyway. Once you build it, we can use it to hold all the junk she downloaded into your brain like… a computer game for a Play-station downloaded onto a Mac, build your UI as an emulator, and then get rid of it. Your pass-through leaves you incredibly vulnerable to mental invasion via sorcery or psionic gifts, sort of like a pacemaker’s control cord leaves you vulnerable to infections.

I was interrupted by someone entering the area I was practicing and dropped immediately out of my zone.

I was, to put it bluntly, exhausted. While I had been speaking with Mnemosyne I hadn’t been paying attention to my workout, and my current form just wasn’t as ready to go for multiple-hour exercise, and when Carolinus was going to lead me to where the pack, or nation, as he referred to it, was eating, I had serious, vicious cramps in both my calves and my stomach.

Fortunately, whatever was healing me quickly was also able to help my cramps, and eventually, I was able to eat. The kobolds seemed to run a set of large pots full of some sort of mix of mushrooms and white meat reminiscent of lobster. The food was not heavily seasoned, but there was a fairly subtle interplay between the various sorts of mushrooms that was interesting, although not well-matched. I was truly curious if I could do better, since, when I had the chance, I really enjoyed cooking.

I probably wouldn’t be very good at feeding the hundreds of kobolds that were here, but I wondered if the large, apron-clad kobold I saw directing the pre-evolution adolescents around serving the food had some kind of chef evolution. Each of the pots had brown kobolds of various sorts, hunters, warriors, and craftsmen crowded around them who took a bowl, a lump of some sort of bread smeared with fat or butter, and retired elsewhere to eat before bringing the bowls back.

It was surprisingly organized even though they didn’t do the lining up thing, and Carolinus helped me grab my own bowl and bread. “Usually kobolds your size are still in the pens.” he waved at a bunch of adolescents carrying another heavy pot somewhere. “Since it’s possible to get stepped on and they are sort of difficult to see in the crowd around the pots.” He explained, “But your coloration is unique enough that if someone steps on you it won’t be an accident.”

I had noticed that several of the workers and more than a few warriors were watching me closely, although the hunters seemed to completely ignore my presence. “You are different, and a lot of kobolds just don’t like different. I am different too, but it was not so obvious, and there are traditions for dealing with mentally unusual kobolds. We usually wind up among the shamans for good reason, even if my first evolution didn’t restrict my size. Shamans are supposed to be different, to have a different viewpoint, so the role is accepted. They don’t know where you fit in, yet.”

As I ate, I had no idea where, or if, I fit in either. I had what Celia had told me, but I had no way of verifying its accuracy. I mean, was all she, or it, said the truth? Or was this just some kind of game lore that I had stumbled into? Something devised to push a player to follow the game’s plotlines, whatever they were.

Carolinus felt like a real person, as did Gus and Tark, but were they real? Were the NPCs programmed to respond realistically? Was I eighty-four years in the future, or had I drowned, been fished out, and was now in a coma in some white room someplace covered in wires with my brain hooked up to a computer game or something?

I had resolved to treat this experience as real, but there were a lot of holes that were hard to address. I was here because, apparently, channels were something special, but how did someone fetch me from earth? Did magic work there? I guess it must have, but every sort of magic I had ever seen had always been a trick or a con.

I loved watching magic shows, and I didn’t mind suspending my disbelief and pretending that the performer was doing things that were impossible, but it was like a cartoon… a rabbit cannot really walk on thin air because he doesn’t understand gravity. Half the time I picked up on what the misdirection was, and figured out how the trick worked, but I was still incredibly entertained by the easy manner that the performers used to conceal their machinations and the wonder of seeing them perform well.

When I was a kid, I tried for years to learn and do the magic tricks I saw in magic sets. I was able to master more than a few of the simple devices, and for a couple of years my mom had found an easy way to buy Christmas and birthday presents in the form of magic tricks, but after a while, well, to be a true magician you had to have a pianist’s hands. I had strong hands, but not long fingers and eventually gave up on the more complex illusions.

So far, except for my existence in a weird form and a set of horror movie rejects trying to eat me, I hadn’t really seen anything that could qualify as magic save for the weird messages and figures that were in my mind. This form seemed to have much more manual dexterity potential than I was used to, so doing tricks might not be outside of the realm of possibility.

I shouldn’t be getting adrift in what-ifs. I needed to treat it like it was real, even if it wasn’t. Yep, I might be going nuts inside some virtual space, but dying in here might mean dying for real. Eye on the ball, man. I just wasn’t sure who I could trust, and who was writing the script.

I sort of remembered how character sheets were arranged in those tabletop games that I had occasionally been sucked into playing by well-meaning acquaintances, compared to the way that games like Evercrack had arranged things. I should probably have some kind of primary listing, something I could refer to in a hurry, but my main concern was how to get actual meaning out of it.

“Do you actually understand whatever values are invested in the attributes?” I thought, firmly.

As well as you do. There are real-world implications for some of them that we can simulate and simplify. It’s hard to get exact measurements, but it appears that some of this stuff is based on an average human male, and we can certainly use things we find as a baseline. It’s mostly very fluid, though.

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Weird, I could almost see what she was looking at as I dipped my bread into the chowder and took a bite.

“What kind of attributes are tracked?” I asked, curiously, and I could see myself looking closely at each tangled knot, analyzing values coming up as they had with the knife, but now they were comprehensible.

It appears that everything is sort of tracked as a blob, but we can peel out and separate the ones we feel are important. There appear to be four basic frameworks. One of them concerns the energy flowing through your physical body, the next appears to concern incoming or some sort of energy translation.

The third looks like it’s tied a lot more heavily into your knowledge and talents, your ability to manipulate and understand the way energy works in the real world, and the fourth involves… uhh… pushing energy into other stuff. I guess that would fit with physical, channel, technology, and imbue. But the things are so tangled, like there is another part that involves the actual parts of your physical body, and the kind of stress they can take, but not their energy patterns, although they both tie back into each other. The same with your mental faculties, but again, everything is a tangled mess.

After I ate, sitting on a protrusion of rock along with Carolinus and several others, I noticed one of the warriors eyeing me. I was starting to realize that what I had assumed to be a whole bunch of males were actually males and females, but I guess as egg-laying creatures they were not markedly different from each other. Was Carolinus…

“Carolinus?” I asked curiously.

“Yes?” He answered as we returned our bowls.

“Are you male?”

“No, I am a female.” She stated. “You probably don’t recognize the smell difference, since it’s not really obvious until the breeding period, and there’s little difference in juveniles and adolescents. I am infertile and don’t have heats, and most of the adults that are capable of breeding tend to wear clothing or uniforms of their status. Is that important?”

I shook my head, “I guess it is not, I was just a little confused.”

She shrugged, “In general it doesn’t make much of a difference until the breeding week rolls around. Both males and females tend to get a little more aggressive, they find someplace to take care of the urge, and then return to their duties. The eggs, when they mature, are sent to a tad pool, and the surviving juveniles are sent to the juvenile pens when they can move out of the pools.”

“Tad pools? Like actual tadpoles, like frogs?”

She shrugged, “Not exactly, but eggs hatch quickly if they are fertile. The offspring are… blind, and barely possess appendages, and have modified gills that can breathe air. Until a year and first shedding, their gills have not grown enough to handle dry air, and their skins would quickly dry and split, killing them.”

“What do you mean by survivors?” I asked.

“All of the eggs for a heat go in a common pool. We feed them, but children will be children, and we are predators... usually only about one in fifty manages to survive to reach the juvenile pens. The juvenile pens are much safer, usually one in five survives to adolescence while we analyze your talents and start training you in a role. Your parent group would be assigned, and they would help guide you into adolescence where you would start learning your real skills and be assigned to gathering, defense, or hunting the caverns based on your first evolution from juvenile to adolescence.”

“So the evolutions just happen?”

Carolinus nodded, “If we need more warriors or hunters, there are tricks we can use to encourage a little more… aggression in juveniles. It leads to fewer graduates, but more overall warriors. We can also encourage hunters by dropping in live, threatening foods like Haro-lizards. That tends to lead to entire generations of hunters, with a higher survival rate than normal, but we need builders, crafters, and food preparers as well as hunters.”

“There are other tricks as well, such as puzzles or more training for intellectual development, but in general, the very first non-standard evolution is out of your control. It’s not like Juveniles are intelligent enough to choose an evolution anyway, nothing I have tried short of forced evolutions has ever been able to make them sapient prior to adulthood.”

Carolinus sighed, “And making them more intelligent tends to close off combat paths anyway. We need both. A Shaman cannot do her job as a shaman if the spirit pathways were not opened. We need warriors to protect us if there is a threat since they have paths we lack.”

She smiled kobold-style again, “Which is why you were fortunate I was gathering. Forced familiars open their sorcery and spirit paths when they are evolved. You are a juvenile, and I have the right paths, so I can be your parent and guide you in your development to become a shaman!”

I shook my head, “I appreciate that, but I don’t know if I have those… uhh… paths.”

She shrugged, “We will have a closer look when we get back to the dwelling. You should have them, though, but detecting them requires powerful spirit magics such as identify and scrying.”

I didn’t know if that would be a good idea. Unless the terminology differed, I wouldn’t have the affinities she expected, and Celia had said flat-out that my affinities were dangerous or something worth killing me for, at least the channel one was.

“I cannot… I mean, I know what my affinities are already, but I don’t know if I know them by the same words you do.”

Her eyes widened, “Can you tell me?”

I shrugged, “Possibly? How many affinities do kobolds have?”

She smiled and held up her hand. “Warriors have one path, the physical. Hunters have two, ranged and nature. Shamans often have two as well, Spirit and lore, but those of us who have escaped familiar have three, sorcery, spirit, and lore.”

I nodded, “Do you know what imbue is?”

She nodded, and we walked back to the room where I had practiced. “One of my affinities is imbuing, and another is machinery.”

She stopped and peered at me closely. “Imbue is a very rare crafter path, but we don’t know how to encourage it. It allows you to add magic to other things, such as items, potions, or even other beings. The last imbuer we had was an alchemist, but the imbuing path is very challenging because it relies on magical essence. A few mushrooms and herbs come with magical essence, as do the pieces of powerful monsters, but it’s rare enough that imbuing is not terribly effective except when crafting things like potions, that have low essence demands.”

“Machinery. That sounds similar to gadgeteer affinities.”

I nodded.

“It is an uncommon gift that some hunters get instead of nature. It makes them less effective as trackers, but all kobolds have an affinity for traps. I imagine that could make you a trapmaster. Useful both for hunting and helping maintain Dirt. If you can find the right materials, I imagine you could create traps with magical components that could defeat those creatures with a gift for sensing traps or that are too tough, or wily, to succumb to normal types.”

“Do you have a third affinity?” she asked.

I nodded, “Physical.”

She shook her head, “But that makes no sense. A Druid could instill physical affinity in her companion, but kobolds are not animals, we cannot become companions, only, rarely, familiars.”

I decided to come clean, at least a little. “I don’t think I was created as a familiar. I was an experiment. I woke up at the bottom of a pile of my kind of kobold in a dump, all dead. I think, maybe, I survived when I was not supposed to.”

She sighed. “You are right. I don’t know where you can go, though. If those are your affinities, you cannot become a shaman. You don’t have the tools of a hunter, and even crafting might not accept you. With physical, I could try and find a warrior to parent you. That would explain how you could take two goblins even at your size.”

I shrugged, “I would like to be of use, but I don’t think I am quite able to match up to those who are warriors yet. Perhaps I could stay here tonight and then try to see if they will accept me in the morning?

Carolinus nodded, “Your gifts are...unique. But the warriors or crafters might accept you. Our master trapsmith might as well, but she has not chosen any juveniles or adolescents to parent in nearly four years.”

She smiled a little as she offered me a pallet, “Still, unlike some, I consider the unusual to be a potential strength. We will discover in the morning, yes?”

I nodded, yes, and curled up to try and get into the zone without having to exercise my way into it. If there was one thing I knew, it was that I didn’t want to be relegated to a life of hunting and taking care of tadpoles.

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