[Visitor System Access: Granted]
[Would you like to rge Visitor System and Risen Guard System functions?]
[Please note: So functions may overlap. As the system has received complaints about favouring one version of a function over another, you will retain both versions of overlapping functions.]
[Would you like to rge Visitor System and Risen Guard System functions?]
[Yes | No]
Emilia barely thought about it as she chose yes. Mostly, she was just thinking about the stupidity of how the system was designed. Not only had it asked her the sa question twice, due to the note, but she also didn’t think rge was quite the right word; rge implied that they would be slapped together, the more useful function overriding the less useful ones. While she could appreciate that so people would complain about this—she was just getting used to the way the Rise Guard system worked, and would be rather unhappy if the ssaging system in particular were overridden with whatever the visitor system had going on—the system really should have changed rge to combine.
That seed a much more suitable word.
This was also a very silly thing to be contemplating, especially as more dialog boxes popped up over her vision, giving her brief bits of instruction that she really needed to focus on. Ti seed to have stopped for the mont, however, the world around her still as the hole in the aether began to close with a painful slowness that, had ti been running normally, would have been instantaneous.
It was also an important thing to consider, in its own ridiculous way. This used to be one of the things she loved: picking at the tiny details that almost no one would notice or even care about. The smallest of tweaks could an the difference between a skill running fast enough to save a life and being a split second too late. There weren’t many people who could analyze code so ticulously, and both her desire to code and ability to do so had been stymied by her knots, both her traumatic and additive ones.
Wanting to stop and analyze a system ssage that she would never see again—that very few people would ever have the opportunity to see and dissect and criticize ever again—was… nice.
She really needed to get Payton a gift when all this was over, not just for unknotting her but for coming with her to the purist hideout and for—hopefully—keeping her secrets.
For the barest mont, an idea of a perfect gift shuddered through her mind, winding and uncatchable. A small mory of… sothing? soone? Emilia wasn’t really sure, the thought moving so quickly through her that she had no idea what it had been. All she was left with was a sense that she’d forgotten sothing important—or perhaps missed sothing?
Sothing about Payton? That seed strange. She knew so little about the man, and she’d never before been struck with the thought that she’d forgotten or missed sothing about him—at least, she didn’t think she had.
Stuck in ti as she was, her body unmovable even as her brain buzzed, Emilia couldn’t shrug in more than just her head before looking over the dialog boxes.
There were a lot, and she flipped through them, trying to get a sense of what she was even looking at and why the system had even been so important, especially when she’d already gained access to the Risen Guard system. Within monts, she already knew what the most important aspect of it was: the visitor system was closer to a Censor in both form and functionality, responding to her ntal commands with the sa ease her Censor would have, albeit slightly slower.
To the side, a HUD similar to what she was used to seeing in real world raids had been pulled up, showing that she already had a collection of people she considered part of her team, although it seed limited to people currently within the Clarity City System. Next to Boundary and Rin’s nas was a mark that she’d seen before, and after a mont of glaring at it, she realized it was the mark that decorated her water bottle: the Risen Guard logo. Their nas were lit up red, while none of the others were—maybe a result of her having Risen Guard system access?
Other nas on the list included Key, Conrad, V and the kids. Interesting, neither Phlostra nor any of the rebel Clarity mbers were listed. Even more interesting, Conrad’s na glowed a faint purple, and despite him also having access to the Risen Guard system, he had no mark next to his na. Like V and Astra, there was nothing next to his na.
Key had what she assud was an Enclave symbol next to his, sothing in it tickling her mind, like perhaps she’d seen it before, but only in passing, while Gale and Caro had sothing else entirely next to their nas, each unique and unknown to her.
Emilia spent a few minutes going over her new functions and rearranging her display to sothing she actually liked. She managed to make a group chat among all the mbers—although it was unlikely most of them would be able to see their inclusion in it, half the mbers having no system access at all—and placed it into the bottom-right corner of her vision. It was a small thing to do, yet felt so very… odd.
Real-world raids ca with both party chats and network ones, as well as direct ssages. Network chat tended to be the most widely used chat, but she generally muted that within monts of the raid starting. People were too loud, and the few people whose ssages she actually cared about knew to ssage her through private ssages or the party chat, and even those she generally kept minimized.
To now be actively setting up a chat function where she could permanently see it felt odd. Not a bad odd, but one that she noted and tucked away for later, curious if it was sothing that would persist into the next real-world raid she was forced to participate in, or simply one that would exist within life and death situations.
Stars knew that she never would have closed her chats down during the war, although she’d had stress powering her at the ti, not to ntion her ntal faculties in tip-top shape.
The irony that she’d managed to retain her D-Levels during the most stressful monts of her life only to crumble after a few an words, left to spend a decade failing to pick up the pieces, was not lost on her.
Flipping through the functions, she compared each of the system’s maps. The Risen Guard system’s was superior by far, and she spent a short mont fiddling with the setting, the visitor system easing her ability to use the Risen Guard system as well.
Yeah, the extra speed and ease that she could use the system with was definitely worth the risk of tracking Clarity mbers down.
That, and she now had an inventory asking if she wanted to store her items inside it—yes, she did. Her bag was weighty and unwieldy, even at her now very low level of 16, visible at the top of her vision, along with various other vitals. It was nice to know that nearly being killed by Jerrina a handful of tis had lowered her level. Emilia couldn’t be sure that was what had lowered her level, but that was really the only significant thing she’d done since fight the Giant of Andir in the last labyrinth…
Actually, that hadn’t been the last labyrinth, had it?
Blinking into space, Emilia contemplated her montary lapse in mory—it wasn’t every day that you outright forget a crazy cult forced you through the sa labyrinth half a dozen tis—before moving on. There were more important things to worry about, including whether the visitor system could tell her what her still unknown gifts were.
Unfortunately, no. When Emilia pulled up an interface that explained each of her gifts, three of the places were marked only with question marks. That said, after a mont of poking at the interface, wondering if it held any secret function that would help her learn what the gifts were, she discovered it did have another function: the ability to upgrade the gifts.
Her ability to hear locals had upgraded itself, signifying her ability to read words straight from the aether, while reading and writing in the local tongue had no available upgrades. Her other gifts—the currently greyed out ability to speak and her abilities to read and disassembly arrays—had empty nodes attached to them, indicating upgrades that she could use tokens to activate?
Tokens?
Emilia spent a long while trying to figure out what these tokens were and where to get them. In the end, she realized she was an idiot and the fact that she didn’t play virtual raids was working against her. She’d heard her friends talk about gaining rewards from quests or missions in virtual raids—and the occasional private, real-world raid—often enough that it felt like she should have realized this raid might have so sort of quest system. She hadn’t, and when she finally realized tokens were given out as rewards for quests, she cursed herself and opened up the quest log, grumbling about how she still couldn’t figure out a way to see every available function laid out in front of her.
That would have been helpful.
What wasn’t helpful were the thousands of quest completion dialog boxes that shattered over her vision. Whoever had designed this system was way too into quests, practically everything from [Adjusted Appearance] to [Slept], [Had Sex!] to [Killed a Local] and [Killed Another Visitor] a quest it deed deserving of a reward.
Grumbling, Emilia contented herself to accepting the reward for each quest completion. Most of them rewarded her with tokens, and she quickly accumulated enough that she could upgrade her gifts—gaining the ability shift her aethervoice into sothing that would work with her inner voice, not that she currently had much need for it, with Conrad still suppressing it, and the ability to read non-array magic, as well as dismantle arrays from afar.
Not too shabby, but also strange. By the ti Emilia was done accepting all the tokens and the occasional extra item—clothing and food from her world being the most common non-token rewards, although she did receive a few items that could allegedly make copies of a blood weapon—it was all frankly… too much. With this many tokens, she could easily have upgraded hundreds of gifts. While it was possible that she’d just completed an unreasonable number of quests, she didn’t think so: most visitors would have completed half the quests she had, even without the Risen Guard ever letting them go. Too many of the quests were just normal life things.
Another option was that the system had changed since the last visitation, adding in more quests or removing more uses for the tokens—and Emilia looked really hard for other uses for them. Nothing else, not even her weapons or control or power with magic could be upgraded, and while there definitely could be gifts out there that had more than one upgrade—or simply cost more to upgrade—the number of tokens she had was still too much.
Maybe she was missing sothing. Sothing told her she wasn’t.
Nothing about this raid felt right, and in many ways she wished she’d spent more ti inside other raids to know if what she felt was normal. Part of her wanted to ask Conrad or V—if they managed to get to him—about it, but she suspected both n would have difficulties answering her: they both spent so much ti within blackaether raids that their perception of what was normal and what wasn’t was likely warped.
Glaring at her token count, Emilia tried to fall into the mindset of a gar—of soone who had the option to go get more gifts, trying to use up their tokens. If the person weren’t attached to any specific group—or if the three groups didn’t exist anymore—would they be affected by the heartcore’s alternate personalities? Would the changes be so obvious?
Or would it be a great way to sneak sothing insidious inside unsuspecting heroes?
They had signed their rights away, in this anything goes raid, and while that did have so limits, would even soone like Olivier really be able to prove soone at Hail or whatever company was managing this raid had known what they were doing? Known they were changing heroes' minds in a way that might leak into the real world?
Emilia sucked in a grounding breath. She really hadn’t been expecting to leave this raid with anything more than knowledge that she had or hadn’t gained tickets to Ship o’ Stars. Now, there were just so many questions that needed answers—questions she couldn’t leave alone for long.
Questions that would require her to step back into her old life, if only a little.
Emilia snorted as ti returned to the world, the hole that had been held open by the flow of ti gone in an instant, hiding away the gore of the universe’s insides once more.
Realistically, it was going to require she return to her old life in big ways. So part of her was ready for that, after these strange few weeks. Another part was terrified.
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