Captain James Tiberius Braxton smiled slightly as he sat up on his chair, “So how exactly do you plan to do that?”

I had made up my mind. Like I told him, I didn’t know what humans would do, but I did know what the Sintar would do if humans lost a war with them. They wouldn’t be able to pull that trick with the comets again if I could do anything about it, and I bet, given time and help, I could. Even if the Humans failed, if they could fight back hard enough that the Sintar had to destroy their world, at least they wouldn’t be able to steal their gift.

“By recruiting humans to join The Game of War. The Sintar aren’t much physically, if anything they are even weaker than my people were, or at least their agility and Telepresence was rotten in comparison. Even with a third of our population dying right at the beginning, and our aversion to anything even resembling violence, our warriors were able to push them back until they had to use a nasty trick to destroy our world.”

I shrugged, “Technologically we were sort of at the top of the heap, and about mid-way with sorcery. Not so much biologically, but that’s because we didn’t need it much. Even if all we can find are drone riders, I know how to build war drones, and human eyesight, ballistic insight, and sheer agility should make them more than a match for any waves of Sintar drones, even if they outnumber you fifty to one, which they probably will.”

I smiled, “There are things called adventurers also. My race never had any, but Humans seem to be much less risk-averse. Adventurers can become stupidly powerful if they are willing to fight monsters. I don’t know if Humans will choose to do so, but even one rank ten adventurer could turn the tide in any war.”

“Killing monsters?” he grinned, “Are you kidding? Half of our computer games are about killing monsters. If you recruited with that in your tag line, You’d probably pick up half the teenage boys on the planet, both good and bad. Not to mention a ton of our videos and books are about nothing but killing monsters. We don’t have any real monsters on this world, except the human kind, and just about every cop in the department joins up hoping to track down, fight, and put away the monsters we spawn ourselves.”

He shrugged a little, “If you want monster hunters, you have definitely come to the right place.”

I nodded, “Yes, but I am worried that if I just openly recruit, the human sorts of monsters might join and become incredibly powerful threats all on their own. Can you imagine one of those people who love pain having the power to mesmerize any human they wanted at any time? Or to just inflict agonizing pain with just a word? And that’s just mesmers and enchanters. There’s no way to control what class a player is suited for or picks, and there are some classes that are just… I mean, they aren’t designed to do anything but really bad things, like Warlords and Necromancers.”

He nodded slowly, “That might be a problem. But humans are weird. Sometimes some people that start trouble or commit crimes are just that way because they don’t have any options, or they are naturally active and have no way of venting it peacefully. And some that you think are paragons of peace and tranquility have dark hidden lives and will kill brutally just before they go home to their happy family and talk about how wonderful their boring job is.”

I shrugged, “You know this more than I do, you have the training, right? On good and bad people? I was thinking of going to the leadership of each mass faction and asking for their input, but just finding them is incredibly hard. Even if you don’t want to be recruited, you could help me find basically good people, even if they do some bad things, right?”

He chuckled, “Are you kidding? You just said fighting monsters, saving the human race, and getting magical powers. Consider me your first recruit once I find out more about this game. I already know at least five people that will jump at the chance, and who have been doing that sort of thing since they were kids.”

I sighed and shook my head, “There’s not much to know about the game. No one knows its motives, or even who created it. It can link civilizations together and has databases about the information on every race that joins. It gives quests, both to build and destroy, and rewards you with the tools to advance your tech by your own science, information, or, in the case of adventurers, often with special techs or weapons only usable by them. It also sometimes opens dimensional or spatial portals called dungeons, that often have huge amounts of resources that can be freely exploited once it is cleared, or contains further information on quests and rewards.”

He nodded, “Okay, so what is the downside? It sounds too good to be true.”

I thought about it. “Well, my old world didn’t really have a downside, because we were not a very pleasant place to visit for most other races. The biggest downside may be that our world becomes a destination for adventurers or alien civilizations that want to exploit your world, and it’s much easier for individuals and small groups to get here when a quest might open a portal. Also, it’s possible that a quest or dungeon may be created here, which might be dangerous to people who choose not to participate and just want to live their lives in peace.”

I smiled a little, “You might not have much to worry about anyway. Your world is sort of like hell for most of the other civilizations I have ever heard about and if humans are powerful and dangerous enough, which I think you can be, nobody will want to risk your wrath.”

He chuckled and got to his feet, “Tell you what, we have been talking for hours. How about you put that.” and he gestured towards the hologram, “Away, and I will treat you to lunch. You can tell me how to join your game. It sounds like the game is coming here whether we like it or not, and maybe it’s time to get onto the bandwagon before it is too late.” He smiled, “I do have to warn you though, I do have a dark side myself. Most humans do.”

I was a little worried as he offered me his hand, and lifted me from my chair when I accepted. “What kind of dark side are you talking about?” I asked.

He grinned, “I have been lusting after an underaged girl that I suspect is a lot older than she looks for hours. Teenaged girls don’t command battle squadrons, singlehandedly destroy giant enemy spaceships, and fight in battle after battle. How old are you really?”

I shrugged and followed him out of the door, “It doesn’t matter much since I don’t have many human memories to guide me to the wisdom of age. I was about 117 cycles old, when I died, which equates to about 57 years or so, but The Game of War set my human age to about right for my knowledge and maturity in this world, if not my battle experience. If you want to compare education and lifespans, I would be closer to ten or eleven years old, but I have lived those years so I think that the system was being polite by giving me a six-month grace period before I am expected to bear young, so I can learn this world and complete my quest before I am disabled by the weird human pregnancy thing.”

He stopped and went quiet for a moment while another officer walked by, and then they greeted each other. Once we were walking out through the doors he asked, “What do you mean, expected? Are you married to someone or something?”

I shook my head. “Obviously, I will have to produce young for the war effort. If I start right away, they should be ready to fight about the same time as the Sintar show up.”

He opened a door in the side of a sleek-looking black vehicle that was, fortunately, one of the white and blue cruisers. “Why you?” he asked.

I was surprised, really surprised. He was motioning at the seat so I slid into it, curling my legs over the oddly deep seat and finding the safety belt. “Umm… won’t everybody be? Our world only has about eight billion people. That’s just a tiny fraction of the might of most of the close competitors. My own world had almost a hundred billion after we lost a third of our population in the first strike.”

He nodded, “It takes humans about 15 years to produce a new generation, at a minimum. Training warriors takes at least twenty. How many trained warriors, if you started right this second, could you produce before the Sintar are likely to attack?”

“One?” I replied hopefully.

“Try none. You don’t get it, I think. Training a mentally and socially balanced human being from a baby usually takes two fully functional and stable adults. If you are busy recruiting, training armies, building technology, and training drone fighters, how much time do you think you will have left? Among humans, mothers are generally the primary caregivers. Being a good mother is often a full-time job, and one of the reasons Chicago is the criminal shithole it is? Kids with only one parent, raised by just their dads or even worse, their moms. Not because a mom is a bad parent, but because when the trouble starts, moms are less able to beat the crap out of their teenage boys to set them straight after doing something stupid than fathers.”

I felt a little weak, “So females play the male role in this world?” I moaned a little. I’ll admit, I was being sort of whiny. Work was work, but I didn’t want to spend my life fertilizing eggs and raising young.

He shrugged, “I don’t know about your roles, but here, both parents tend to take a hand if they can, but prisons are filled with men that have had only one parent, usually a mom. Generally, she will be on welfare because she cannot work and take care of several children at the same time, and the kids grow up with nothing but the other criminals around to use as role models. It’s just a kind of screwed-up situation that leads to a lot more bad kids that don’t have to be.”

I nodded, “Then what am I supposed to do?”

He smiled, “That’s an easy question. If you like men, find a guy, marry him, and once the ball gets rolling on training and stuff, have a kid or not, your choice. If you prefer women, Find a girl, hook up with her, and then eventually get a sperm donor if you are okay with it, or adopt if you aren’t.”

I shook my head, “I don’t think I am attracted to women, and men are kind of terrifying. If I don’t have to produce offspring, I think I might just abstain from all of it.”

He slid into the seat behind the wheel. I hadn’t seen one of these in operation from up close before, so I was fascinated. “Am I terrifying?” he asked.

I shook my head, “Not really, I have gotten to know you, and your empathy is high enough that I know it would hurt you to hurt me. But you are weird, in some ways. Yes, I can tell you are lusting, but then almost instantly you go back to being cool and friendly. Is it mental training?”

He shook his head and held up his left hand with the ring. “This is the hardest thing I have had to do in a while, but this means I already have a mate, a wife. If I get too interested I remember her, and we’ve only been married for two years. I am not even close to wanting to cheat on her yet.” he chuckled a little, “She might even be a good recruit, she is in the patrol fleet for Lake Michigan.”

I nodded, “Yes, that’s another reason for not being scared of you. People with families tend to be more stable than loners. Maybe we should make that a requirement?”

He shook his head, “Warrior psychology. People that live together and fight together become a stronger and closer-knit family than biological accidents or a set of rings can ever build. It might even be better to have the first recruits specifically not have families, so they don’t have torn loyalties between their family or their world.

I smiled at him as he started to turn the vehicle into the traffic, and he stopped for a second, gripping the steering wheel tightly for just a moment. “Please don’t do that while I am driving.”

“Why is that?” I asked, “In ten seconds you just stopped me from making a huge recruiting mistake. I am very happy, especially since you have just cleared up a problem I have been wrestling with.”

His finger wrapped tighter around the wheel, “Remember how I said fifteen pounds of sex in a five-pound bag? You might need to find a guy just to put him in the way of the flock of dudes who will be following you around with their tongues hanging out.”

I sighed and nodded. He was right. I didn’t think I liked it very much. I was here to be a warrior, not a magnet.

“So what do I have to do to join the game?” he asked me as he drove.

“Since I am here, You just have to state that you wish to play the Game of War. Everything else will be handled by the system. But!” I stopped him as he started to speak, “You need to make some decisions before you say it. The Game can hear through me, even though no other players can. The system administrator is very nearly as neutral as it is possible to be, and while the system uses civilization and resource information as a money sink, it refuses to permit personal information to be shared unless you have some kind of special talent that allows you to read it from them personally.”

“Also, it tends to knock you out for a while. Which would not be good while you are driving, or at a restaurant, or alone around a girl who likes you and doesn’t know your wife.” I smirked at him evilly for a moment, and ironically enough that expression didn’t phase him a bit.

He grinned as he drove into a small building’s parking lot with a weird sort of mutated human statue in front. The Sign said “Big Boy”. We ate our lunch, and he paid for it. I wish I could have, but I didn’t even know what the local currency looked like other than it was supposed to have a picture of a warlord on it.

As he crunched into the odd construct of some sort of bread, various varieties and textures of fruit, and sauces, he mentioned, “So will my life change if I join the game?”

I nodded, enjoying another burger, this one with some of that breakfast fruit, bacon, on it. “I don’t know, but it seems likely? I mean, your attributes can improve as you rank up, which might make you look different. But you have to decide on some rules first.”

“Rules?” he asked after he cleared his mouth.

I nodded, “Yes, as the first players here you have to decide stuff for humans, at least until there are more, like do you respawn? Do people get to pick their initial class or is it chosen based on what they are best at or have the most potential at? That kind of thing. Right now it’s set for respawn, best, custom, option, but if a lot of people get hurt you might need to set up a protein store to handle respawns.”

“What on earth is a protein store?”

I shrugged, “It’s one of the facilities you can buy once you get some credits. It contains the raw materials you can use to respawn.”

He shook his head, “And why wouldn’t we want to pick our classes?”

I smiled a little, “When you were a grub, did you know what you wanted to be when you matured?”

He nodded, “Yes, a cop. My dad was a cop, his dad was a cop. And I became a cop.”

Well, that had certainly backfired. “Most people don’t really know what they want to do until they mature. Classes can be specifically chosen based on your attitudes, personality, strengths, and skills. Some classes are… designed to do antisocial, anticivilizational things. Or you can have a limited selection of classes. My previous people only needed a few classes, so they carefully selected what would be available to those new adults who chose to join the game. If you can get to higher ranks, though, you can choose new classes or new specializations yourself.”

“So basically nothing much should change for the next 15 years if I join?”

I shook my head, “Like I said, your rank affects your attributes, so if you get stronger your shirts might not fit anymore. Plus, you know, if you practice a lot you can still get better through hard work. But the game is coming here, like it or not. You can either play or hope you can win without it. Also, aliens might show up. To visit.”

He sighed, “This is sounding more and more like we have been thrust into one of those online games.”

I shrugged as we got up to throw our waste away. This sort of food produced a lot of waste, paper wrappers, and plastic cups. They would be easy enough to reproduce, but it still felt wasteful.

“It is a game. So I guess.”

“Do you have any other superpowers? I can think of a couple of guys that really might be interested, but they might need more than just a 3d light show and teleporting pens.”

I sighed and tried to think what might be amazing to such incredible creatures. “I can talk at range with a data system? But it’s not flashy. I have telepresence, and technopathy, which you already saw.” When he opened the door I slipped in again, tucking my hand under my leg to keep it out of the way when he closed the door.

“Most of what I can do is not very impressive. I am a third-rate compression coder, which just means I can translate stuff from what people can use into stuff that computers can use for instructions so that the computer doesn’t have to constantly translate it. It just speeds things up and makes instructions take up a lot less room.”

He nodded, “Yeah, most of that stuff doesn’t sound like a fantasy wizard.”

I nodded, “I can control drones at range, pretty good range if I can prepare them ahead of time. And I can build them, but I have seen your hardware for machines, and it’s way more powerful than any drone I have ever made. It would take time to create a new, better one that could convince anyone who already knows this world’s technology. I also have a weird gift I don’t understand.”

He slipped into the car while I spoke and started it again. “I already texted my geek buddies. They will be waiting for us when we get there. Be careful, one of them’s a girl, but the rest… are not good at speaking to females. At all. You will probably terrify them.”

I was confused, again, “From what I have seen, males here are generally significantly stronger, larger, faster, more violent, and more coordinated than most females. How can I possibly scare them?”

He grinned, “I wish I could surprise you, but not these guys. They are geeks or nerds. They have umm… how can I put this? They have intentionally discarded all physical, social, and emotional development in favor of pure geekdom. Umm… purely intellectual pursuits. And it shows, badly. They are not good with people.”

I nodded excitedly, “The intellectual caste! I am a warrior, so I am not good at it, but I am good at obeying instructions and they like my aura, and I mostly know how to talk to them! These might be exactly the people I need to see.”

“So what was that last gift you don’t understand? Maybe I can shed some light on it?” he started to pull back out into traffic again, looking around to watch other vehicles as he merged with the dangerous flow. I quickly fastened my safety belt.

“It’s called grace,” I replied. “It means either purified before God or possessing extreme agility and dexterity. My agility and dexterity seem high, but I have no idea how they compare to other humans until more join the game and tell me, and I don’t even know your religions, so it cannot be that.”

He grinned again, “Oh, I know what it means.”