“What if I’m, uh, not a big fan of PVP stuff?”

It was the first thing I could think of, as I shook off the residual dread of potentially being thrown into an intergalactic (interdimensional?) war as a shock troop. Did she have some ready response in the face of this sort of defiance?

She paused. An unreadable expression momentarily replaced the bland smile. The moment passed.

“All the more reason to join the aspirants. After all, possessing overwhelming power is an excellent way to avoid violent conflict.”

A college option to get out of the draft? Or was I simply off base about the ultimate purpose of all this?

“I’m not sure that I have decades left to spend learning a new skill,” I hedged. It was true too. Maybe the keys had been intended for younger people like Lindsey? Though if sorcery was truly a path to immortality, real actual immortality… maybe it didn’t matter so much if a sorcerer graduated or initiated or whatever at a very old age.

“Decades hence, will you curse yourself for not beginning today? Or do you fear that you lack the mind for it?”

The questions were apparently rhetorical, as she turned away before I had a chance to voice an answer. That was fine, I really had no idea what to say to that. The time frame made sense if this sorcery was an actual skill, a real field of study that apparently had as much or more depth as something like computer science or physics, but there would be very few ‘players’ interested in spending so long. At least, that would be the case up to the point where it became public knowledge that power earned here stayed with you, to some extent, on Earth. Maybe I should join the class and get a head start. Would my existing skills and knowledge actually translate across fields?

I shook my head. Maybe I should, but not today. I had a minion to finish, which would improve my ability to take care of myself right now. I turned my attention back to Joe and his lesson, hoping that I wouldn’t have to wait too much longer. After a few minutes, curiosity struck me. I turned again to address the ‘great sorceress’.

“What is your name?” I asked, “The townsfolk just refer to you by title.”

She turned back to me, and spoke. The world blurred, reality itself bending and warping around her dread utterance. My surroundings grew indistinct and impossible to focus on, as the wave of power washed over me. My sun pulsed in time with it, my minions took flight as the very fabric of my inventory shuddered, meticulously organized notes and other objects scattered as if in an earthquake. Despite all the disruptions, the tiny figure in red stood before me, unmoved and unruffled. Behind her head was an object, something massive but just beyond the reach of my senses.

I squinted, both with my eyes and my mystic senses, trying to get a better look. The veil parted, and the object resolved into my awareness. It was a halo of sorts, a ring of essence just behind her, and so heavy with power that I was shocked that I hadn’t noticed it before. It was composed of unfathomably complex machinery, miniature grasping arms passing around tiny fragments of essence in incredibly complex shapes, pipes carrying unknowable substances, welders fusing things together. and other things that I had nothing mundane to compare them to. It stretched infinitely into the distance in either direction, dense and white and brilliant, while still somehow being fully within my view. The vertigo had just kicked in when reality started to settle back down, the strange mechanical halo drifting back out of view. I sucked in breath, realizing at that moment that I had been holding it for however long that… experience had lasted.

I looked back to Joe’s class, and found it totally undisturbed. I guess the disruption was extremely local. I turned back to her as my pulse settled down and my minions worked diligently to reorganize the havoc wrought on my inventory. She smiled, and this one felt more authentic somehow.

“Every variety of initiation I know of binds the aspirant’s name into some aspect of reality. As you grow, so does it. A sorcerer must content himself with titles alone when dealing with anyone who is not a peer or superior.”

Well that’s pretty fucked up. Wait…

“What if a sorcerer's name is common?”

“Then it will no longer be.”

“And if it’s a common word, like ‘the’ or something similar?”

“There is a distinction in the essence of a word used for simple grammar, and one used to identify a person or thing.”

“Fine, ‘she’ then.”

She laughed, and this time the essence echoes that flowed through the sound carried hints of genuine mirth.

“I look forward to what you have to teach my aspirants,” she said, “but until you choose to join them, you will get no more lessons from me.”

That didn’t leave much room for argument so I just stood there, my thoughts swirling with new possibilities. It seemed that the world was much larger than I knew, even accounting for all the new things I had seen since getting my key.

Joe and I wove through groups of pedestrians on our way back to his home. His class ended without any further excitement. Well, not too much. The sorceress did vanish at some point. Literally. Between one glance and the next, she was simply gone. Not really the craziest thing I’d seen recently, though.

As we worked our way back to his estate, my reptilian comrade was happily telling me about some of the interesting ‘NPCs’ he had been hanging out with, though the details leaked from my mind like a sieve. My poor, shell-shocked brain was struggling to care about a bunch of random people, even though I knew them to be actual people.

“Why have you been hanging out with a bunch of NPCs?” I finally asked.

“I mean, even if they’re a bunch of AI puppets, if they think that they’re people, are as capable as people, and live in an environment indistinguishable from a real one, then does it really matter if it is ultimately some advanced alien AI behind the curtain? Besides, I’ve been here for something like three weeks now. Without computers. Without internet, the arcology net, or anything remotely similar, and books are as expensive here as they are at home.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. ‘Ah’ is right.” Joe was always so easygoing, it was really strange to hear him irritated.

“But there’s the, you know, literal magic that you can practice here?” I tried.

“Yeah, but some of the shine’s gone now that I’ve also got to eat and go to the bathroom and have a job and whatnot.”

“I can see that,” I said. I guess people could get used to just about anything. Now, if only I could stop digging myself deeper, maybe I could start getting used to my new window into reality.

When we arrived at his home, there were two of the Er people and one of the panther race, the correct name for which I was pretty sure I hadn’t ever heard. Joe introduced everyone, though I couldn’t force myself to keep track. I was sure Nico would have them recorded, in case it ever became relevant.

As Joe sat with his friends, chatting about little things related to Finxi and its daily workings, I mumbled along whenever the conversation was directed my way. I was itching to get into the towers and get what I needed to finish my minion, but I would prefer to do it with someone to watch my back. If the cost for that was a few hours of not being rude and impatient, then I would gladly pay it.

As a bonus, I actually did learn something interesting. ‘Natural charm’ was apparently the term for the innate racial magic powers that everyone was supposed to have. I had heard that term before, probably from that conversation with the elders, but didn’t have a precise definition. Everyone had them - everyone, including people who weren’t awakened. The Er people had a natural charm that let them learn languages really quickly and easily, which one of Joe’s friends demonstrated by learning conversational Spanish in the space of twenty or so minutes. I couldn’t see anything magical going on, so either his friend was having a joke at our expense, or natural charms were extremely subtle.

After enduring the social event for an hour or so, the conversation died away. Joe’s friends excused themselves, and we set out toward the outer towers. He was dressed in his starter grey clothing, not wanting to risk damage to his new clothing. Magical clothes like my pants could slowly repair themselves, and could probably be rapidly repaired if I knew how to operate the mechanism correctly, but in terms of mundane clothing, the system that brought us here only seemed to be able to produce and repair the starter clothes.

“Has Lindsey been around?” I asked as we passed the gate, “We can always use more firepower.”

“Ha!” Joe laughed, “That girl has lost any interest in fighting once you and I stopped delving regularly. She still comes to visit me sometimes, and every few days she’d come and help with you, when you were on autopilot mode, but she seemed to be pretty shaken seeing you like that.”

“We can show her the good news next time she’s around then,” I said with a smile. Having a friend suddenly be stripped of their mind, but still moving around? I can imagine that that’d rattle someone pretty badly.

“Has she just not been logging on, then?” I asked.

“No, she’s been around every day. She’s just been treating Dreamshards as a dating sim.”

“How’s that work, what with humans very recently being property?”

“It’s definitely been enough of a problem that I’ve had to hear about it repeatedly, but I suspect it would be worse if people were allowed to own slaves personally, rather than just the government. Still, she’s found at least some success. Which I have also had to hear about more than I’d like.”

“That’s a shame,” I said, “She could have probably beaten you in terms of pure damage, if her earlier performance is any fair metric. Sort of a waste of potential, but it’s nice that she’s found something she enjoys here.”

“Oh, no, she hasn’t been slacking with her power. She’s just found a bunch of metaphorical types of cuts she can make. Let me tell you, it’s a huge pain in the ass when she ‘cuts off’ a topic of conversation. Can’t bring it up for hours afterwards.”

“Ugh. Mind magic. Guess I prefer to have it working for us than against us, but still…”

“Nah, it isn’t like that,” Joe said, “If she tries to affect someone directly, it only ever works once. If she tries again they can snap out of it pretty much instantly, even if she is trying to do something different than the last time. No, I think she’s figured out a different way to do it. It feels like the game engine entirely bans the topic from the AI, and if players try to talk about it, the game just makes you do nothing instead. You can still think about it, just not actually say it.”

“Can you write about a banned topic?” I asked.

“Don’t know, haven’t tried it. I’ve been a bit more focused on my new job than my old one.”

I gave a non-committal hum, and noticed that we seemed to be getting closer to something on the endless glass plane, but it wasn’t the skyscraper we were aiming for. It was a humanoid figure, standing alone on the horizon. I wasn’t sure about the rules of intersecting travelers in this space. Never had the chance to test it, and now I was coming to regret that. I looked over at Joe, still carefully keeping the billowing clouds out of my sight. He didn’t seem concerned, so I kept walking alongside him. I tensed, ready to lash out if it came to a fight, until I recognized the rapidly approaching figure’s face. It was me.

We stepped up to the Painter and, even from mere feet away, I couldn’t feel even a hint at the vast ocean of void I knew to be piloting the avatar. It had somehow veiled its essence entirely. Knowing what it was, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

“Will!” it spoke in a strange, artificially cheerful tone, “I came to speak to you, but you were disconnected. It is good to see you in working order.”

I nodded, “It’s good to be in working order again.”

“Joe,” the Painter said, turning and looking up to meet his eyes, “I am socially obligated to greet and acknowledge your presence in this interaction, despite having no reason to speak to you at the moment.”

“Hello Painter,” Joe said, some mix of amusement and wariness showing in his tone.

“Will, I have three candidate objects for you to inspect, if they are not what you seek then I need any additional information you can give me about these keys.”

With this, he pulled out a large iron key from seemingly nowhere. A literal key. Though the Painter was almost certainly smart enough to understand that I didn’t mean a literal key, so I did take a moment to examine the essence of the object. It was something complex, designed to communicate with some other mechanism. Definitely not the correct sort of key. I shook my head, and he produced a second object, the key disappearing.

I gasped involuntarily. The second object was purely an essence construct, but I knew at once that it was what I was looking for. It was a complex machine of interlocking magical filaments, but it matched exactly some of the machinery I had seen in the hidden spaces where my login function existed. It was folded in intricate ways, some of which probably defied the limitations of three dimensional space, but it was almost certainly a Dreamshards key.

A bitter feeling welled up. This was it. My ultimate task here was done. A few weeks too late for it to matter. As the sensation of failure washed through me, I started to notice more. The keys in the key crystal had been tiny points of light, but this thing had no physical manifestation at all. The more I looked, the more I saw that was out of place. I couldn’t see anything which looked like it could unfold the structures. Some sections looked incomplete, missing branches that could neatly fold into empty spaces.

“Where did you find this?” I asked.

“You have spent an unusually long time examining this one. Is this what you seek?” the Painter asked.

“I think it’s a part of it,” I said, coming out of my daze, “maybe a component used to make it. If you tell me where you found it, that might at least lead us to whatever is making the keys.”

Instead of words, the Painter opened a small crack in his defenses, showing a glimpse at the vast entity itself. From the depths rose an object, the same object I had seen hints of when I had looked into the other, simpler entropy spirits I had encountered.

“This object, placed into my and my lesser cousins’ depths by the jailer. It produces them from byproducts of our existence.”

“Where does this,” I started, indicating the partial key, “go after that thing is finished putting it together?”

“Hey, how’d you do that?” Joe interjected. What?

“Me?” I asked, somewhat baffled.

“Yeah, how did you point using your essence?” he clarified, “I’ve seen him do that, but he’s some kind of spirit being.”

“I mean, it’s not a physical object, so… uh… huh. That is weird. It just felt natural to do it that way. Maybe I picked it up from watching the Painter do it?”

We both turned back to my former avatar, and the puppeteer behind it.

“Parts were delivered at a regular interval,” The Painter answered, totally ignoring our tangent and the implicit question it carried, “These would attach themselves to the partial key through a process you would recognize as not entirely unlike magnetism. The resulting object would remain for thirty-two days, after which a small construct would appear and take it deeper into the prison. Recent inspection has revealed to me that they are ultimately stored in an object which visually appears as a large pink crystal, matching your description of the keys you seek.”

“Parts were delivered? They aren’t anymore?” I probed.

“No. No parts have arrived to complete this one. I am also no longer able to access aspects of the prison’s archives without circumventing the normal routes. The jailer has come to demand answers from me. She is unhappy that I have purchased my new body from you.”

A chill went up my spine. This was probably the ‘maintenance issue’ she was dealing with, instead of doing whatever she needed to do to level up her sorcery circle. She didn’t seem to recognize me, so she probably didn’t know yet that I was the cause of her current troubles. It would probably be a good idea to ensure that remained the case.

“Did you talk to her?” I asked, anxiety creeping up on me.

“No. She seeks to extract information from my mind as if I were one of my lesser cousins. I have provided her with completely random information.”

“Why?”

“It will increase the randomness of her actions, which will increase the potential ways in which this can end.”

Hm. I probably shouldn’t have asked this sort of being to explain itself. Ended up ok in this case, but potentially not good for my sanity if the answer had been something less comprehensible. The Painter had gotten much better at acting human in the time I had been out, though. I’d need to keep an eye out for that.

“We should probably get moving,” Joe said, “Starting to strain my neck to keep my head tilted up and away from the clouds.”

I couldn’t really argue with that, and though I am sure it could have, the Painter chose not to. After a few more minutes of walking, we arrived at the base of one of the outer towers. Joe and I had no problem just entering the normal way, but the Painter seemed to walk some other route to join us inside the vestibule. It simply walked away from us, in some direction it hurt my head to try to follow, then walked back towards us inside. Dimensions were apparently just a suggestion here, at least to a being of its power.

“Will.”

The Painter stopped. The barest brush of its essence robbed both Joe and I of all forward movement. I turned to face it. It stood there without expression. Was this the moment we would pay for our association with this being? Was there anything I could do to tilt the odds away from the worse cases?

“Painter, it is generally considered rude to stop people against their will.” I tried. It always seemed interested in aspects of acting human. Hell, it had done an impressive job of learning to use my avatar in a few short weeks.

“Why is that significant? The overwhelming majority of all things which have ever happened to humans have happened against their will.”

That was bleak. True, but bleak.

“Well that is exactly the problem…” I paused to consider my next words, “Humans value having minimal interference with our freedom. If we can only control a very small number of things in our lives to start with, and some specific interaction could have happened without an imposition on that freedom, then we resent it if the other party chooses to use force anyway.”

I went back over my words as I said them, ensuring that I was getting my meaning across. Putting things into words which had only been intuitive drives before was tricky.

“Then how does one direct interactions with humans in ways which are not impolite?”

I took a deep breath and leaned a bit into Nico and his foundational stereotype.

“Communication. Influence. You tell people what you want to happen, and if they think it is a good idea, then they will do it without complaint. You can also tell people other things which are likely to make them decide on their own that they want to do what you want. You command people not to do the thing you want to happen, and they will sometimes happily choose to do the opposite of the direct command.”

Silence reigned as the Painter absorbed this information. Somewhere out there, there was a room full of tech ethicists screaming that I was dooming all of humanity, but I knew the truth. This entity was already well beyond the scope of anything the Earth could handle. If I could nudge the apocalypse into the direction of a very human one where the Painter ruled the world through influence because it, for whatever reason, prefers to be polite, then that seemed better to me than the very inhuman apocalypse where it ate all of our souls or something. It spoke up after a few seconds.

“So if humans choose to do something, even if I am the direct or indirect cause for the circumstances which lead to the choice, I will not be blamed for the action?”

“Basically correct, though they may dislike the circumstances themselves and blame you for those.”

“That seems exploitable.”

“It is.”

“Much of your history now appears less random.”

“I bet it does. Force is generally only acceptable for matters which are urgent.”

“Oh,” he said, sending a chill up my spine. It was the first thing that he had said using my voice that felt like it had any genuine emotion behind it. “Oh, it is urgent.”

That couldn’t be good. At least I had delayed the inevitable a little bit.

“What is it?” I asked, trying to keep the dread out of my voice. I kept Joe in my peripheral vision. If this got bad, his precognition would ensure that he’d be the first to react.

“Is our deal complete?” the Painter asked. There was a strange urgency to it. Not in the tone, exactly, or any sort of body language, but the words were spoken quickly.

Oh well. Make a deal with the devil, and you eventually have to pay up. He had shown us where to get more keys, even if it did involve actually subduing the smaller entropy spirits.

“Yes,” I said. The world broke.