Asphodel – Fifth Age – Sixth Year – Eightieth Sun

Adam’s head was pounding. His eyes cracked open to a fuzzy sea of green. It took a moment, but Adam realized he was lying face down on a lush, grassy landscape. He could feel a cool breeze sweep across his back, and then heard the sound of wind all around him. After a couple of deep breathes, Adam pushed himself up from the ground and looked around. He saw tall grass in every direction and clouds beyond that. Adam rolled on to his back and sat up to see Mary sitting on a large bolder fifteen feet in front of him with her legs extended and crossed. She was whittling away at her fingernails with a small knife and offered no indication that she noticed him move.

“It’s interesting that you’d choose this plateau,” Mary said before blowing some dust away from her finger nail and rubbing it with her thumb. Seemingly satisfied, she started at the next nail with her knife.

Adam sighed, “Yeah, why’s that?”

“It was Lisa’s favorite spot.” Adam was surprised to hear Mary say her name so plainly. Mary cleaned off the nail she was working on and moved to her thumb. “No matter how much time I spend in hear, I’m always amazed by the level of detail that’s been put into this world. Our nails grown, our hair, hell our skin flakes off when it dries out. Just blows my mind. After a while the real world seems fake be comparison.”

Adam waited for Mary to continue. She’d opened the door into her past by mentioning Lisa’s name but now she was stalling by musing about Asphodel. Mary took her small blade and sheathed it into a leather wrap around her wrist, before looking up at him.

“You had plenty of mana to burn. You could of flown for hundreds of miles and you came here,” she shook her head. “I don’t know what that means, but I think I’ve kept Lisa from you long enough.”

Adam slid back against the grass and pulled his knees up to his chest. “Mary, I got…”

“An anonymous message, yes. I know…Georgia,” she said with a weak smile.

Adam sighed. “Makes sense. I didn’t get the feeling from that video that it was something you wanted to talk about.”

Then Mary did something he never expected, she apologized. “I’m sorry Adam. I really am. I pushed Lisa out of my mind for a long time and when you came along…it stirred up some really old shit, some really painful shit.” It was the first time that Mary had apologized to him for anything. In fact, it was the first time that he had heard Mary apologize at all.

Whatever anger Adam had from being locked up just melted away. Ever since she’d found him in Asphodel, he’s viewed her as a rock, a foundation. An immovable, unemotional, rational force that would do anything she could to guide him in the right direction. Before she had a chance to prove herself, Adam trusted her instinctively. He was never quite sure why, but something in her eyes told him that she didn’t mean him any harm. Everything since the first day when they met had been based off of that. Even when he was furious at her for locking him up, deep down he trusted her. Adam waited for her to tell her sister’s story.

Mary stood and walked past Adam. Adam stood and followed her to the edge of the plateau, thirty feet from where they were sitting. “Five thousand feet,” she said. “That’s how high we are, give or take a few feet.”

Adam looked over the edge to see a dense forest below. There were several castles littered around the landscape further away and beyond that a large city with more modern buildings. “It really is amazing when you have a chance to stop and look at it all. Medieval, fantasy like magic mixed in with futuristic science fiction warfare and everything in between. All it needs is a bunch of alien races to round everything out. Of course, there’s plenty to do with just several billion humans running around, imagine what aliens would do to mix.”

Adam wanted to comment about how he thought Hidarian created Asphodel to perfect humanity, and aliens wouldn’t fit into that plan. Hidarian was always looking to the future. He knew that people needed an excuse to get fit and healthy in a way that they actually enjoyed. Asphodel gave them that. He knew that someday we’d outlive our physical beings and need to transcend to greater heights. All of the information in Asphodel could fit in a small satellite, be sent to space and run off of solar energy. It was an organic computer, with artificial intelligence capable of sustaining the system for indefinite amount of time. Asphodel could give humanity transcendence, but this wasn’t about Asphodel. This wasn’t about Adam’s knowledge of Hidarian or what he thought the human race should or could be. It was about Mary, and whatever pain she dealt with in losing her sister. He was here, being the rock for his friend that she had been for him on so many occasions. So he just kept his thoughts private, and listened.

They stood there looking over the edge of the plateau for some time. After a while, Mary just stared straight out into the clouds and said, “You’re not the first Adam.”

“What?” he was transfixed by the beauty below, and had almost forgotten that she was talking about her sister.

“You’re not the first,” she repeated, still staring into the cloudy white abyss. “Lisa was. She was a Shifter…she was a Wrathic.”

Adam was at a loss for words, “How…”

“HTG kept it quiet. They kept her out of the public eye, and killed anyone who knew too much. After…well…they burned any record of it. She knew I wouldn’t approve, joined under a different name, even I didn’t know until it was too late.” Mary sighed and rubbed the insides of her eyes.

“They killed her Adam.”

Mary’s overbearing protection of Adam became so clear. He still had so many questions, but the most prominent one he just blurted out, “How can you work for them?”

Mary turned to look at Adam and touched his shoulder, her eyes were red and tears were on the verge of pouring down her cheeks. “We should sit.” Mary directed him over to a short patch of soft grass and they both sat, facing each other. “The Wardens have always been more than a character class in a game. We’re a secret society. A collection of well trained, and supremely skilled spies that operate in Asphodel and the real. I became a Warden after Lisa’s...disappearance.”

“Where did they come from?”

“Some of founding members were from Hidarian’s personal staff, working on the Asphodel prototype. Some were ex-soldiers who didn’t believe in the de-weaponization of the world, they thought it was one step closer to free people being controlled. Some were Doctors, afraid of what technology was doing to humanity, extended lives and all that. Nothing seemed natural anymore. In the early days, it was just twenty people. They were worried about Asphodel, about the rumors of Hidarian hiding the key to digitizing consciousness in the game. Much like Hidarian, they knew that if the wrong people got their hands on it, then they could do some serious damage. So they joined the game as Wardens and adopted the mantel in the real.

“Not all Wardens in the game are Wardens in the real , which helps us stay under the radar. We’ve been fighting for sixty real years to keep the key to digitizing consciousness out of the wrong hands, and most of our time is spent fighting HTG, with DARC being a close second. HTG had resources that I needed, Tartarus, the Tomas Hidarian facility, access to Hidarian’s notes. They think I’m manipulating you for their cause, they want to harness your power and keep you under lock and key, but we have to stop them Adam. They like DARC but much more powerful and well-funded. They want to convert everyone connected, they’re a cult, fanatics. They want to destroy what’s left of physical humanity, and their council has some very high members of society in it.”

“What about DARC?”

"DARC wants the same thing, but they don’t have the resources that HTG does. They’re a poor man’s facsimile who we can use to our advantage when to time comes, but HTG is the real threat. They were close before I came along. Too close, and Lisa showed them that Wrathics exist. She opened the door.”

Adam sighed and took a moment to process all the information that Mary was giving him. HTG needed to be stopped there was no question about that, but as selfish as it seemed, he needed more information about Lisa. He couldn’t make the same mistakes she did if they were to have any chance of fighting back. “What happened to your sister?”

Mary looked away from Adam. She focused on the clouds, the swirling nothingness beyond their isolated little plateau. “She wasn’t ready. She didn’t have all of the information and didn’t know what she was, what she was trying to do, until it was too late. She was on the right path to finding the key but…HTG got to her first. They found out her true identity, and went after her in the real. Lisa tried to complete the conversion before they got to her but she was too weak, didn’t have all the information for the ritual, didn’t have the skill that Georgia and Faraday recently discovered. She died during the process.”

“I’m sorry,” Adam said solemnly.

Mary wiped a tear from her eye. “Or I thought she did. She’s stuck in Asphodel, at least part of her is. There have been rumors, sightings of a ghost calling itself the Dark Angel, her user name. I didn’t want to believe them, I didn’t think it was possible, but after your experience…I just wanted to believe that she was gone, so that she was done with all of this.”

Mary took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I wish she would have come to me, I wish she would have let me help her, maybe…”

Adam put a hand on Mary’s shoulder and squeezed in support. “You can’t blame yourself. Without your help, I’d probably already be dead too.” Mary took a moment to compose herself and breathe through the emotions. After a few minutes she stood and started pacing around Adam. Adam got up and waited for Mary to pull herself together.

“Okay,” she said forcefully. “Okay, first things first, we need to get you that skill. HTG can wait, all of the people we’re working with were hand selected by me. The ones who don’t know who I really am, don’t have a way to find out. So we need to find a way to get you that skill, and that’ll be a lot easier with HTG’s resources.”

“So we take it one step and a time,” Adam offered. “The Ogre guarding Neramith cave, he’s a level 20 right?”

Mary winced, “Yeah.”

“Shit.” Adam said bluntly.

Mary laughed. “Step one is already a pain in the ass.”

Adam chuckled. “Right, but remember, Hidarian wouldn’t have added this into the game unless it was possible, so think, there has to be something out there, that I can use, a relic or a potion, or something that can make me strong enough to fight a level 20 Ogre. Mary what about Tony?”

“What about him?”

“Well you’ve been able to alter code in Asphodel, hence the flash doors, is there anything he can do to help?”

Mary shook her head, “Doubtful. Tony’s very intelligent but we’re pretty positive that all of the code we’ve been able to alter was just Hidarian hiding mods in game for people to discover. The foundations, the classes, the xp, the weapons and level restrictions, we’ve never been able to crack any of that. It’s like Hidarian created his own programming language and no can understand it. People have been trying to crack that since its inception and the back end AI has always been able to protect itself and mutate to stay ahead of the game. That man was a goddamn genius.”

Adam had been waiting for the right time to bring up Reggie and this could finally be it. If they were able to import him into Asphodel, then he could possibly have access to things that they could never understand. He could process code and try to crack into back doors that Tony would never be able to see, fight the backend AI on a battlefield that they didn’t have access to.

“What about importing data? Grav chambers scan our bodies and import them into Asphodel, is there a way to transfer data into the game?”

Before Mary had a chance to answer and ship streamed by above them. Ghost dropped out of the sky and landed on one knee next to them “Mum,” he gave Mary a nod and stood. He nodded at Adam “Mr. Kitos. We’ve got a problem.”

“Oh good,” Adam said with an overtly fake smile. “A change of pace for once.”