Side Chapter

“The hunter stalks through the forest like a great, white shadow. He is the master of [Stealthy Movement], like a shark in the ocean,” Short Bus said in a stage whisper, wholly unaware of how far his voice was carrying, “the prey animals of the land are crafty, possessing keen senses of smell and sight that allow them to flee from the ultimate predator.”

Short Bus's movements were quite silent as he stalked through the forest, but his constant external monologue completely ruined any real attempts at stealth.

“He is the avatar of hunger, because he is very hungry. A shark denied his destiny to be the biggest shark that ever lived, banished from his homeland by a very large purple cloud, he stalks through the forest like a great. . . oh wait, I already said that part.”

Then Short Bus frowned, delighting in his new facial muscles. There weren't many, at least as far as a human was concerned, but for Short Bus, going from zero facial expressions to anything was a huge improvement.

He wiggled his, whatever passed as eyebrows, doing a little wave with them. He felt along his razor-sharp teeth with his new flexible tongue, which he used to vocalize constantly while hunting.

Short Bus sniffed the air, smelling the animal he had been tracking for over. . . for way too long. Honestly, he was a terrible hunter on land; he was about half deaf as far as a human would measure it.

“A shark never stops swimming, even on land, his restless tail ever fanning the air behind him,” Short Bus said, then glanced back for the hundredth time to make sure all his fins were still there. They were, including his caudal, of which he was very proud.

“A shark never stops moving, but that might be an ocean rule, because I'm feeling a little weak in the legs,” he said, then sat straight down on the ground, moving his eyes around and blinking; two more new things he would never get tired of.

The forest, to him, was extremely strange. He felt like he was inside of a gigantic, flat tidal cave that just stretched on and on forever.

“Oh man,” he said out loud, “I remember that time the tide went out. Wow, that was embarrassing. Then those humans found me and were tossing me fish like I was a dolphin, and to my shame, I ate the fish, because I was hungry. I am still hungry,” he said, staring at the solid canopy above him.

“I miss Ben,” he said loudly, thinking he was whispering softly to himself.

It was right about that time that the air in the Lair Of The Aeon Slug started to circulate out, and Short Bus caught two familiar scents. The first was blood, but that could have belonged to anyone.

The second was the smell of Ben pissing himself, which was completely unmistakable to Short Bus's superior sense of smell.

“I am the greatest tracker to ever step my dinosaurus-like feet on land,” Short Bus said, a shark's smile on his face, his exhaustion suddenly forgotten.

“I'm coming little buddy.”

-

The System still looked like the devil, mostly because he hadn't bothered to change his form back yet, and he thought he looked rather cool as the human ideal of evil.

“I'm totally stealing this design,” he said, probing at the gigantic horns, “I could probably update the entire hell-layer and nobody would even call me out on it,” he said, then 'pressed a button' in the fabric of reality that started to play some extremely heavy metal, “I could probably steal this entire genre too, and only the humans would notice! Wait, that means I'll have to pay them extra. . . I can probably fold it into their level-ups. They don't need to know,” The System said, talking to himself.

Not like how Ben talked to himself. The System was literally communicating with countless instances of himself, each walking around, doing their own thing, solving their own problems, like a gigantic hive-mind of beings that all currently looked like The Devil.

Which they weren't.

“Well, if I'm stealing rock and roll, I might as well steal all of it, all the genres. Blast these rules about cultural theft, I never would have agreed to them if I'd known the humans were going to come back with so much art and music. They even remembered to claim legal ownership of most of it! They're such cheaters, nobody should be able to store so many memories in their DNA, that's complete nonsense.”

The System experimented by growing out a black goatee, then started styling it to look more and more sinister, until it reached peak sinisterness, and then passed it into post-irony sinister, which just looked silly.

He would have continued experimenting with facial hair for. . . ever? Except his desk was beeping at him. He wasn't a being who had a sense of boredom, and he'd invented the [Tireless] perk, like how he'd invented most all of the perks and skills.

Well, invent was a strong word. He took the invasion of personal privacy to an entirely new level, and monitored everything, about everyone who was inside of The World, who had also accepted the level and class system. Which everyone had, and would continue to do.

If they did something new or interesting, he'd just copy it, refine it, standardize it, and repackage it as a skill. The best part was, the people of The World did most of that work for him too.

Sometimes, he'd grant broken, unusable, but interesting skills to players just to see if they could salvage anything useful out of them. Most of the time they failed, but if he seeded the skill a billion times over ten years, well, he usually got something promising.

The System sighed and pulled himself away from the mirror, still thinking about skills and perks. He would never admit this, but about seventy percent of the skill system had been generated by humanity the last time they'd been here.

“Just a really creative bunch of killers in that group,” he said, then sat down to look at the beeping paperwork.

He didn't always have paperwork, in fact, it was a recent addition to his life. He'd scanned the minds of tens of millions of office workers when he inducted humanity into The World, and he'd learned a thing or two about both efficiency, and procrastination.

Apparently, some procrastination was good for efficiency, for reasons no human would ever be able to explain, and for reasons The System didn't care to examine too closely. So he'd been enjoying a little time off from work.

“Ah, Ben's made it to a town crystal, excellent. Oh, look at that face,” The System said, chuckling fondly, looking at the archived footage of Ben's utter 'What the fucking shit' face he'd had when he was turned into a fairy.

“I'm saving that one,” he said, then captioned it with something witty and sent it to all the other instances of The System via something that approximated email. They'd discovered memes were a thing, and right now the 'I've just been turned into a fairy' meme was extremely in among the instances of The System.

“Ah, human memes. So much better than cats,” The System said, still chuckling, a big smile on his demonic face.

“Oh? What's this?” he said, the mirth evaporating as he read over Ben's most recent data. “Create Minor Elemental, that one's always been a stinker. Wait, what?”

The System squinted, making sure it wasn't seeing things.

“A Utility Pocket Elemental, oh. That's the beeping, its the balance monitor. Hmmm, that was an Extremely Common perk, wasn't it? Either I give Ben the old [Cheater Cheater Pumpkin Eater] 'Perk',” The System said, making massive air quoted with his red, black clawed fingers, “or I have some balancing to do. Well, let's see what manner of monstrosity humanity's created this time.”

The System pulled up an image of the Utility Pocket Elemental, and to The System, everything was labeled like it was an MMORPG.

The little blob of living dimensional distortion stood on blobby little legs, everything about it was round. The System frowned when he pulled up the status sheet of the elemental, which contained inherent capabilities that were decidedly not 'Extremely Common'.

He looked again at the elemental, then saw floating above its body, a little name in green letters, with Level 1 under it.

“Its been around for literally three seconds and he already named it Frankie,” The System said, a dry, straight expression on his face, “that’s the exact opposite of what the perk description says to do.”

The System hmm'ed and hawed, looking at little Frankie, then shrugged, took a picture, made a meme out of it, and sent it to all the other instances of The System.

The response was quite instant, and he reached a majority consensus in favor of Ben. He usually sided with the players, but occasionally the Grays or the Dwarves would do something which was an explicit exploit. Even then, they only got the hammer if what they were doing was a direct danger to the delicate balance of The World. It's hard to get 'things that are not and should not be' to agree to get carved up into gremlins if they didn't think they even had a chance.

“Thank you, humans,” The System said, as he reclassified 'Create Minor Elemental' as a rare perk, with all the associated re-balancing work. Then, he sent out the standard reward he gave to anyone who did his job for him. Which was him saying thank you, and nothing else.

“I've got the best job in the universe,” The System said when he was done, putting his cloven hoof feet on his desk and leaning back. Moments later, he burst out in wheezing, hysterical laughter as one of the other popular kinds of memes was sent his way.

“Oh, those void souls!” The System said, “Oh, they are so bad! Ahahaha, oh, that's hysterical!” he said, slapping his desk, then feeling refreshed to get back to it and start crunching some numbers.

It could go without saying, but it will be said in honor of the dead and the dying, that those who found themselves in the unfortunate position of being in a meme with a Void Soul, did not find it funny.

They didn't find it funny at all.