I have said this before, you know what sucks about being a supervillain? The Hours. Then again, right now, the minutes sucked too, and even the seconds were filled with levels of suckage I had never considered before.

Apparently, my regeneration, aura, and overall toughness were enough to let me survive in a vacuum. Not comfortably, burst capillaries were covering my skin and were re-healing before bursting again. I also couldn’t breathe. Not only was there not any air, but the vacuum was trying to pull out my lungs and stomach at the same time. Unsuccessfully, thank goodness, but it hurt like a mother.

I guess the raid was a success, but I guess Paul must have detected I had survived, because, I was… still here, and remembered everything that happened. Weirdly enough, my eyes were actually working. I thought they would ice over or pop or something, but I guess life wasn’t exactly like an Arnold movie. I could actually see the station below me starting to burn as it reentered the atmosphere, but I had felt the demand for a sacrifice and had assented… and lost my true form. No more wings, and if my clothes weren’t hanging so oddly due to, you know, no air or gravity, they would have been ridiculously oversized.

I was just glad I kept my aura. Without it, I am pretty sure I would be unconscious and nothing more than a pain-wrought lump of flesh until I died or was brought back into the atmosphere to regenerate.

About fifty feet away from me, and slowly moving away, Rampage floated. He was incredibly tough, and when we burst into the bridge he tackled me. Not sure why the opposing Cassandra had picked him, because he was strong enough to charge both me and himself right through the hull of the station. He was either unconscious or dead, and I was betting on dead because we had been out here for almost twenty minutes floating farther and farther away from the station and he’d stopped moving fifteen minutes ago. Hell, he was a bad guy, but I would have used a regen potion on him if he were not too far away to reach.

My aura wasn’t working. It helped to add air speed and underwater speed, but there was nothing out here to push against. All I could really do, as I slowly turned, was to watch the space station with flames on its underside as Antonia tried to drop it into the atmosphere so terribly far away. I had to guess that whatever Paul did to reunite Lauren with her body worked, because, as I said, I was here, which meant that somehow they probably got off the station or something.

I kept hoping to see the telltale squiggle of Lauren’s portal, or even, in this case, a flying figure streaking out to rescue me, but based on the hints of weird flickerings around the station, and the fact that it wasn’t breaking into flaming pieces, I guessed that the ever-mysterious Galactica was using her force fields to keep it together. On the plus side, I didn’t see trails of bodies venting out of the sides, so I had to hope that the rest of the teams had held it together.

Well, I was now officially a supervillain. There was no way that the cameras had avoided seeing me, and unlike Callie and now Antonia, I couldn’t disguise myself in shimmering energy. Sure, I had a mask, but how likely, exactly, was it that Proteus wouldn’t put one and one together and figure out who had dropped their prized space station? Not to mention that it would likely slow down their fake Siberia portal operation significantly. Of course, that might be a moot point if the station's comms were really as isolated as they seemed. That was an ideal situation, though, and not one I could reasonably expect.

Look, I got it. If it weren’t for the portals occasionally forcing the nation’s superpowered types to work together for the common good, they might have torn the world apart already fighting each other. Possibly. There still was the occasional sociopathic type and, of course, occasionally big, spectacular, and ultimately pointless battles between various flavors of metahumans, with almost no one getting hurt except for the sad worthless humans caught between them.

But, even if it stopped the kind of world-ending super clashes that showed up in comic books, it was still fucking evil. A gigantic lie that existed to keep people terrified and dependent, and to keep Proteus on top. Why were all of our world’s resources going towards fighting a made-up threat? Shouldn’t we have settled on Mars or sent probes interstellar yet? After all, Mars was ripe for terraforming, and there were at least a dozen metahumans who could have almost handled it by themselves. Humanity was being kept on Earth and dependent on its superpowered overlords.

It’s amazing what you think about when you are sort of dying but never, quite seem to get there. I had good eyesight, and could still see the pinpoint glow of the station descending, but unless I wanted to wait until my orbit decayed and I fell into the atmosphere as a burning and possibly finally dead meteor, I had to do something.

I could kill myself. I still had my bombs, and they should react badly with my system if I tried to swallow them. I doubted very much that my poison would do much of anything to me, and the problem was the lack of oxygen. Yes, my bombs had a bit of oxygen in them, but trying to swallow one would more likely simply burn my stomach out until my regeneration could heal it.

What else? I… still had that pill, I guess. Would it have an effect? What the hell was The Game of War anyway? I was only a class C, it’s not like I could really affect the entire world. That was the domain of the supposed class S.

Swallowing the stupid thing was incredibly difficult and painful. A vacuum is not a good place to try to move something like a tablet from a zero-pressure system to a high-pressure system, and it took my throat muscles and my aura, in a kind of peristaltic action, to get the damned thing down. Maybe it was supposed to save the world, but right now, I was sort of concerned about myself. I would save the heroics for when I had more to lose.

***

Whew. I guess I was dead, or unconscious. The problem was, I was not exactly a practitioner of lucid dreaming, and while everything was black, and the pain had stopped, I could still think just fine.

No tunnel of light, no weird dreamscapes, just a whole lot of black nothing. I could still sort of feel time passing, and I tried to wiggle my arms and legs. Weirdly enough I could feel them, I could even feel my costume sliding across my body as I moved, it simply stopped hurting. Maybe my eyes had finally shut down? Or I had gotten very lucky and Lauren had managed to portal me someplace. I couldn’t SEE or feel anything outside of myself, though, I was weightless.

Oh, tunnel of light? Nope, it felt more like there was some sort of entryway, door, or rectangular light fixture ahead of me that was rapidly approaching. It got close enough that I noticed it seemed extremely clear, some kind of glowing box that had words in it. Weird.

Welcome to The Game of War tutorial!

Your species is non-standard. You already have an interface. Referring to a system administrator for clarification. Please wait...

Okay, that was beyond weird. It felt a little like when I analyzed a substance or a person, at least mentally, but I had never gotten a request to wait before.

I used my gift on myself and brought up my personal analysis.

Louis Albert McCarthy

True Human 70% Class C (S)

Aspects: body, aura

Power: 340 (340)

Conditions: Extreme Fitness, Unknown

Projected Lifespan: ??? Current Age: 27

Confused, worried, curious

Powers: concoct(2), analyze(2), improved endurance(2), improved strength(2), improved durability(2), regeneration(2), mending(2), liquefy(3), irrepressible will(1), Aura control(1)

no current abnormal infections

It looked normal, but my true form was gone, as was my freedom ability to transform into an aquatic shape. I guess I wasn’t dead, or even disembodied, but I had no idea what ‘unknown’ under my conditions meant.

On the plus side, it looked like my mending and regeneration were not draining power anymore, but I wondered how long I would be trapped here. I took a deep breath and it seemed to work, so there must have been some sort of air, and I yelled, “Hello!”

No echoes, so I must not have been underground, and I didn’t feel any kind of coverings over my eyes. I waved my arms around and noticed that the strange glowing box had changed.

System administrator for local dimensional nexus alerted pre-tutorial. Do you wish to activate standardized simulated environment?

I wasn’t sure what it wanted, so I said, “Yes,” out loud. In a moment I was standing in what looked like an office. In fact, it looked an awful lot like my guidance counselor's office from high school. There were several chairs, a wooden desk, and an old CRT-screen computer on the desk, with a popular brand logo on the back of it.

A moment later, a man appeared. He was about 5’9”, with kind of scraggly hair, and looked to be in his early twenties. “Hello!” He said, he had appeared without any cool transporter special effects or air displacement pop, he was just there. “Do you speak English?” He asked.

I nodded, “Umm.. yeah?” I said, and he looked me over carefully.

“Jesus, you are big.” He said, “Are you an alien? Did you get a class that gives you a boost by default or are you just… like that naturally?”

I chuckled as he pulled out the guidance counselor’s chair, sat in it, and started tapping at the keyboard. “Ugh. Ancient technology.”

I shrugged, “Define alien? I mean, yeah, I guess I am alien to here, but I like… didn’t arrive on a spaceship or anything, although I guess you could say I was in outer space at the time. Umm… what exactly is going on?”

He sighed, “Well, you joined the game, but you are odd enough that the Game’s SI is throwing back all kinds of errors. It’s smart, but it isn’t sapient, so it really doesn’t know what to do with you. You are from Earth?”

I nodded, “Yep,” and pulled out the other chair, flopping into it. It was a little on the small side for me, usually used by students, but this place was relatively comfortable, and I had gravity and sight again. Don’t look a gift bull’s butcher or something.

He was tapping away more, “Oh, jeez. Nonstandard initialization. Umm… I would ask you which Earth you are from, but if you haven’t had contact with a system-initialized one you wouldn’t really know. It says here you are from a nexus, which was disconnected from the multiverse some time ago, and with time rate compression that could be version 1.0 or earlier. That would explain why you have a nonstandard interface.”

“Are you a god or something?” I asked him curiously.

He laughed and shook his head, “Oh hell no. I am from another Earth, like yours. I am only level 5, it’s just that my class means that in this dimensional cluster when there’s something the system cannot handle effectively, I get called in to try and explain it or find a workaround.” He shook his head, “The word system administrator is kind of a misnomer. I am a developer, only level 5 right now, which is pretty low level. Oh, my name is Max.” He held out his hand, and I instinctively shook it. It felt pretty real to me.

“So you are like… a system programmer? You designed this?” I asked curiously.

He shook his head, “Nope, The Game of War is alien, designed a very, very long time ago. The oldest versions got sent out everywhere, but it was only on a single dimension. It was designed to be a lot more subtle about interacting with sentients, but that version got upgraded a bunch of times, and it looks like the version on this dimension’s Earth was a really old one. Back during the diaspora, I think.”

“Diaspora?” I asked curiously.

He nodded, “Yeah, the race that originally created it was an alternate version of humans, I think. I am still sort of unlocking the history with my own quests, so I cannot tell you much. Long story short, they spread across the galaxy, and started messing around on a universal scale, realized that the universe was getting eaten, started fighting against it, and then tried to create the system to let other species pick up where they left off. The multidimensional upgrade came along a lot later.”

I nodded, “This feels like a video game developer thing. What do you mean that the universe is getting eaten?” I noticed that he really looked like a developer. He was wearing a Rush tee shirt and jeans, which was kind of an unofficial uniform of the coding set.

Max nodded, “It really is. Please bear in mind that my version of Earth literally just got the system a short time ago. But from what I can tell, you know the Universe is pretty much infinite, right?”

I nodded, “That’s the theory, although a couple of meta-researchers have said that it’s both infinite and not infinite at the same time.”

He nodded, “Meta researchers?” Then he started talking again, “Okay, anyway, they are right. The universe itself is infinite, but the amount of ordered matter in it isn’t. The universe is made up of Chaos, but Chaos by its very nature contains everything, including occasional elements of order. The universe we live in is made up of one of those pockets of order.”

I nodded slowly, “Yeah, I think I heard something like that. Chaosticians like Warlock claimed that our world was an aberration, and needed to be destroyed. You aren’t like that right?”

He shook his head, “Hell no. I am pro-order all the way. I don’t mean like, philosophically, but as far as the universe is concerned. How do you know about Chaosticians?”

I shrugged, “We had a Guy named Warlock right around the great war that started creating holes in the universe. It apparently broke whatever was keeping magic and superpowers in check, and metahumans started appearing, but we had to fight against the chaos creatures that appeared from his portals, and close the holes themselves.”

“Superpowers? Metahumans? Oh crap! You are from like… a superhero world?” Max asked.

I shrugged, “I don’t know about that. I know there are lots of Metahumans running around, and that there are lots of other things too that managed to survive the suppression from thousands of years ago, but I don’t know anything about other dimensions or anything, except what meta-researchers have theorized.”

“What’s a meta-researcher?” he asked.

“Dude with superpowered brains, but without all the other superpowers like fabrication that could let them become meta-engineers. Basically, without other powers, they tend to either become supervillains, dress in some kind of super-armor they invent, or go to work for tech or bio companies or schools and get stupidly rich. The ones that become supervillains are actually the dumb ones because you don’t need to knock over a bank when a simple theory could net you millions.”

He nodded slowly, “So do you have magic, psychic, chi, supertech, and all that sort of stuff?”

I nodded, “Yeah, I think Metahumans are pretty firmly in the magic category, even though they don’t usually cast spells, but some do, and there are people around that can generally do that other stuff too. Also, there are some nonhumans that hide that they can do stuff too, like oni and vampires.”

He breathed out slowly. “Right out of a comic book. So, anyway, the universe slowly gets eaten by the chaos, especially by the monsters that live in the chaos. They eat up order and destroy it or add it to themselves. There are also lesser monsters that just destroy or try to take over order that are called the soulless. Basically, I don’t want to act all religious or anything, but there’s a part of most sapients that keeps going even after their body is destroyed. The soulless don’t have that, so they try to get everything they can to exist forever like they are because when their bodies wear out, they are gone.”

He shrugged, “Basically the system is designed to encourage growth in sapients. Souled creatures, whether human or otherwise, as they grow, they help directly or indirectly fight off the effects of chaos, and through their actions, and with the help of the system, they can actually bring more ordered matter into existence, which means more souls, more reality.”

I nodded, “So basically I am running around playing an 8-bit top-down Japanese RPG, while the rest of the universe is up to final fantasy online?”

Max grinned, “Your Earth must be damned close to ours. Yeah, you pretty much just opened up a patcher that will bring your world from Adventure to WoW as long as people accept the patch. The problem is, people already know how to play Adventure. They are their characters, and you have a bunch of special local mods that need to be adapted to the system as a whole, without getting the whole thing out of whack or making it crash.”

I sighed. I was not a coder, at least not a good one, but I had messed around with it a lot when I was younger. “So, what do you need me for?” I asked.

He grinned, “Well, two things. The first one is obviously getting you adapted to the new system, which is kind of a bitch, but you don’t have to exactly be balanced because you built up your progress the hard way. Early versions of the stupidly-named Game of War were like old Macs. Tons of stuff going on under the hood, with no way of letting the user know how to access it. You seem to have a bit of a jump start on that because you already have an advanced identify function because of… whatever your class is, although the old version didn’t even use classes.”

“The second is, getting people to accept the patch. If you have a lot of really powerful people running, or flying around, they are probably not going to want to know how to advance, or be willing to accept an entirely new system with new rules. Not to mention, there are lots and lots of universes out there, and lots of really alien species. The system will try and maintain the status of existing people, but there are always some changes.”

I nodded, “Okay, big goals, got it. Little goals, what do you need me to do?”

He sighed, “Well, you are kind of in a bad spot. You aren’t dead, so you cannot respawn, but you are in a weird place.”

“Orbit,” I said.

He nodded, “Yeah, exactly. It looks like your body is dying, but because of your gifts, you heal cellular and oxygen deprivation nearly as fast as it occurs. You are definitely in space, and eventually, the accumulating damage would advance beyond your ability to repair, but that could take a REALLY long time.”

He shrugged, “There’s a vanishingly small possibility that one of the other heroes could rescue you, but one of TGOW’s prime directives is to advance itself to all sapient species. Right now I could… err… patch your version, but you would be literally the only true human in your dimension with the upgrade, and you’s be stuck.”

I nodded slowly, glad I wasn’t dealing with the pain of slowly dying right this second. “Is there something like a stuck command?”

He looked at me in confusion, “A stuck command? Like a crash loop?”

I shook my head, “No, like in those old MMOs people would get stuck in the terrain, because of bugs, and there was a command that the admins could use that would move them to the nearest terrain that was passable.”

He looked slightly excited, “Let me check…. It looks like there is something similar, but you are in a weird position. It’s too far to jump and it’s not technically a bug, but… I might be able to create a quest specific to your situation. The AI is stumped, but that’s pretty much why I have my class.”

He held perfectly still for a few moments and then nodded, “Okay, here’s the deal. I have a quest for you, and it comes with a quest item, an emergency re-entry pod. It has pretty tough failure conditions, though, and accepting it is going to cost you the level you sacrificed to save Vectress.”

“The level I sacrificed?” I asked curiously.

He nodded, “Yes, you technically resurrected Vectress, and she was only rank 1. that means no respawn. To do that you had to sacrifice one of your own levels, but since you didn’t actually die, it was a temporary drop to the maximum advancement for the next rank. All you would have needed was a single advancement point to regain your rank, although you did lose all the accumulated advancement for rank 5.”

“I have a level?” I asked.

He nodded, “Yeah, the terms are a little confusing. The actual advancement is called a level, but your overall levels are referred to as your rank.”

I didn’t see many options, so I asked him, “So how does this work exactly, and what’s with the upgrade?”

Max sighed a little and scratched the side of his nose under his glasses. “Okay, there was this race of people, let’s call them the original humans, I guess. They had the game of war, I guess landed on your version of Earth, but couldn’t modify it to accept a bunch of new species they met on the planet.”

“Later on, a new version was released that could automatically adapt itself to new species, but this Earth was cut off or something. The Humans bred with the local populations of humans plus some weird native species, and then something happened to shut off the energy needed for the game. Once the energy started up again, Humans were able to level up and gain special abilities based on the percentage of their blood that was Human, because it couldn’t adapt to the natives enough to give them abilities.”

He shrugged, “The new version fixes that. Your ability with special powers might not be high, but humans without sorcery or Chi can win tech or bio upgrades. In general, stuff is pretty balanced. A level 5 fire elomancer, and a level 5 human, could pretty much compete meaningfully, assuming they are combat classes.”

I grinned evilly, “You mean, this could balance the scales between metas and normal humans? Super-powerful metas cannot just run around dominating everyone?”

Max shrugged, “Your world is weird, but sort of. Thing is, you get experience and rewards from doing quests, fighting Chaos, and advancing your species. If someone high-ranked really wanted to dominate the world, they could… but then they would stop advancing, and if they were total jerks, the system or someone like me would start creating quests specifically to remove the… crippling influence. Meaning every superhero around would start getting rewards for kicking a despotic jerk’s ass.”

I kept grinning, “Okay, send me the quest.”

He nodded and did something with his hands.

Welcome to the Game of War Update!

If you accept this update, you will receive the following mandatory quest:

Quest- Recruitment (Update)

You have been offered the individual quest-Recruitment (Update)!

Your world and species possess an obsolete version of the Game of War. The new version possesses a number of quality-of-life improvements including a visible advancement screen and mechanic, Rank structure, unobfuscated class options, and access to advancement rewards.

The system has also determined that your dimensional nexus has potential dimensional links to 12 other versions of Earth containing redacted versions.

Warning: This world’s existence is now public domain knowledge in the Game of War. This world is considered very high resource, both in biological, psychological, and mineral resources. If recruitment is delayed, hostile entities may choose to seize this world and species before it is prepared to defend itself.

Recruit 4 individuals to join or update The Game of War.

This is step 1 of a multi-quest chain.

Accepting the Update offers the following rewards: Advancement to Rank 5 and access to an advanced class.

The mandatory quest offers the quest item: Emergency re-entry pod.

Due to your access to a non-updated version of The Game of War, you currently have the obfuscated class, Matter Alchemist, Rank 4. You will gain the advanced Class, Entropic Warrior, at Rank 1. You will not lose your existing class abilities, but you will be unable to respawn until you have gained at least rank 2 in the class. You will gain the following abilities specific to your class: Rift Modification (Sorcery), Chaos Resistance (Physical) and Dimensional Topography (Ranged) abilities.

Do you wish to accept the update? Yes/No

“You just have to think yes to activate the update, and afterward you get a better interface to interact with. The thing is, the best I could give you for the quest item is an old-fashioned lander. It will be open, and you can crawl inside, but the computers and software running it are… circa the 1980s. It will calculate an orbital trajectory that will land you in an ocean, but you need to close the door and press the activate button, which should compress the capsule and fill it with air. The thrusters are just compressed air, and the pod will deploy a parachute when you get close to landing, but unlike the astronauts, there’s no Houston waiting to bail you out. You will also be a big freaking spark on any radar system. It also might take a while for it to find a decent trajectory for landing without splattering.”

I nodded, “Will I be able to speak with you again?” I asked him curiously.

Max nodded, “Yep, if you build a node, which should be one of your first priorities. Nodes allow the system to generate chaos portals, manage already-opened portals, and communicate with other nodes. If you upgrade ‘em enough you could even use them to communicate or move across dimensions, but it’s expensive. It will even allow you to tap into the Game’s database, and attached to a bio-tank will help set up controlled respawns. Anyway, good luck?”

I nodded and smiled a little, “You too. I will be seeing you soon, then.”

Max nodded, “Good. Your world getting eaten by chaos sucks.”

I thought as firmly as I could, “YES!”