Chapter 5: Chapter 5. Going Under.

What the hell had that goblin called me? A Kobold?

In legend, kobolds were short, gnomelike fey, dwellers in the deep that liked to play tricks on miners like blowing out their lanterns, turning their picks when they struck, and starting cave-ins, disguising themselves as bricks or candles or just plain being invisible. ‘Kobold’ later got bastardized into ‘golbol’ or ‘goblin’, so clearly, this world didn’t follow the rules of german mythology, since the goblins met the description of a kobold, except for their size, far better than I did. I also doubted I could turn into a brick or a candle, although invisibility was not necessarily out of the picture.

In fantasy games, well, I matched much more closely. Small lizardlike or doglike humanoids. Was I small? That would… truly suck. I thought I was more akin to one of the fake velociraptors from Jurassic park rather than the spitters.

That would certainly explain the knife, though. If it were not a shortsword, but just a normal-sized carving knife, that meant that the perch was just large, not some kind of giant of its species. That would put me at about two… crap. Two and a half feet tall. Barely a speed bump. I was a bloody little. Shorter than a dwarf. The same height as a Hobbit NOT played by Elijah Wood.

Worse, by far, was the fact that kobolds were little more than speedbumps in other ways. If this world was like fantasy video games or that tabletop game played with dice, a kobold was something newbie players slaughtered en masse in the tutorials just to get to level 1. They weren’t even level 1, the lowest of the low, noob fodder of the first order.

I was a friggin’ monster potato chip. Meant to be eaten in stacks.

That explained a lot. They wanted to put Earth Humans… and the distinction strongly implied that there were humans here, that were from Antowyn, not Earth… into something small, nearly helpless, sentient enough to hold their souls but easily manipulated. They were looking for slaves! Powerslaves, like the Iron Maiden album.

I started talking out loud, quietly, as I walked through the tunnel. This one was clogged, but all of the detritus looked ancient, like it had been dropped years or decades ago, now mostly just rotten dirt, and the water was a lot cleaner and not choked with debris. “I know you cannot afford the resources to start another safe mode chat easily, but are you able to answer questions?”

<Activating social interaction program, AI administrator. 2% resources devoted>

To some extent.

“Right. The first question, are goblins considered destroyers?

Somewhat. You still get rewards for destroying some of them, just as you do for self-defense. They originated as pure chaos creatures, but over hundreds of generations, they gained more and more order. Most goblins are still destroyers, but there are a few that are considered civilized.

Kobolds are the same. Civilized Kobolds and Goblins can gain safe-pass chits from city authorities in some areas, and killing them would be a crime, but it is rare. Please be aware that to most imported players, unless you are in a city with a safe pass, you are a monster. Antowyn Online, if it discovers your existence, might even offer a quest for your destruction, even if you are in a city with a safe pass, so please be warned.

Do not offer to touch a bracelet or their control collars. You have some abilities that will allow you to control their energy signatures and communications indirectly, but direct contact would instantly alert the administrators that a channel immune to their influence exists.

I nodded and sighed. Great. My kind of human was going to make me KOS, Kill on sight, and like I said, barely a potato chip. “Next and last question for now. How long was I unconscious? You talk about some kind of virtual world on Earth where people volunteer to play here as a Game. I never heard about anything like that.”

There was no reply for a while. Finally, I got a message that said,

<4% of resources devoted temporarily to social interaction program due to possible critical stress reaction>

Are you sure you want to know?

---

eighty-four years!

I had been off Earth for eighty-four years. What the hell had happened? Did they have flying cars yet? Televisions you could fit in your pocket? Holograms on every street corner? Celia didn’t know, and I had promised not to ask any more questions to release her resources.

I had a line, based on my zone ability, that could let me build my own user interface in slow time, but I would have to research the players myself.

But eighty-four years? Dubya had just been elected. We were trying to figure out which of the third-world whackos had knocked down the tallest buildings in the world and were on deployment towards the Persian Gulf when we caught a Hurricane off of the coast of Hawaii.

It didn’t help that she said that I had most likely been caught by something called a Temporal Magus, someone who had the chronomancy affinity, while I was dying, and I would have been dead for those years anyway. Apparently, Chronomancers had fewer problems with grabbing someone from one world and moving them to another, as long as they left a dead body identical to the original behind. If they didn’t, splat! Paradox turned them into a Chaos paste. This was apparently not a well-known fact to Chronomancers, because none ever survived to pass on the advice to not change the past, but some figured it out, and the rest tended to have very short careers.

The tunnel got older and less maintained as I went along. Is it possible that this tunnel was under a part of the city that was abandoned or destroyed in a battle or something? Here and there actual rubble, bricks, and shreds of bronze fittings appeared in the water under the drop tubes rather than biological waste of various types.

Eventually, I saw the water inlet. It was spitting clean water out, just like the ones from the vortex room. In fact, I bet if I could have made it past the slime, in the beginning, I would have found fresh water not too far beyond it. I took a drink and noted that a large part of the wall had collapsed, due to some disaster above, and a clean stream of water trickled from the trench into the tumbled stones.

In general, one doesn’t make giant sewage tunnels unless one has giant sewage. I should have thought of that before, and I felt really stupid like I had missed the most basic of clues, not realizing that the carving knife was a clue-by-four upside the head that my scale was way off.

The large, spacious sewage tunnels I had been following were probably scraping the hats of any humans that came down here, and the broad path was likely a narrow ledge that threatened to slip a human up at any time.

I carefully wriggled my way past the wrecked remains, into what looked like a large natural water-carved cavern. Water carved an immensely long time ago since apart from a pool of water where the stream from the tunnel ended, the sandstone and dripstone were bone dry. A sort of half-path, with little chunks here and there where something small, like one of my claws, had cleared the path enough to wiggle past a stalactite, were barely enough to follow deeper into the cavern.

I didn’t smell Goblin or Kobold, I don’t think. I didn’t know how long a smell lasted, but aside from the pool, there were no organic smells at all.

There were many stones, most of them various sedimentary rocks, and I took the time to whet the knife to the best of my ability by splashing some water from the pool on a fairly flat surface and then carefully dragging the blade across them. It was not the best, but aside from a few scuff marks I soon had a sharp bronze or cupronickel knife, with even the broken tip filed a bit into another sharp edge.

Whatever the metal was, it was clearly not as hard as steel, and slightly tarnished. It would not hold an edge long in a serious fight, but a carving knife is very important anyway, and my next fish was going to be far less of a nightmare to clean. Sure, I wish I had a filleting knife, paring knife, butcher knife, and a mess kit with frying pans and pots, but if wishes were horses…I’d have pants.

The path ended at a sheer gulf, what looked like an enormous, ancient, water-eroded chasm spanned a gap a hundred feet wide. Okay, possibly only fifty, but my size was a little confusing for off-the-cuff calculations. I caught a sniff of water, far away, and could even hear a faint rushing noise from far below. It looked like the water that had previously formed the cavern had dug itself a channel far below.

When a water-formed cave dried out it was referred to as a ‘dead’ cave. Nothing could live without water, after all, and stalactites and stalagmites stopped forming or growing without constant moisture. Far below, however, there was probably a living cave. The chasm was not a straight crack, and while on this side there was about a 70-degree slope, the other side was undercut heavily. Water creates it’s own channels through the softest stone, so the river’s cut followed the stone’s striations through the softer metamorphic layers, leaving behind its own sediments as it carved its way through the earth.

The layers exposed on the other side were, to put it bluntly, gorgeous. I had gone caving before, but in a cave, the darkness was absolute. Only the beams of your torches and lanterns could cut through the gloom, and the beauty was only exposed in the glaring beams. Here, I could see the cut-through layers, exposed in veins of pale color like the work of a master painter. There were glistening hints of sharpness to my eyes, and great outcroppings of rich green which I assumed had to be copper ore. They were nested in a matrix of azurite bands of green, blue, and even the occasional red patches, and around the outer edges of the bands were traces of the lighter blue-green turquoise.

These substances were considered semiprecious gems, and the human city sat on top of a copper node. I had to wonder if that was why it was founded. To exploit the rich copper and semiprecious gem deposits in the region? Or if this was unknown, barely missed by the ancient tunnelers that built the sewers and only exposed by some kind of recent geological activity. Such things had happened before.

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There was water down there and there might be food. There might even be other kobolds, and while I was not too terribly eager to deal with what were now my local cousins, it was the closest I was likely to find to civilization if surface cities considered Kobolds Kill on Sight.

I only hoped that they were not people-eaters like the goblins. Maybe it would be considered naive by the locals, but someone who can talk is people, and one doesn’t eat people. It might not be considered cannibalism, but it’s still some kind of evil in my book.

With a great sigh, I abandoned my board. It was going to be too long to lug down the incline as I climbed, even if it was valuable. I wound the cordage around my waist, not too tight, like a sort of belt, and then stuck the metal curve and the knife into it, around the back next to my tail, with the edge facing away from my tail. The newly-sharpened knife had a chance to hurt me if I caught myself on a rock wrong, but it was my only weapon and worth the risk. I just wish I had something to wrap it in, like a sheath or those rags the goblin had been wearing. Damn.

This was real, but it was a game. When you kill something, remember to check it over for loot. I had seen the crap they were wearing and dismissed it as disgusting, but right now I needed anything I could get. Just because they used the rags as clothing didn’t mean I had to. There were dozens of uses I could have put the rags to. Heck, I probably could have even used the fish bones from that perch I had caught. Think like Bear Grylls.

I started to climb down the slope if you can call a ragged, 70-degree cliff a slope. There were lots of places where ledges had formed, and cracks in the rock from the river, but there were also deposits of grit and dust that could be dangerously slippery without any wind to clear them out.

Using my claws to carve out solid rock was incredibly helpful, but it seemed to tire me quickly, so I only occasionally used them to add a handhold or dug my claws into the stone to keep from slipping. It worked for my toes as well as my hands, but simply burying my claws instead of trying to pull out pieces seemed to be a lot less draining. I almost slipped a few times, rock climbing without a rope, but it wasn’t much worse than a really long climbing wall, and this form was clearly lighter than my original body.

At one point I slipped except for one hand digging into the solid rock and dangled until I could catch my balance. My human form had been strong, but the move would have sent me to the bottom of the chasm if I had weighed that much. The sudden burst of fear and adrenaline had sent me into the zone for a moment, and I could see, or feel, a roiling mass of disorder deep within it. Apparently, Celia’s Passthrough had worked, but now was not the time to fiddle with making sense of it.

As I descended, the cool humidity had increased, and I was beginning to smell not just water, but life. The light decay of fungus, and even, oddly, the green scent of vegetation and growing things. That made no sense unless there was some sort of outlet along the river. Plants couldn’t grow without sunlight, but the growing breeze convinced me that there was something, at least, plant-related down here.

I saw a mark in the rock that was unmistakably artificial, a tool-like gouge. I scooted over and realized that there was a ledge, sweeping down a rock face in a long arc along the rock’s striations, and there were occasional cut marks where bits had been cleared off to make the ledge more accessible.

A path! I wondered if I had missed the beginning of the path up top, or if it had just begun near here, leaving a cliff that few but kobolds could navigate. Or possibly giant spiders. Every fantasy world had giant spiders. I shivered a moment in atavistic disgust that didn’t trigger my zone.

Yeah, I get it, God’s little architects. I had an absolute horror of spiders. Rats, snakes, slugs, creepy-crawlies of most types I could handle without batting an eye, but spiders freaked me out properly. Brush a cobweb past my face in unused space and I would bounce around for minutes waving my hands around, convinced that they were crawling all over me. That scene in Indiana Jones where one of my favorite actors, Alfred Molina, was covered in tarantulas? I could not have done that ever. I’d sooner step into a Starbucks, and that’s really saying something.

It had been several hours and I was starting to get thirsty and hungry again. Note to self, Kobolds don’t have snake digestion, they cannot eat something and then hunt again a week later. The water was tantalizingly close, although it smelled different from the inlets above, more mineral, less vegetable. I would have to test it again for drinkability.

It was like a quest. Get from point a to point b, fight goblins, and travel safely.

There is a quest system.

What? Did Celia read my mind? What quest system?

There is a quest system. It was designed for the release version, and never implemented for the alpha. It is considered… invasive. It can reward or punish people for meeting or failing to meet certain goals. It is currently very bare since user input from administrator classes was expected to fill that role, and creating an exciting quest that doesn’t lead players by the nose requires creativity and tact.

And no, I cannot read your mind, I don’t have any affinities, and mind-reading requires sorcery or mental manipulation. But when you are close to or in your zone, with the passthrough, or when you strongly articulate your thoughts as words in your mind, the passthrough can pick them up from your language centers.

You can also speak to me by envisioning words, rather than speaking them. Excuse me please, I need to redact the resources for the social interaction program. For some time, I will only be able to answer precisely-phrased questions about simple subjects while The Game deals with a new security variant of the worm.

So wait, she was still fighting while we spoke? Was there some kind of ongoing war between the resources of the game and those of the worm? How long had this war been going on?

Yes. 2,121 local years. Earth and Antowyn have different time scales, 12-1. 1908 on Earth. A rift was created that allowed the creatures to come into this worldspace, the rift was violent enough to echo through several other dimensions, including your Earth.

1908. That year was important for some reason. Oh right! That was the year that Baden-Powell published ‘scouting for boys', the precursor to the boy scouts! Very near and dear to my heart. Err… less important, The Model T was first created, which I guess was important, and something else…

“The Mysterious Tunguska Fireball? Was that caused by this rift thing?”

Yes.

“And the time compression? Do imported players experience this?”

Yes.

Holy shitballs. So players experience 12 hours of playtime for every one hour spent strapped into whatever machine lets them project their consciousness. Subjectively, they could live over a thousand years only taking breaks for eating, exercising, and sleeping.

No. time spent in stasis is considered sleeping time on Earth for your body, if not your mind. The version that is importing players just left Beta, and only went live yesterday. Beta players were able to spend every night playing instead of sleeping. If they chose to spend time in-game sleeping on a regular schedule, it refreshed their mind as well.

If they spent their sleep time playing, without sleeping in-game, their bodies would be refreshed, but their minds tended to have psychotic breaks.

Antowyn Online only went online yesterday? With an advantage like being able to work for two weeks while only spending one day asleep, This thing was going to be huge. People would flock to anything that promised a longer subjective lifespan, and the volunteers would be non-stop if the machines were affordable. Maybe even if they were not.

Even without directly importing Channels, and a small return on the investment of creating energy constructs, their input would be insane.

Yes. My AI has determined that without additional energy resources, The Game’s anti-intrusion routines would last for only 12 local years before they could be completely overwhelmed by Antowyn Online. Your input could extend that time as you become more powerful, as could any other channels that remained Free of Antowyn Online’s influence within the local sphere.

“In that case, doesn’t it seem a little… convenient, That I showed up at just the right time, with just the right gifts, to help fight off the worm’s influence? The Same day that the worm went live?”

Yes. The most likely probability is that the local framework's most powerful entities colloquially referred to as deities, collectively interceded to ensure the survival of the experimental channel disposed of on release day. This is in general violation of their direct intervention policy, but aside from random chance, is the most logical explanation for your life.

Holy crap, I survived by divine intervention?

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