Interlude Seven

5:03 had me schlepping myself to the toilet again. And while I woke up fully easily, that didn’t mean I wasn’t still tired and yearning for my bed. Thinking about skipping the part of walking over here before letting loose brought a tiny smile onto my face. How would Sam and Geri react? I still knew so little about our new lovers, to be honest.

During the day, I felt like we four were mated for life, and no possibility of ever breaking up. But now, I wasn’t that sure. Or rather, I still was sure, but I saw how it was an influence forming us. It echoes through me even now, so it wasn’t just a simple controlling mechanism but something slowly changing how we felt.

Did I want that? Or should I fight against it? I wasn’t sure I could fight it at all, seeing how I didn’t really think about my night session during the day. I think I still remembered them, but without actually doing it, I couldn’t be sure.

That may sound weird but try to remember something you haven’t thought about for a while. Now try to determine if you knew about it yesterday. You can’t. You can guess that you could have remembered it all the same, but you have no evidence that you actually could have.

I wiped, then took a second piece of toilet paper, wetted it at the sink and did a more thorough job, going between the folds and up into my entrance with my fingertip, as Livia had taught me I needed to do for work. It was a good practice to keep up when being in a relationship with three girls who could decide to dive in there with their tongues at any time.

Or to invite someone to join us for some quick fun. We hadn’t yet had a rule-3 situation, if you didn’t count Sam and Geri joining us for good, but I could see that happen. Marco, Rebecca and Chloe I would welcome with no second thought. Paul and Eric were ok if they behaved. Harry looked tasty, but I hadn’t yet spoken to him.

That left only Megan and Kinasteria, who looked much too childlike for me not to squash any desire in me. Megan in her real form? There were about ten reasons I didn’t want to imagine that, and her disabilities were at the very end of that list.

What I found interesting was that I still felt that way now. Did that mean it came from within me with no outside influence? If not, then sitting here wrecking my brain over the day’s events was pointless anyway.

So, what had happened yesterday I brushed over?

The fight with the imps was pretty standard; the Chloe situation I had handled in a way I saw no reason to doubt myself now. So…oh, the dead one.

It had occurred to me that there seemed to be one player too many, but it had faded out of my mind quickly. It hadn’t popped up again when I reacted to finding out about Chloe’s influence, and that was weird. Shouldn’t I have suspected Chloe to be an impostor? A monster pretending to be a player? It would fit the evidence.

System influence, simple as that. Whatever was messing with our minds didn’t want to think me that thought…during the day. Now I was free of it and could investigate.

I didn’t subscribe to the monster idea; there was no reason for the system to smooch that over. Fighting an infiltrator monster would be well within normal parameters. That would mean there really was an extra player today. But why?

What had Chloe been doing sitting on the stairs after finishing the first level? Had she been waiting for someone to bring her some trousers? She still had her phone and could have called or texted someone. Even if there was no reception inside, sticking a hand with the phone through a crack in the door would solve that.

I thought back to the short moment I had seen her before the fight started. It had just been a second, but Chloe had stared into nothingness and had not reacted to me opening the door, only turning when Sam shouted. I remembered her clearly; the light from the door had fallen upon her.

She had not reacted? She’d have to have had her eyes closed to not notice that. Or be deep inside a system screen. Assuming she had, the next question was why. My experience was that people didn’t go system diving after a fight. You got some XP and sometimes a skill levelled up. Unlike in a video game, there wasn’t anything to do in there, no points to distribute or gacha boxes to open.

The only player I had seen spending anything but a couple of short moments in there had been Geri after her race change. Then had that happened to Chloe? And what kind of name was Manstomper anyway? Not the one she had given us when we met. The conclusion was that something major had happened to her character sheet, and she was checking up on it.

And then she had been remarkably reserved talking about the system. Not throwing around comments about nanites and being chosen in a dream, and all that. This alone meant nothing, but together with the rest, it gave me a hypothesis about what had happened.

Chloe just had become a replacement player when we found her.

It fit all the evidence. Her careful noncommittal way of speaking, the wrong player count, the system trying to hide it from us, her studying the menus, and even a name change could be explained by that. It also explained why she was down there instead of checking in with the guild, although that was weak evidence as the original player hadn’t either.

Or I could be completely wrong, and there were three more bodies down that dungeon that Chloe hadn’t seen and when we found her, she had closed her eyes to think about what to do. The name thing could just be an alias thing like what Eric had done.

Which of those was the zebra, and which the horse?

Was I becoming paranoid, seeing secret schemes everywhere when all that was there was an “all is fine” vibe during the day? Was the layered secrecy of humans, players, setting magicals, and initiated digitised natural persons making me see more layers where there was nothing?

It made perfect sense for the AIs to not tell me everything, neither about the gamification nor the purpose of digitisation. They had been seemingly very open and overly chatty in the beginning—them dialling that down wasn’t a sign of a conspiracy.

But then there were the weird half-remembered dreams I sometimes had before waking up at 5:03. And the waking up itself. And me being free of some hard-to-pin-down influence during that time. That wasn’t smoke without a fire, was it?

🙚⚜🙘

On my way back to bed I had an idea and grabbed the system pad to see if I could approve the daily quests now. To my surprise, the pad worked like molasses. I could follow the drawing of lines and text with my eyes; it was that slow. At least it wasn’t a graphics-heavy interface; who knew how slow that would have been.

A very annoying minute of waiting later, I had the quest app open. The list appeared letter by letter, but it was slightly faster than me reading the quests, so that was ok. There was nothing special in there, the same old quests reappearing if they had been cleared or increasing in difficulty if not, as well has a handful of new ones. We were now getting more quests in the 10-20 level range, not surprisingly, as players gained one to two levels a day, at least at these low levels.

That added up to about 5 levels for the whole group, which meant we got quests around level 10 for group 3, around level 15 for group 2 and level 20 for my fam, in addition to the level 5 quests for today’s new group and the level 1 to 3 ones for ungrouped newbies. However, the selection wasn’t as big as it had been before, the number of quests hadn’t risen by a fourth. This was likely due to the dungeon. We probably should tackle that so it opened up for others.

With that in mind, I lay back down, slotting myself between some very nice bedwarmers.