Lilijoy surfaced from the thorns as the scene faded from her awareness, faded into the black space of no senses. She felt a sense of purpose fulfilled. She had defended. And the universe had noticed.

Trial Complete: Welcome to the Inside: Tutorial Mode

Name: Lilijoy*

Defender of the Young

All of this is your character sheet. In the future there will be detailed information, jargon and statistics written here. In tutorial mode, you will be introduced gradually to this information.

You may leave tutorial mode at any time.

Dark Lady of the Thorns

Blessed of Nandi

Trial Results: Above 99th percentile.

Eligible for Academy**

Level: 8: An excellent result for the Trial

Achievements: 4: Less than 100 others have earned this many. Listed below...

Defender of the Young

You saved 18 children from certain death in a no-win scenario. This is a unique achievement.

Reality Bender

The Inside will never be the same. You have invented a unique ability: Two Minds, One Self

Dark Lady of the Thorns

You have become a legendary figure to the Goblin race. The stories will only grow.

Blessed of Nandi

Congratulations Lilijoy! I knew you would shine, but I never guessed how brightly. Well Done!

p.s. say hello to Anda

Titles: Some of the achievements have given you Titles that others can see. They are listed next to your name at the top.

Other Notable Accomplishments:

Animal Lover

You did not kill any animals or monsters considered to be animals during the Trial

Path Less Taken:

Across more than 10 million iterations of this Trial, 3 have made the same path choices.

Experience Points (Exp) earned: 868

Exp turns into points you can spend: You have 100 (80 + 20 bonus from Reality Bender)

10 exp = 1 free point to spend on skills, traits, abilities, magic and more.

You earn Exp by learning and doing things that are novel, challenging, painful and creative.

Everything from fighting a rat to learning a new spell will give you Exp. But every time you repeat the same action, you will get less (or zero) Exp. Be sure to explore and mix it up.

You now have the following Abilities Inside:

Scan II: Lets you see information about other people, animals and monsters.

Infrared Vision III

Echolocation III

Low Light Vision II

Two Minds One Self I: Merge your mind and will with another being and act as one

Abilities are things you can do. They can be ranked from I (lowest) to V (highest). You can raise them by using them or with your free points (to level II = 4, to III = 6, to IV = 10, to V = 16)

*Before you go, think about your character name. You can use Lilijoy if you want, or something completely different. All Inside announcements and statistics will be attached to your character name. If you do not choose a different name within 24 hours, Lilijoy will be used. The first statistics and announcements available to the public will be posted then.

**You are eligible for the Academy, an elite training facility for ages 12 to 16: Go to the Academy Building to register soon.

That’s it for now! There are many more things you gained in the Trial. Come back to your character sheet after you have explored a bit to see more.

She was exhausted and elated. The trial had finally ended and now she could see what it was all about. She was very grateful for the patient tone of the character sheet and smiled at the little note from Nandi.

But she had just about had it with windows popping up in her vision bringing more stuff to figure out. She needed a break. A long break. And she could finally talk to Anda. Now that everything had turned out better than she could have hoped.

She still wondered who had died.

***

The odd ache of absence entered her awareness as she returned to her one-armed existence. It was late afternoon, and to her entire lack of surprise, they were driving over a dead swamp. Was it less dead than before? Lilijoy couldn’t tell if they had even moved since her last return. Anda was sitting with his eyes closed, so she didn’t disturb him. She got up to find a food bar, stretching her stiff legs and back. Jiannu had mentioned that as her motor areas were integrated, the system could begin to help to move and exercise her body even if Lilijoy was Inside. She wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about her body moving around on its own but had adopted the view that it was like sleepwalking; a bit creepy, but ultimately nothing to worry about. Hopefully.

While she was polishing off a second food bar, Anda roused and noticed she was awake. He looked at her with searching eyes, trying to gauge her emotional state. She smiled and waved.

“I finished the Trial! I was really mad at you for a while, but it turned out okay in the end.”

Anda looked confused. “Are you sure you finished?” he asked. “I was expecting you to be a little more...thoughtful.”

“Well, it was really hard. Right up to the end I thought everyone was going to die, and if that had happened I would still be really mad at you for not telling.”

“So you had a survivor?” Anda broke into a wide smile. “Lilijoy, that’s amazing! Do you know that less than one in a thousand Trials ends with one of the children surviving? I was so worried that you would be devastated for days after the Trial. Truly, it caused me a great struggle as well. I think it may have marked the beginning of my eventual break with my clan.”

“So what made you choose the middle door?” he asked, not giving her a chance to reply. “My clan told me which door to choose. They require that every member undergoing the trial already be a competent warrior, so the door for the young would be below us. I wasn’t sure which door would call to you, so I kept my mouth shut,” he winked. “Which was not an easy task, let me assure you.”

“I knew it was the middle one right away. I just like wood better.” said Lilijoy. She decided not to tell Anda of the specifics of her final stage just yet. “So the metal door is for kids, the wood for young people and the stone door for the old?”

“Yes, that’s pretty much it,” he replied. “The inside takes you as you are, natural body and mind, so it wouldn’t make sense for an eight-year-old to undergo the same difficulties that you did. Or an eighty-year-old for that matter. Today, almost no one goes through the stone door, because nearly everyone joins the Inside at a young age. Different clans like their children to join in various ways, so the other doors get a lot of traffic. I understand that the final trial for the youngsters is protecting a group of talking mice from predators of the forest. But the end result is always the same; tears and futility. Guardian is trying to tell us something, I am sure of it.”

“Did you go into the forest?” she asked. “Wait! Did you have bees? What about the spider? She was not nice at all. How about...”

“Hold on, Lilijoy,” Anda interrupted with a chuckle. “Let me give you the short version of my Trial. As I understand it the Trial areas are consistent in most ways from person to person, but I may have diverged from your path quite early.”

He took a deep breath and settled into his narration. “I was fifteen at the time, full of ‘manly’ thoughts of battle and valor. I ran through the field, entered the forest and constructed weapons for myself, several throwing spears and a longer lance. I moved deeper into the forest, made my first kill, a boar, which gashed my leg pretty badly. After tying off the injury, I limped still deeper, avoided the cave behind the fallen trees...”

He gave Lilijoy a look. “What on earth made you go in there? Didn’t you see the webs?”

“I hadn’t seen many spiders before. I thought they looked neat,” she said with a shrug.

“Well, almost no one chooses willingly to go into a spider cave. File that away for future reference,” he said raising his brow. “After I passed the cave, I heard the calls of wolves. I quickly climbed a tree and waited in ambush, throwing my spears and then leaping upon the largest wolf and killing him in one strike from my lance. The forest path climbs into a cold mountain area, where I had my first death.”

He winced. “I fell into a crevasse full of icy water and froze to death. My people are great warriors, but just slightly less adept in arctic conditions.” His expression indicated how ‘just slightly less adept’ meant ‘abysmally awful’.

“I was so angry after that death! I had felt sure I would be the first in my cohort to pass the trials without dying.” He sighed. “The arrogance of youth. Did you know that there is an Achievement for that? It’s called “Deathless” and it gives you a huge bonus to vitality. Oh well. After the crevasse came the yeti, then the rope swings over the cliff and the giant geyser squids. You haven’t really lived before running for your life across an icy plain while geysers erupt boiling water, and sometimes giant grasping tentacles, all over you. That was where I died the second time.”

Lilijoy nodded in sympathy. Her own tentacle experience had been pretty traumatic.

“Being slow cooked over a steaming cauldron while held by a barb covered tentacle really gives you some perspective, you know? After that respawn, I was back on the wrong side of the plain. Tried again, same result. Death number three. I tried climbing the icy cliff to circumvent the plain, fell down halfway, just out of the reach of the closest geyser. At least the air was warm, but by the time I recovered, I had become embedded in the ice. That was a long and traumatic experience. I actually had to log out twice before I had the courage to send myself to respawn. I did get an accomplishment for it though. ‘Stubborn Unto Death’. It doesn’t do anything for me, but it’s nice to see the words.” He thought for a moment.

“That’s why it would be so hard to start over. I have lived with those words and my memories of the Trial for over a decade. How can I just erase it like it never happened?”

He shook his head. “I finally respawned on the other side. Perhaps the Trials took pity on me? Regardless, the path descended into a village, where the people mistook me for a legendary monster of theirs and attacked with pitchforks and flaming torches. I told my clan at the time that I fought and killed until they fled, but the truth was, I ran as fast as my legs would carry me. Which is still awfully fast, might I say. Thankfully, I never had to explain where the huge bonus to my Flash trait came from to my friends. At that point, the Trial must have decided it was time for the finale. A giant bird plucked me up and after hour of flight, I was deposited in good old Fort Groveship.” He paused.

“Lilijoy, have you run across the ancient entertainment program ‘Star Trek?'”

She shook her head.

“Well, look it up when you get the chance. Hardly anyone today knows of it, but it had the most delightful characters and stories. One story concerned an unbeatable test, rescuing a ship called the Kobayashi Maru. The test was designed to be unwinnable. So now you know where the idea for Fort Groveship came from. It is a test of how we respond to a no-win situation, and a chance to display our courage, creativity and humanity in the face of defeat. Personally, I think there is a lesson in humility and human limitations in there too. Everyone who takes Fort Groveship seriously is changed. Of course, there are those who are uncaring and abandon the children, and those who do ridiculous things like charge the goblin army single handed. I almost feel worse for them, because they showcase what they lack by their actions.

And do you know, the name Groveship has had a lot of discussion over the years. Some thought it must be from ‘Grove’s hip’ or was named after someone named Groveship. Until some clever person translated it into Japanese. Grove is kobayashi and ship is maru. So there you have it. Indisputable proof that Guardian is using ancient entertainment programs to mess with the human race!” He said this last sentence with a broad smile.

Lilijoy loved hearing about Anda’s trials. His sound much harder than mine, she thought. It was nice to get some perspective on Fort Groveship too.

“Would you like to hear my story?” she asked.

***

During Lilijoy’s narration, Anda expressed amazement, bewilderment, and total disbelief. He demanded, in a friendly way, to see her character sheet several times, but she deferred, not wanting to spoil the ending. When she finally concluded with her victory over the goblin warband elites and showed him her character sheet, he sat quietly for a long time. When he finally surfaced from his inspection slash introspection, he made as if to speak. He opened his mouth several times. Then he went back to looking at the sheet. Finally, he managed...

“This is astounding. This is...astounding. There are less than twenty reality benders that I know of. Five of them are now Clan heads at rank ten on the Outside. The Reality Bender achievement is the Inside’s way of saying you broke the rules in a new way that it now needs to incorporate. It is almost like a bounty for finding a programming error. Sometimes it fixes the problem and closes the loophole, other times it turns it into a new spell or ability. The earliest examples come from high ranked individuals finding ways to use their mental or sensory enhancements on the Inside. I’m pretty sure that echolocation got its start that way.”

“And you know that this is just the tip of the iceberg? You still don’t know your skills and skill levels, or traits, or magic. I can only imagine what is contained in your full sheet!” His face turned serious. “Lilijoy, I know that the Inside seems less real and less important than the Outside to you. Everything there is a simulation, right? It’s not real.”

“But you need to realize that most of what humans value is not real either. Money and fame, power and honor are the currencies of our existence. None of these exist but through our unspoken agreement as a culture; all of these are just as real on the Inside as they are on the Outside. A beautiful sculpture is just as valuable on the Inside. Music is just as moving. Gold mined on the Inside is actually more valuable than that mined on the Outside, for reasons of economics we can discuss later...” Seeing her face. “...or never.”

“The point is, serious, powerful people control both worlds, or think they do. For them, it is not two separate worlds. It is the Taijitu, Inside and Outside, yin and yang. Our species has lived in the Inside for five generations. We work there, love there, even grow up there to some extent. Over fifteen million people make their living from the Inside, and millions more go there whenever they can. It is our species’ true home now, and the Outside is where you find the outcasts, the exiles and the stubbornly obsolete.”

Lilijoy listened to Anda with half her attention. There was something in the back of her mind nagging at her, and she couldn’t figure out what. She was excited to cultivate, but that wasn’t it. Memories of her last session kept dancing across her mind, but that wasn’t it either. It was an odd feeling of missing something important, something about all her success that didn’t quite make sense.

For some reason, her mind kept going back to the little group of people she grew up among. Her family? Her tribe? For twelve years, they were the totality of her existence, but in her memory, they felt foggy, unformed. Spending time with the children Inside, with their vibrant and varied personalities, emotions and dreams was the first time she had experienced a different group of people. All the rest of her adventures had been with Marcus or Anda alone.

There was something about her childhood tribe that felt less real than a computer simulation. She had never had anything to compare it to before, but now that she had, she felt aware of a sense of…she couldn’t put her finger on it. Thinness? Incompleteness?

For example, why didn’t her tribe have a name? Groups of people liked to have an identity. Even the goblins called themselves ‘The People’. Her group didn’t. They just existed. Or another question: Why didn’t her tribe use genders? This one had been bothering her for a while now. She hadn’t even known what a girl was. Looking back, it was clear to her that Grabby was a woman, as were several of the Bros.

She had been too distracted by two, three if she included Emily’s, worlds worth of new experiences to consider her own past and how unusual it was, but now that she thought about it, there were many enigmatic details. Like why her tribe lived next to the piles. The factory mine had come by years ago, just before she was born, leaving its tail of waste. Why didn’t the tribe move? What were they doing before that, living in a barren wasteland? How did they eat before the sky pellets, which she now knew were provided by the people on the factory-mine?

Mooster and Grabby were the biggest mysteries of all. She had never had reason to question it growing up, but with her new perspective, the behavior of the two made no sense. They almost never talked, would spend the entire day sitting just outside the entrance to Night’s Safety, then close it up for the night. Mooster didn’t give orders or attempt to control the Bros at all, but he was (somehow) indisputably the leader. Attaboy’s punishment was the only time Lilijoy could remember Mooster departing from his routine, and even that was dispassionate proclamation. He had no personality, no initiative, no spark.

Grabby had more personality, at least some of the time. Lilijoy could remember a few times that Grabby had hugged her or Attaboy for no apparent reason. Or told them they were good kids. She had a feeling that Grabby was her mother, if only because the other candidates seemed even more unlikely.

It was tempting to pass off her people’s mental dullness as a product of the pollution from the piles and the general environment. To explain the lack of culture, of curiosity and identity as results of generational trauma, malnutrition and ignorance. All those factors were there. But they didn’t explain the lack of spark, the lack of will. The Bros picked on Attaboy and Lilijoy, made them climb trees over and over, or run endless circles, beat them up for no reason. Only Timout had moments of lucidity when he told them tales of the old times. The whole group was deeply damaged somehow.

After thinking along these lines for a while, she became aware that Anda had just stopped talking. She gave a grunt to acknowledge whatever it was he had said.

“Lilijoy, this is important!” he urged, seeing her distraction. “The second the data from your trials hits the public there is going to be a firestorm. If anyone connects the results to you in the Outside you will have many of the most powerful clans after you, some for relatively benign reasons, but most to capture you as a resource. You simply can’t afford the attention! Thank god you haven’t put a name in yet or it would already be happening.”

“Do I really need a different name? I don’t even know who I am now,” Lilijoy complained.

“There’s no other choice. Another name; something you like, but completely unconnected to any aspect of your Outside persona.”

“What was your Inside name?” she asked.

Anda gave an embarrassed shrug. “Laibon,” he said. “He was an important figure in my people’s mythology, and I was an arrogant idiot.” He made a quick head tilt. “Perhaps another reason for a fresh start. The good news is that the Inside name does not need to be unique. In fact, I would recommend a common name, boring even. You can’t change it, but you can also designate an official nickname, so people know what to call you. Many of us come to regret our name choice, so the system gives some leeway.”

Lilijoy wanted to be sure she understood. “I should take a common name with no known connection to me on the Outside. Not that I have connections on the Outside anyway; my tribe doesn’t even have a name.”

Anda nodded.

“How about Emily?” she said.