“Look; your ‘Demons’ know magic, right?” I asked the Saint, whose posture straightened, as if she hadn’t intended me to hear what she’d said.

Cautiously, she replied in the affirmative, and I continued:

“Well, I don’t know any magic—at all. I’ve only known about the existence of your magic for the past couple days and all that I do know about it is academic knowledge at best.”

It didn’t take any ingeniously coded analysis software to tell me that she was still skeptical, but I wasn’t sure what I could do to prove my honesty to her. Furthermore, even if I had some sort of evidence, anyone with even a single skeptical bone in their bodies would need to surgically extract that specific bone before accepting evidence of any sort in a constructed VR environment such as this one. It was too easy to fake; too easy to manipulate the environment and the senses when surrounded by already digitally generated scenery.

This fact was also why I considered myself safe from the Saint: in this VR, my control over “reality” was as close to absolute as it gets, and maybe I was being naïve, but I trusted a software that had endured centuries of continuous security patches and was commonly used by corporates to protect me from someone who’s attack ware was rather primitive and who I suspected didn’t even really know how a VR environment worked.

After a short period of silence, the Saint spoke up, “You said that you’ve only known about the existence of magic for the past couple days. I take it you were elsewhere before then?”

I had an idea, “Yes, would you like to see how I arrived here?”

“…Very well.”

With her agreement, I mentally dove into the settings for the VR, and began reconfiguring the space. Instead of the infinite gray and untextured void, the surroundings morphed into a different kind of void: the void of outer space. In an eyeblink, our two chairs and desk along with us were suspended above an angry planet and surrounded by a vast starfield. The Saint gasped.

The space around us was now my memory. Reconstructed from what I’d seen and what recorded sensor data could observe. Above, a starship coasted: the starship, from which I’d eventually leapt in a daring escape.

With my best narrator’s voice, I began to tell my guest my tale of how I arrived on this strange planet and what I’d seen and done since, all accompanied with stunning sights and sounds. Only interrupting sporadically to ask for some clarification, the Saint was a model audience. Occasionally sneaking glances at her revealed that unlike in our interview-esque situation beforehand, the Saint was now not only relaxed, but maybe even enjoying herself, even emoting visibly when my short story hit particularly interesting beats.

Story complete, I left our surroundings set to a wooded forest scene, not bothering to switch back to the default gray space. I’d showed the Saint almost all of it, including everything between my escape from the Former Applause to fleeing through the forest away from the knights in the village. Only a small amount ended up being editorialized. After all, while time might not be passing too much outside of our little VR, I didn’t feel like spending a couple of subjective days in VR watching Dakla sleep or collecting flowers in the woods or whatever. The boring parts I simply skimmed over.

As I rotated my chair back to face my guest, I just caught her expression change: During my storytelling she’d been—well not quite enraptured—but definitely an eager and open audience. Now though, it was as if some subtle guard were raised again. Clearly, she didn’t trust me yet, or she still had some unanswered questions.

“When you said earlier that you needed my help, what did you mean?” she said.

I thought it was quite obvious, “From what I’ve shown and told you, you know that I’m a stranger to these lands. Now, unless I’m completely mistaken, you probably know quite a bit about this world, and I’d like you to teach me and guide me towards my goal.”

At this, the Saint paused before saying, “Putting aside the question of ‘how?’, what exactly is your goal?”

“I want to return to my home, to modern human space.”

“Are you sure?”

What a strange question. “Of course.”

“No, I meant is that your only goal?”

“Well besides peripheral goals that lead me to accomplishing that main goal, sure.”

“So, your goals don’t involve conquering, starting wars, enslaving souls, that kind of thing?”

“What?!” I exclaimed, “Is this another one of your ‘Elise is a Demon’ accusations? Why would I do any of that?”

“Well…” At this the Saint looked a bit uncomfortable, “I need to be sure, and… you’ve already captured one soul.”

“What? I haven’t captured any of these ‘souls’.” Now I was just confused.

She looked at me like I was being purposefully obstinate, “Mine obviously.”

“What?” I was beginning to sound like a corrupted file. “You don’t have a soul.”

This stopped the Saint dead, and in a low tone, she said, “That’s the kind of heresy that’ll get you strung up.”

“And that’s exactly why I’d like your help!” Another one of those social landmines.

“My—” the Saint cut off her rebuttal and seemed to begin to contemplate deeply. I simply waited, sensing that a decision was imminent. A while later, the Saint spoke up:

“I’ve come to a decision.”

I waited patiently

“…I’m willing to help you, under a few conditions.”

“Alright.”

“First, I’d like to be returned home or leave whatever this—” she gestured at the surroundings, “—place as soon as it’s possible and safe for me to do so.”

“Yes, that’s not a problem.”

“Secondly, I’d like you to seriously consider any advice or recommendations I give you. If you don’t, I have the right to stop helping you if or if I believe your actions are evil, I’ll also stop lending my assistance.”

I wasn’t sure where this formalized distrust was coming from, but then again, she didn’t know that I’d agree to basically anything she offered. Some help was better than none, and although I’d called her a guest, “prisoner” was really a more apt descriptor. Yes, I was an unwilling warden, but realistically I had all the advantages, up to and including directly reading her mind at a surface level. This discussion only had the semantic frame of a negotiation, and, well, if I were the absolutely-evil type, I could just delete this instance of the Saint, pull another copy of her from backup and try my skills at persuasion again.

I didn’t want to be evil and wouldn’t do so. I’d already decided that even if the Saint decided not to help, I wouldn’t be punitive or upset. Yes, she could be helpful, but even without her, it’s not as if I’m completely lost.

“Yes, I agree.”

“And finally,” the Saint gave me a serious look, “I’d like something to do! The time I spent before you arrived in the endless gray void was beginning to drive me insane—when you’re not asking me questions could I… read something maybe?”

I chuckled, “That’s not a problem; I wasn’t planning on leaving you in the empty simulation forever. In fact, if you’re interested, you could ‘ride along’ so to speak: I’ll give you access to the world as I perceive it through my senses, and you can follow along.”

“Really, you’d do that?” she asked, with an expression I couldn’t quite read on her face.

“Sure, why not?”

“Isn’t that perhaps a little… invasive?” she asked tentatively.

“Invasive? No, not really. I’ll only give you my basic senses and surface level thoughts.”

“Huh. We really must talk about this world you come from sometime.”

“Sure. But now, let me reconfigure the space quickly.”

I’d already been considering how to keep someone whose brain was bereft of all the biological and technological improvements that mine had sane and healthy inside a virtual space. First, I’d decided that I’d keep the VR. It wouldn’t’ve been too difficult to simply pipe in all my sensory inputs directly to the Saint, but that probably wouldn’t have been a good solution. I had personal experience how it felt being trapped in a body without control and making her feel that same way wasn’t conductive to building a good rapport, to put it lightly.

Instead, I began constructing a virtual observation room. Large displays on all the walls, a copy of the chair she was currently sitting on, and a small table with an old-timey microphone that she could speak into if she wanted my direct attention. Then, a little control panel with other options—for example if she wanted the drone’s perspective—and then I gave her a quick walkthrough on how to use what I’d set up. Fortunately, Saint Tabris was intelligent, or at least very competent at following instructions.

The most interesting part, at least to the Saint, was the asset library I gave her access to. By modern standards, it wasn’t much—only what I’d accrued during my two decades of unindentured life—but to Tabris, it was a vast library full of interesting artefacts. It had everything: not only hundreds of tables, desks, and chairs, but also other props to populate VR environments with: Physics-enabled koi ponds, pilotable shuttle craft, low-detail building facades for backgrounds—a little bit of everything in short.

Seeing how interesting this all was to her, I gave her access to the basic libraries I had too—those that any citizen has. I didn’t give her access to everything though, sharing my other libraries probably would’ve been a bad move: from my indentured days, I had vast amounts of data on military strategy and combat and these would probably give the Saint the wrong idea of who I was or who I wanted to be.

Then, with a wave and a fade-out, I returned my main thread of awareness to my physical surroundings, leaving the Saint to get acclimated to her VR environment with only a couple subroutines monitoring her mind and actions for security, just in case.

In the real world, not much time had passed or much had changed with one exception: Dakla was now no longer sleeping deeply: she was close to waking up. I decided that I’d let her wake naturally, as I wasn’t in any extreme moment-to-moment hurry, and instead I decided to refamiliarize myself with my surroundings.

We’d covered a bit of distance during our night-hike. We were a solid distance away from the village, and several hundred meters away from the path we’d been taking. This path wasn’t well-traveled, and it wasn’t paved, nor did it have the rutted pattern that other such paths obtained from passing carts. Still, it was more than a game-trail; hoofprints of shod horses were visible. Dakla said that she’d follow that trail, but we’d also already decided that traveling together wouldn’t be prudent. Regardless, our goals didn’t align anyways. Dakla wanted to find a quiet new place to settle down and practice her craft and I wanted to find a skilled and hidden magic practitioner.

This is exactly the kind of question that I should ask my Saint about, I thought, so I did. Outlining my thinking to her was quick. Her response wasn’t all too helpful though:

“Well, your approach of attempting to find some unlicensed practitioner—as loathe I am to admit it—is probably the right decision. The magic that I or the various other mortal and immortal followers of the divine know is somewhat… formulaic. The Spells, Blessings, and Miracles I can—usually—perform are powerful and highly effective, but not quite flexible enough for your application.”

The Saint continued, “Furthermore, because of—who you are—I find it unlikely that even with my guidance you’d be able to convince some mortal followers to help you out.”

“Alright,” I said, “That’s all useful information for me, but doesn’t solve my direct problem of where I should start my search.”

At this the Saint’s tone became a bit sheepish, “Well, you see, paying attention to the geopolitical happenings on the Plane of Man isn’t exactly something I spend a lot of time with. Most of my work deals with people here in a more abstract sense. The little knowledge I do have concerning things like geography and political borders is around three hundred years out of date and what I do know is mostly broad strokes. If we find a map or the name of a major city, I might be able to remember more, but from here in the middle of the woods with only some backwater hamlet’s name to go off of, I can’t really tell you much.”

I audibly sighed. No easy path to success it seems. Fortunately, I hadn’t gotten my hopes up too far. There was a long road and a potentially longer search ahead of me.