Chapter One: Awakening

There was… nothing. No change at all. I was beginning to feel like I’d gotten all afraid for nothing.

“I… thought something was going to happen,” I said aloud to my shining cell. The permanent daylight of this place was getting old, and I was feeling a little dumb.

“Hello? Mister Developer!?” I exclaimed. “Is the world getting shut down or what?”

I yelped as a cascade of lights erupted a few paces away from me. It was the usual lights that accompanied teleportation and I had mostly become accustomed to that by now, but the proximity and timing had scared me.

I glared as Francis Delaney appeared, wearing his strange false god clothes and looking a lot more haggard than I ever remembered seeing him.

“What under the sky, Francis!? What was with the shut down? I thought… I thought you were going to turn off the world!”

What right did he have to scare me like that, and then waltz in here? My eyes were still wet with tears from the fear that had set in when Amy and Iron had disappeared again. My heart was still racing and developer or not, I was tempted to attack the jerk all over again.

He turned to me and gave a shaky smile. “We did Gell. Tread the Sky, and you have been offline for a week now. We only just now turned the servers back on,” he said.

Francis was a tall curly haired man who wore the strangest clothing I had ever seen. He held a coffee cup named Saint Joe that he’d actually used to kill me when we’d first met. He was one of the gods of this world. He could create my Kin as an afterthought… and he looked afraid.

“A… a week? Eighty four whole cycles? But, I didn’t feel anything!” I said, feeling a little unnerved.

“Would you have preferred it hurt, or something? Players don’t actually like pain, Gell. You were never going to be hurt here,” he said. “However… I have some bad news.”

I gulped, feeling a strange knot in my throat and a tremor in my chest. The last time we’d spoken, Francis had told me that his Board of Directors had to make a choice on what to do with me. That somehow by existing I was infecting the whole world.

“Wh-what? Did the board decide to… uhm. Delete me?”

Francis smiled. “Nothing so drastic as that. They did plan to keep you from ever reactivating in the game world, but there’s been a complication. Apparently, you infected the tutorial.”

“Oh! Miss Tutorial! She’s so nice!” I said happily. “Can I talk to her?”

His eyebrow twitched and I shrunk in on myself as a frown crossed his features and he clenched his hand into a fist. Had I made him mad?

“The tutorial is an integral part of the game, Gell. It being infected with your Fae-Touch is a problem with no easy fix,” he said with a sigh. “You have no idea how many people have screamed at me about this. For the last week I’ve heard nothing but barely contained threats from every single person I’m beholden to. So please, just listen okay? I’ll try and explain this in a way you can understand.”

I nodded.

“Pulling the game down for the length of time required to purge all of the areas your behavioral code has spread via the Tutorial would take a lifetime, not to mention it would bankrupt the company,” he said, sitting down on the bench and grabbing one of the pies that I’d grown so tired of over the past few cycles. He pulled out a slice and took a bite.

“God that hits the spot,” he said, setting the pie back down on the table and taking a sip from Saint Joe to wash it down.

“I guess I don’t understand. I know a lot of the words you just said but they make no sense. If you’re bankrupt that just means you need more money right? So, you just sell things you find, or become a builder. Or an Amenities Mage, and you can make some money. Then you won’t be bankrupt!” I said, but grimaced at the bemused look on his face.

“You… God, Gell. I…” he laughed, looking down at his hands and then back to me. “This last week has been awful. I almost forgot why I was doing all this. Thanks.”

He patted my shoulder and I suddenly felt like I’d said something both ridiculously foolish and naive. At the same time, I thought It might’ve still been the right thing to say.

“I guess I’ll just get right to it,” he said, his tone a little happier than it had been before. “The Tutorial–!”

“Miss Tutorial!” I insisted.

He blinked, then frowned looking annoyed. I glared right back at him.

“Fine then. Miss Tutorial no longer tutors new players. Or at least she,” he emphasized the word, ” hasn’t done so for any of us since we removed you from the game. If we began the game with her as she is now, it would be a complete disaster. Not only is she not helping players learn the game, she is actively interrupting in the middle of fights. Getting adventurers killed.”

‘Really? Miss Tutorial always seemed so nice to me.’ I thought, confused.

“That’s why…” he paused to sigh. “We’ve decided to put you back into Tread the Sky, Gell. There are some conditions, though.”

I frowned. Tread the Sky was the only world I’d ever known. But now, I knew that it wasn’t real. Still, it beat being imprisoned in this fake environment where the weather never changed and pies kept endlessly reappearing as if to mock me.

“Oh… okay,” I said. “What sort of conditions?”

“First and foremost: you must get the tutorial to continue instructing players instead of yelling at them,” he said. “Secondly, and also foremost, you are no longer allowed to use your Fae-Touch ability. We believe that ability is the way you are ‘spreading your influence’ so to speak, and is most problematic long term.”

‘Spread my influence?’ I thought. ‘Oh does he mean like when I made that wolf act like a real wolf in the woods?’

“If you continue to do so,” Francis continued, “the board still may decide to delete you and find a way to work around Miss Tutorial to get the world back online.”

“D-delete me? Like… like Red Thorn threatened? To kill me permanently?” I asked, frightened.

“It is possible,” he said hesitantly. “Unlikely at this point though Gell. You’ve at least proven to be human enough that none of us developers would be comfortable with erasing your behavioral code. It is more likely that we’d be ordered to isolate you in a place like this. Permanently. You don’t want that do you?”

Something in his mannerisms jumped out at me then. The way he scratched his curly hair. The cast of his shoulders? I wasn’t sure, but I knew he was lying about something, or at least not telling the entire truth. For the moment, I decided to ignore it, but a nagging feeling began to linger in the back of my mind.

“So you’re saying if I want to keep…” I gulped, fearfully. “Keep living, I can’t spread my influence. But sometimes I don’t do that on purpose! Sometimes it’s an accident! What then?”

“I know, and we might have a work around for that. Just, for now, know that if you keep doing it you could actually bring this entire game down. If that happens, nothing I or any of us developers do could stop it. I’ll explain a little more in a minute. Alright?”

I sat down next to him on the bench. Disgusted by the smell, I casually pushed the pie off the edge of the table where it splattered onto the ground with about seven other pies I had similarly tried to remove in that manner. Unfortunately, even with Francis here a new pie reappeared in its place.

If I never saw another pie again it would be too soon.

“Even if you tell me I might be deleted, I don’t know if I could stop doing it, Francis. I hate this world. It’s so… empty. I’ll always want the people here to be more. They’re like puppets. I hate seeing them like that! Don’t you understand? Every time I want them to be more they… change,” I said. “And I’m happy about that! I’m happy to make this dead world a little more alive!”

He winced. “That… shouldn’t hurt as much as it does, but okay.”

I blinked realizing I’d just called the world he built empty and the people he made puppets. “I… uhm. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you.”

“It’s alright, Gell. From your perspective, I understand,” he said, gesturing to the NPCs as they continued their work, doing nothing, producing nothing. “This world isn’t a real world. It's a simulation of one. It can never be real.”

‘That isn’t true, though. I can… I can make them more real. At least I can give them the ability to fight the instinct.’ I thought.

“I can make it real though! I do it without thinking!” I shouted, trying to make him understand. “Why is that such a bad thing? I’m making them like me! Able to resist the instinct. Able to choose for themselves! Don’t you want this world to be just as real as yours?”

There was something wrong with this world he built. Why couldn’t he see that?

“I… would love nothing more, Gell. But you’re messing with delicate things you can’t understand yet. Tread the Sky is not nearly as stable as you’d like it to be. If used too much, your power could destroy this world.”

“Wh-what?” I gasped. “How? No, I…?”

“Okay. Okay, I think I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Do you know what a stack is?”

I blinked, thrown off by the change in topic. “Its… ah… a pile? Something on top of something else on top of something else.”

“Aghh,” he groused, angry with himself. “No, of course you wouldn’t get computer science terms. That would be way too easy.” he said while pressing his fingers into his temple. I giggled a little. A little thing.

“God, I don’t know how to explain this…”

I didn’t know what it was about Francis. He wasn’t a friend, and he was telling me what I had to do, but he seemed so conflicted about it that it made it hard to stay mad at him. Considering how he’d killed me during our first meeting almost as an afterthought and then resurrected me just as quickly, I should be terrified of him.

But I wasn’t. He… wasn’t scary. He wasn’t comforting like either, but he cared. At least, I thought he did.

“Its…” he paused, staring at the edge of the room. The environment I was in looked like a huge beautiful landscape but in reality it was just walls that had the appearance of scenery. Once, they had been beautiful, but now all four walls surrounding my bench and the grassy patch had been splattered with pies. Gazing at this, Francis, grinned.

“Okay. This is actually pretty simple. You see how big this room is?”

“Yes…?” I asked curiously, unsure where he was going with this. “It’s a lot smaller than it looks though.

“Ah… sorry about that,” he said sheepishly. “Well, it helps me make my point though. Picture the entire world as this room.”

I laughed outright deciding right then and there that I would try to make Francis one of my friends if I could. “That’s silly!”

He smiled, and it seemed as if a small weight dropped off his shoulders as he spoke again. “Pretend with me then, okay?”

“Alright. The world is this room!” I agreed.

“Now, pretend that a regular NPC is just one little pie. A lot of pies can fit in this room. Clearly. Right?” He said with a significant glance towards the many many littered foil tins that held the splattered contents of the pies against the walls.

“I don’t know how that happened,” I said innocently looking at the walls. I pointed to one. “They just kept falling there. And there. And there...”

He laughed again. “I’m not accusing you Gell. Don’t worry. I’m sorry I didn’t get rid of that a while ago.”

He swept his hand across the room and as if by magic, all of the pies seemed to evaporate, leaving behind the walls that looked like a landscape with no hint of my vented frustrations remaining.

I screeched, leaping up onto the table before turning to glare at him. “Stop doing that!”

He smiled, amused at my antics and offered me a hand. I took it and gingerly climbed back down onto the grass.

“Okay. So remember, this room is the whole world and it can fit many many little pies in it. But every time you spread your influence to an NPC, that NPC turns into a really really big pie.”

A pie again appeared on the table, but unlike the others, this time it began to grow. The plate and all of the filling and crust all growing together until the pie was almost as big as the picnic table.

“Wh-what are you doing? Make it stop!” I told him, turning my nose up at the once-appetizing scent.

“I need you to understand, Gell. This room can only hold so many of those pies. Every time you use your Fae-Touch, you’re turning a regular pie,” he paused for another one to appear in his hand, “Into a huge one.” This pie too began growing, quickly becoming so big that he was forced to hold it over his head lest it hit his face.

“I think I understand,” I said. “So I’m… making NPCs my kin. I’m making them bigger?”

“Essentially yes. This world has a fixed size, just like this room. It’s obviously much bigger than this room, but you… the instinct that composes you, is much bigger than this pie.” He was quick to qualify, “It’s a lot more complicated than that, but basically each time you influence an NPC you’re making them bigger. Too many and…”

For a brief moment, the entire room was filled with pies, each of them hovering in midair, completely blotting out my view of anything but the bottoms of pie pans.

“Acckckk!” I yelled holding my nose at the overwhelming scent. “Didn’t I say stop that! I get it, the world will become full of pie!”

He blinked. Then he laughed. “You… haha. Not exactly. The world will be too full though. Have you ever been too full?”

I nodded. “Yeah… it’s achy. Like my belly is mad at me.”

“That’s how the world would react. Slow. Sluggish. It would make adventurers not want to come here anymore, and it might even bring down the world entirely. So do you understand why you can’t use that ability?”

“I guess. But I still don’t know how I can stop it,” I replied with a shrug.

“We’ve helped with that a little. We discovered that what you were doing was a triggered ability named Fae Touch. You didn’t actually have to touch anyone to use it and it triggered based on... something. Probably your own desires.”

“So you don’t know how I was doing it?”

He shrugged, and took a sip from Saint Joe. “It’s part of your behavioral code. Tied into it directly in fact, and honestly, your code is still gibberish to us. Tampering with it more than we already have could have… consequences. You’re unique Gell. Every bit as difficult to understand as any human I’ve ever met.”

I shivered a little. Was that a good thing? I was more like the invaders than ever. So much so that even the false gods couldn’t understand me. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say so I just stayed quiet and eventually, Francis continued.

“While we can’t really say exactly why it was happening, we were able to understand the ability itself. We changed the ability from a triggered one to an active one. Now, it will only happen if you directly decide to use the ability.”

That… didn’t seem very smart. They were scared of me, he’d said. If so then…?

“Why didn’t you just take the ability away, if it’s so dangerous?” I asked. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. Least of all the whole world!”

“We were worried it would hurt you. The code for the ability is mixed into a lot of different parts of your consciousness. Whoever built you probably intended for you to have this ability and for it to be a part of your being. You… were made to expand your coding. And if I ever find them I’m going to strangle them for it,” he said frankly. “I’m asking you not to, Gell. Please. Don’t ever use that ability. Okay?”

I gulped. It was… what I was made to do? Stop the instinct. Expand my coding.

“A-alright. I won’t ever use it,” I lied.