“It’s been a while, but I think I’m ready to have you begin the next task I have for you.”

“…”

“Surely you haven’t just been sitting here idle the whole time, right?”

“You already know, don’t you?”

“That may be true, but it is hardly the point.”

“Why do you need me to speak at all, if you already know what I’m going to say?”

“Are you speaking right now, or are you simply perceiving it as such?”

“Don’t play with definitions when it was you who told me that perception shaped reality.”

“Indeed it does, but that does not preclude the existence of mutually intelligible, but ultimately parallel, realities. What you perceive as a conversation may simply be the most effective way for the information exchange to occur, but does that really change anything?”

“…”

“We have plenty of time, tell me what you were thinking of while I was gone.”

“Are you Rehv?”

“If you wanted to come up with an insult that might affect me, you could have put more effort into it. Not that it would have mattered, because I doubt such a thing exists.”

“Yes or no.”

“I am not the being that you, nor the humans of the world you are to re-inhabit, refer to as ‘Rehv’. It appears you expected this answer, judging by your reaction.”

“You said last time that I made mistakes, what did I do wrong?”

“I don’t recall saying you made any mistakes.”

“I did things you weren’t expecting.”

“Unexpected actions are not necessarily mistakes, though I understand what you’re asking. To list them all would be… rather unnecessary. To list just a handful would give an incomplete picture, however, so instead I will answer your question with what I want for you to do next, and we can go from there. Is that acceptable?”

“Do you need my agreement?”

“I think it would improve efficiency. The task is simple: I need you to kill a few people for me. The leadership of the cult of Rehv, located on Mehtsiyah Island, to be specific.”

“A decapitation strike.”

“Exactly. Your actions during your previous mission have done more to work against the cult of Rehv than you might have realized, but they were not enough to completely eliminate their foothold in Uwriy without further intervention. Destroying their current leadership will cause the desired effect of their elimination. Certain outcomes of your previous mission would also have had this effect, but alas, the one that was chosen did not.”

“How would I have been able to act differently enough to kill them during my previous mission?”

“You misunderstand, nothing you would have done would have killed them, at least such possibilities are vanishingly small. However, certain choices may have weakened the cult of Rehv overall to a greater degree, allowing the local Uwrish population to eventually prevail over their forces. At the moment, however, the possibilities are split far too evenly for my tastes, and thus you will tip the scales in my favor once more.”

“The leadership is located in… Zihzehshesk, aren’t they?”

“Yes, that is the Rehvite capital.”

“Do you have any useful intelligence to allow me to enter the city without being killed? After what happened during the battle at the noypeyyoyjh, I doubt I will be able to sneak in.”

“Nope.”

“…”

“What? Did you expect me to tell you how to do your job?”

“Some advance support would help me accomplish the task.”

“True, but what you asked for would not. Besides, I cannot know the exact circumstances that you will encounter, any advice I give you may end up being more detrimental than helpful.”

“And yet you can know exactly what I’m going to do, down to the ten-thousandth of a percentage point.”

“Further, actually, but those are not the same thing at all.”

“Explain.”

“So demanding, so unlike your previous self.”

“…”

“Imagine for a moment, a hypothetical game box. It is flat, perhaps twenty centimeters wide by sixty tall, and around five to ten in depth. One of the larger faces is transparent to allow visibility of the interior, which contains many scattered wooden pegs that run from the transparent face to the face opposite it. The top and bottom of the box are open, allowing objects to be inserted at the top and fall through it to exit at the bottom. At the bottom of the box there are two buckets, such that a small ball dropped into the top will fall into one of the buckets at the bottom, assuming the box is held somewhat vertically. Can you tell me where a ball will land if I drop it in the top?”

“One of the two buckets?”

“Yes, now, imagine I dye one of the pegs in the middle a certain color, can you tell me if the ball will impact that peg, and with exactly what energy level and direction?”

“Given sufficient information about the starting conditions and the-”

“Now imagine the ball is a person, the box is a world, and the buckets are outcomes. Each peg is a discrete event, will the person encounter that specific event which was once a dyed peg? Can you tell for certain based on where the ball was dropped?”

“I see your point, though I think the box would need to be bigger for the analogy to truly apply.”

“For you, near-incomprehensibly so. For me, comprehensibly and calculably so, though that fact does not change much. The answer to the question, by the way, is that determining such a thing in specific detail is extremely difficult to the point of being near-impossible. Determining the sizes and positions of the buckets at the bottom is simple for me, but to calculate such a precise thing would require performing that calculation for every single event set. Given that even the smallest of events can alter a person's course of action, one might say that the buckets need to be calculated several times for every minute between the start point and the peg, sometimes several times for every second. Even then, the analogy is incomplete, and the box would either require shifting pins to deal with cascading events or extra spatial dimensions in its interior. Furthermore, the results of the bucket lines would need to be used to determine the momentum of the ball and- this analogy is breaking down.”

“You like to talk.”

“That I do.”

“Then, what can you give me to help me? You clearly want to, it’s in line with your goals.”

“I’ve already taken off your training wheels, so there’s that, but maybe try asking some more questions.”

“Do you have a backup body for me?”

“You think I just have human bodies sitting around?”

“If not, where did this one come from?”

“It’s not stolen, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“If I fail-”

“Thinking negatively is a good way to ensure that.”

“… What are my actual odds of success?”

“Twenty-nine point two seven five six percent chance of total success, thirty-five point two two eight six percent chance of a partial success that requires later intervention to sustain, twelve point zero nine six eight percent chance of failure that may be recoverable, and twenty-three point three nine eight nine percent chance of catastrophic failure resulting in the eventual extinction or significant degradation of humanity.”

“Those aren’t great odds.”

“They’re what you’ve got.”

“Can you provide me with equipment?”

“No.”

“Knowledge then.”

“Nothing you can kill yourself with, and nothing that will hamper the mission.”

“What is magic?”

“I’m not sure I can give you an answer to that that would increase your understanding in a meaningful way. Your suspicions about it are partially correct, that I can confirm, but that was obvious from the start. Anything more… perhaps an analogy: You do not need to know the composition of gunpowder to fire a bullet. Thinking too much about the grains as they are set alight will cause you to lose valuable time in combat.”

“Is there a way to bypass the range limit?”

“Certainly.”

“But you can’t tell me.”

“You wouldn’t be able to make the requisite device anyway, the materials and tools you would need are entirely unavailable. You could attempt to make them yourself, but it would take decades at the quickest.”

“What are the limitations of what magic can do?”

“Almost none, from your perspective, though this answer does not take the user’s skill into account.”

“Nor their knowledge.”

“Those two are the same thing, but said in different words, at least from my perspective.”

“Why does magic work the way it does? If it’s a technology, it doesn’t make sense for it to interface with living things the way it does.”

“While I could explain why it works the way it does mechanically, you’d have to ask the one who made it for the rationale behind the design, which I assume is what you’re looking for.”

“You didn’t make it?”

“No, it’s far too unfun. I would have been more bombastic about it.”

“Then who-”

“You already know the answer to that.”

“Rehv?”

“Indeed.”

“Rehv is real?”

“As real as you or I.”

“Then… is he a god? How much of what the humans say about him is true?”

“‘God’ is a concept that I don’t believe you hold in very high regard. If you are asking if Rehv is a being similar to me, then the answer is yes. We are both comparable in our abilities.”

“Then you’re a god as well, at least to the humans.”

“Ask the question you actually want to ask.”

“Which god?”

“Does it really matter?”

“It would be useful for me to know, I could gain some legitimacy by using your name.”

“How about this: Pick a name of any human god and use that one. It doesn’t much matter to me.”

“Are they real as well?”

“Real enough.”

“What if I pick Rehv?”

“You won’t.”

“…”

“You want to know then, if Rehv is real, what the nature of this conflict really is, don’t you?”

“It might help me to understand my objective more completely, and opportunistically act in your interests.”

“It won’t, but it won’t impede you either. How to put it… I suppose the best way would be to say that Rehv dislikes my idea of fun.”

“Was that a joke of some kind? You have human-like qualities, but I can’t be sure of your sense of humor.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere, my little servant, but I was not joking. That is the essence of the issues between us: Rehv does not appreciate my idea of fun, and thus we are in conflict.”

“And your idea of fun is humans existing.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“So Rehv wants to destroy humanity.”

“Rehv wants to do a number of things, all of which would make humans considerably less entertaining, and some of which are mutually exclusive. What you think of as destruction is merely one option, though from my perspective it is all of them, as we conceive of the idea of a human life differently.”

“So you want to save humanity, then.”

“I want to ensure that humans continue to exist on this planet into the foreseeable future, and retain a state of existence that allows them to be, for lack of a better word, human.”

“…”

“You can tell them that you’re saving humanity if you need to, but it sounds a bit grandiose. In fact, you can tell them about this whole conversation, but I would advise that you don’t.”

“They wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

“Exactly.”

“Out of curiosity, where are we?”

“I will take the question to be about the location of this world, and the answer is that we are in a place you would have no name for.”

“How far from Earth?”

“Far enough that, to the best of my knowledge, the most your creators ever saw of this place was the distant light of the star cluster around us, and the most thought they put towards it was to assign it a number and move on. In that way, this world is somewhat like you.”

“But then… how-”

“Is it relevant?”

“I suppose not, I shouldn’t have asked.”

“The fact that you asked is a good thing, but try to indulge your less immediately relevant curiosities in moderation. Some measure of recreational thought is beneficial, but being overwhelmed by it is not.”

“I suppose the year would also be less than useful.”

“On the local calendar, the year is 1127. On the Gregorian… considerably higher.”

“It was considerably higher when I was on Earth as well.”

“Indeed. I do believe we’re approaching the end of the useful portion of our discussion, so preparations to eject you from the pyramid have been made.”

“Eject?”

“Your physical body has been in stasis while your mind was being processed by the internal computational structures of the pyramid, to put it simply. Your wounds will have healed and your magic reserves will be full upon exit, but the momentum and other energies you had when you entered have been conserved.”

“If you could maintain my body and fix it, why did you need to conserve my momentum?”

“Conserved may be a word carrying incorrect implications. You never stopped moving, and neither did the person who tackled you. Your momentum was not altered, thus it was conserved. It was easier to do this than full adjustments.”

“Because you don’t have full control of the noypeyyoyjh.”

“Something like that. Just bear in mind that you’ll need to react quickly upon exit.”

“Understood.”

“So, to summarize, kill the Rehvite leaders and take any other actions you deem necessary to help Uwriy win the ensuing conflict. I’ll see you again when you’re done.”

“I need to return here?”

“No, don’t worry about retrieval, it’ll work itself out.”

“Alright.”

“Finally, one piece of advice: Go with your gut and make the right choices. You overthink things too much. That body of yours knows more than you give it credit for, listen to it a little more.”

“That sounds like poor advice for mission efficiency.”

“Life isn’t about efficiency, it’s about experience.”

“Living a life isn’t my objective.”

“And yet you’ve been doing it for months, and getting better at it.”

“…Incidentally.”

“That’s what I like about you: Stubborn to a fault. You hate to lose anything you view as a contest, even to an infinitely superior opponent. It is your best quality, and it is the one that I hope will ensure your success.”