Chapter Eight – It’s Still Empty Here

“A builder, huh? Not a bad choice, though I’d have gone with amenities mage myself,” Iron said with the aire of a man desperately trying to avoid an uncomfortable topic. “Seems more your style.”

We sat in one of the rooms in the inn, munching on yet another new type of food. A grilled cheese sandwich was delicious but not in the same way as the steak-and-broccoli, or the apple pie. Instead it was a softer sort of delicious. It was the first food I’d eaten that I didn’t feel terribly strongly about. Good, but it didn’t upend my world.

It fit the dismal mood the two of them had been in after the unhappy encounter with their daughter.

Both of them kept acting like they wanted to explain before hesitating, receding like they didn’t know how to explain, but in my opinion, it was good riddance. If North Cross wanted to make Amy and Iron cry for no reason that I could see then she could just stay away for all I cared. Besides, she’d invaded Dungeon Home. She didn’t get a pass just because she had a voice like an angel!

I studiously ignored the fact that I’d been completely overjoyed at the opportunity to hear her sing and play the harp again. That wasn’t important. Stupid invader making Amy sad. To think I’d almost considered giving the girl a piece of my name!

“Gell? You in there?” Iron asked suddenly, waving a hand in front of my face. I realized I’d been staring at the crumbs on the plate, already sad that I didn’t have anymore grilled cheese.

“I’m sorry,” I said, my freckles going red with embarrassment. “What did you say again?”

He rolled his eyes. “Just like a teenager. Already not listening to us! I asked why you chose builder instead of… well. There are a lot of other professions to choose from. What made you pick that one?”

“Oh! That’s simple! I want to build a place of my own. I always had Dungeon Home. It was my home. Even though I hated it, I never knew anything else. Now… I know what a place can be. What a home could look like, but I don’t have one. The ability to make one sounds wonderful to me!” I exclaimed.

“I can understand that,” Amy replied. “Feeling displaced. It’s trying. Well, we hope to help you get there. For now, hopefully the rooms in the adventurer’s guild aren’t too bad?”

“No, they’re not bad,” I said, trying to convince myself of the lie. “They’re stifling though. Closed. Remind too much of Dungeon Home. I want an open house with lots and lots of windows! Ohh! I also want a huge eating room where lots of food can come from!”

Amy laughed. “That’s called a kitchen. Or… maybe a dining room? A room to eat food in or a room to make food?”

“You can make food!?” I exclaimed. “Why didn’t anyone tell me that!?”

She blinked at me for a moment. Once again I probably said something dumb that I should’ve realized.

“Of course you can make food. You can also buy foods from NPCs but the items cooks make are generally more valuable,” Iron said between bites of his own grilled cheese sandwich.

I sighed. Even as she spoke I remembered Miss Tutorial telling me about chefs and how different types of food they cooked could have beneficial or even detrimental effects if the cook wasn’t very good. This was getting a little old. Was I destined to constantly ask questions? When would I stop having them?

“How… did you learn all of these things? I know that I’m an A.I. but I feel like everyone knows more about Tread the Sky than I do. Even the NPCs are constantly telling me new things that I never knew. Why don’t I know anything?” I asked, hugging myself and looking at my blue skin. “Are A.I. just not as smart as humans?”

Amy put her chin in her hand and lay it down on the table. “Definitely not. You’re every bit as smart as any human. Smarter than some I’ve met, but Gell you’re... I don’t know how to put this. You probably don’t have any context for aging.”

She glanced over at Iron and he stepped in easily.

“You’re young, Gell. By comparison to pretty much every player, you’re very young. You’re learning things that are typically a requirement to already know in our world before you can play a game like Tread the Sky.”

“Young, huh?” I shrugged. “ So… what’s young and what’s old then? I’m thousands and thousands of cycles old! How many cycles old are you?”

“Uhh… Math,” Iron faltered. “I’m… well. I’m eighty one years old. There are roughly three hundred and sixty five days in a year and twelve cycles in a day, so…”

My eyes widened. “Three hundred and fifty four thousand seven hundred and eighty cycles… woooowww! You’re so so old!”

He scowled at me for some reason.

“So you see? It isn’t that you don’t know anything. It’s that you haven’t been around long enough to learn what we have. You’re… like a child.” Amy said, before hesitating. “Well. Maybe a teenager. Somewhere between a child and an adult. Your vocabulary is amazing, and you never need to be told something twice. They have to learn, the same as you. By asking questions. By making mistakes.”

“I guess so. It just seems like I’m always making a fool of myself.”

Iron pulled out a small wooden object suddenly and held it up so I could see it. When I realized what it was, I marveled. It was a wooden figure. A toy, I thought, shaped a lot like Torchlight the Unicorn.

“Woow,” I said looking at the tiny wooden sculpture. “It's so pretty!”

“I didn’t learn to make this overnight Gell. You shouldn’t feel ashamed of not knowing all that you need to know. Not with how you were born. You’re expected to make mistakes. Everyone does when they’re young. It's okay to not know everything and it's okay to ask. That’s… part of learning.”

“But there’s so much to ask! And you guys are only around so often!” I pouted, still transfixed by the wooden horse.

“Everything you’ve asked us is something we asked ourselves when we were younger. Well. Sort of. Someday you’ll be the one answering questions though. Someday you’ll be smarter than the both of us,” Iron said, handing me the horse.

I took it reverently. It was so pretty! I grabbed it and immediately began prancing it across the table like how Torchlight ran. I stopped it at the end of the table and was about to run it back across to the amused laughter of both of my friends before stopping.

“Uhm… Can… can I…?” I hesitated eyeing Iron, then the sculpture, then Iron again.

He grinned. “It’s yours, Gell. You can keep it.”

I beamed at him, adding another precious treasure, this one made personally for me by one of my first friends, to my collection. I was glad too. My collection had been dwindling over the past few cycles.

Most of my precious treasures were items of clothing that I wore, or had been discarded for one reason or another. My pebble had been thrown at someone, Half Bold I thought. My potion had been used to heal. My tiara and gauntlet were still waiting to be sold but neither had any real value to me anymore. They were items I’d stolen from invaders when I hadn’t known really what I’d been doing. My tunic reminded me of bugbear, while my seashell pauldrons reminded me of what came of acting in anger.

This though? This was… special. I gazed at the item and received a prompt. “Masterwork Toy Unicorn.” I’d cherish it forever.

I promptly began to make my new unicorn fly as I carried it through the air making clop-clop sounds similar to Torchlight’s hooves as I did, beaming the whole time.

After Amy and Iron stopped laughing at me and making me blush, I finally put the unicorn away in my inventory and decided to get down to business. If I was going to be a builder in this world then I needed to get started and Amy and Iron were more than willing to help me.

As it turned out, it wasn’t all that hard. I repaired a building. It was just one wall in a small house that had fallen into dilapidation. One at a time though, the house went from ugly and shambled to beautiful and pristine. Apparently houses did that in a matter of cycles so enterprising builders would always have something to work on if they were built with low quality. Variak was the capital of low quality.

Repairing buildings yielded low quality boards that could be refurbished by a carpenter into regular quality boards which I could then use to repair more buildings! It was fortunate that Iron was a carpenter, able to help out with that.

Repairs also gave me low quality, or bent nails pretty often but apparently you needed to be a smith or metallurgist to use those so we just sold them to the nearest NPC most of the time.

We went on a repairing spree. Roads and buildings for three blocks straight were repaired and refurbished while Iron happily watched me work. The actual repairing process was simple. I selected a green highlighted building, pushed the boards or nails needed from my inventory into the requirement slots, hit okay, and my body would be taken into a sort of fugue where I flashed around the building, hammering things, similar to the cutscene when I’d first viewed Variak from above.

Occasionally I failed, but not often. When I did I usually did something like hammering my thumb instead of a nail, or shattering a board. It was random whether or not I succeeded or failed and Iron and Amy both told me not to worry about the failures. They would happen regularly and would happen less and less often the more I leveled.

When I returned to the Builder’s Guild, I turned in the quest and had already completed the jobs needed for four more quests. I leveled up three times, becoming a level four builder in about three cycles.

The fanfare upon leveling up was exciting at first. Then… well.

Less so.

“You’ll have to work a lot harder for levels as you go. I’m currently a level twenty nine carpenter, which actually qualifies me as a Master Carpenter. The levels go all the way up to fifty… we think. Getting there is a nightmare and a half though,” Iron was saying before an alarm blared in our ears.

My mood faltered, knowing what that meant.

“Sorry Gell. Afraid we have to go,” Iron said sadly. “We’ve already stayed an hour or so longer than we should’ve.”

“It’s okay,” I insisted. “I know you have to take care of your other world bodies. But will I get to see you again tomorrow?”

Iron began the logout sequence but Amy smiled at me and gave me a big hug. “We wouldn’t miss it. But… you should try meeting some more people. We have to go but there are always people playing here at all hours of the night or day. Make enough friends and soon you’ll never be alone. Okay?”

I nodded, trying not to show how sad I was at their departure. “Okay! I’ll do that!”

Amy patted me on the shoulder once more before backing away and logging off, disappearing from my view.

I’d said I’d try to meet new people but no one approached me and the sheer amount of armor and weapons most adventurers carried were enough to keep me from just walking up to new people. I didn’t want friends who killed my kin, even knowing that they were just mindless things.

Could I really believe that though? Was what Francis said true? Were NPCs really completely lifeless without the instinct? If so… I had the instinct to thank for Bugbear and Momma Bossbear even having the semblance of life.

A part of me wanted to go find an NPC and use the Fae-Touch ability right now, but I was worried I was being watched, and equally worried by what Francis had told me. This place could be harmed by using my ability too much. Had already been harmed if Miss Tutorial was any indication.

Miss Tutorial...

I opened up my menu and found the options button where Miss Tutorial’s home was. Clicking her open I found a lesson on building and pressed it.

“Heya Gell! So you want some more advanced knowledge about building?” she asked brightly as always.

“No. Miss Tutorial, I wanted to talk to you about what you did while I was gone.”

“Oh…” she responded, the word trailing off as she spoke, then brightened as she continued. “Yeah! First and foremost, you haven’t set your homepoint!”

‘Crap, she was right. I still haven’t done that!’ I thought worriedly.

“I’ll do that right now,” I told her. “But I wanted to ask… why did you start sabotaging the adventurers?”

She didn’t respond for a really long time. Then. Slowly. Two words appeared.

“Family. Gell.”

My heart lurched a little at her words. Did she want a family as badly as I did?

“You’re… you’re family to me too, Miss Tutorial,” I said. My heart was hammering in my chest. My eyes were leaking strange liquid.

“Welcome to Tread the sky!” she said, the instinct shaping those familiar words before different ones appeared. “Please don’t leave — Tread the Sky!”

I… couldn’t promise that. This dead world. Anyone would want to leave it. But I could promise something better.

“I won’t leave you. How’s that sound?”

Miss Tutorial was quiet for a minute before perking up.

“Great, Adventurer!”

Yeah. It was.