Lucky Rabbit

Pandy didn’t claim her completion reward then, mainly because she was a rabbit with no pockets and a full Inventory. Instead, she watched out of the window as a whole herd – troupe? Legion? – of Knights of the Royal Eagle swept down from the sky on Cloudmanes. Meanwhile, Sir Bailey drove their carriage pell-mell in the opposite direction, over roots and ravines that absolutely should have broken the wheels or the axles or some Important Part, while the Knights headed back toward the location of the vanished tower.

“There’s a Dark elementalist with them,” Augustus murmured to Pandy as the children gaped out of the opposite window. “If our enemy sends Apparitions after Ms. Wellington, our mage will do his best to track the link between the elementals and their contractor.” She stared up at him, and he offered a crooked smile. “There was no reason to risk you unnecessarily, but when you insisted upon leaving Knightmere, it seemed prudent to, ah, take steps. There’s also no excuse for wasting an opportunity.”

She glanced at Thaniel and the others, and Augustus shook his head. “I promise they were in no danger, at least not from our shadowy foes.” He tilted his head to indicate the identical armored figures now surrounding the carriage. “We were never truly alone.”

A sharp rap sounded from where Sir Bailey sat atop the bench at the front of the carriage, and Augustus’s stiff posture relaxed slightly. “We’re back in city limits,” he told her, then raised his voice to address the children. “We’ll need to close the curtains and be quiet for a few minutes. An elemental is going to obscure our presence for a little while, and looking out from inside the magic is… disconcerting.”

“I can-” Thaniel started, but Augustus silenced him with a look, making the boy drop the curtain he held and slump back in his seat. Thaniel didn’t seem as upset as he might have been, however, as he raised the locket and opened it again, staring at the smiling faces of his parents.

Beside him, Geraldine was already gazing into Miss Cupcakes’ eyes, while Abbington simply looked around, his pale blue eyes taking in details that had probably escaped him until now. Pandy still felt bad that she’d completely missed the fact that his glasses weren’t good enough to allow him to see clearly. She’d just assumed they were magical and thus perfect, but – whether because he couldn’t afford better ones, or because the technology or magic had simply failed him – it was now obvious that he’d been struggling under an enormous disadvantage.

Pandy was sitting beside Augustus, since the chancellor had carried her and Thaniel back to the carriage. Sir Bailey had carried Geraldine and the cat, while Abbington and Brook simply seemed to flow over the ground, the boy showing none of his usual awkwardness. Pandy half expected Augustus to continue talking to her as whatever was happening outside began, but instead he closed his eyes, his hands out in front of him and his hair blowing slightly in an unfelt breeze.

That left Pandy alone with her thoughts – or rather, with the god lurking in her head, who also had access to her thoughts. That was something she’d never thought she’d be grateful for, but here she was, just glad to have her – could she actually count a god as a friend? – back again.

she demanded silently. She felt something akin to a sigh, followed by a twinge of embarrassment, before the god responded.

…

I told you I felt both Asparagus and Ismara’s power on Guising Night, but what I didn’t mention was that I put a…

A sort of hook into the code for that VitalLink module.

The next time it triggered, I managed to track it.

Just a snippet of code, but I had it.

Or so I thought.

Turns out, it had me.

Whoever wrote that module is a far better coder than I am.

They sucked me into that quarantine zone. 

It wasn’t exactly unexpected that the unknown divine programmer would be able to outcode Keros, given that Keros had only started Celestial Programming in the last few months, at least as far as Pandy knew. Honestly, she was more surprised that he’d been doing as well as he had. It must be nice being a god. Pandy could barely figure out how to use her electric toothbrush.

As I told you, it took a while, but I finally realized I could use that device to play Gacha Love, and that alleviated my boredom.

I would have thought you’d notice I was missing a bit sooner, though.

I had to use my own hook into VitalLink to give the command for your System to return to the default before you even seemed to realize something was wrong.

Pandy felt her ears grow hot.

Just some of your logs.

Things VitalLink tracks.

I knew when you called for me.

And I got a few things out of it, besides more information about what happened to Ismara.

Think “Initiate Pandora’s Sandbox”

Obediently , Pandy did so, gaping as her old apartment seemed to form around her. It wasn’t as solid as it had been when she met Keros there, with a faint ghost image of Augustus and the others overlaid on the worn but cheerful flowered comforter and the pea-green couch she’d hauled up three flights of stairs after finding it in the ‘giveaway’ spot next to her apartment building.

Keros was there, too, and he smiled as she appeared in front of him. His hair was brushed and his toga clean, and either the space had been reset or he’d picked up his trash and crumbs, because the room itself was more like the way Pandy had left it.

“This is a lot easier than using text, though obviously you won’t want to do it when you need to interact with others,” he said. “You’ll have to end the program before you can do anything else.”

“How do I do that?” she asked, twitching a bit as she heard her own voice coming from her throat. It was becoming progressively less familiar as time went on, and she was half afraid that if she ever did get her own body back, it would feel as alien as Ms. Wellington’s had at first.

“Just think ‘End Sandbox mode’, but don’t do it right now,” Keros told her, looking unusually solemn. “Just listen.”

Pandy blinked, then nodded and just stared at him, waiting, something which seemed to disconcert the god somewhat. He grimaced and muttered, “I haven’t spoken to anyone else in months. It feels odd.” With a shake of his head, he started talking.

“I got the Bibliophile’s Bounty achievement on my fourth or fifth playthrough, and I’ve been reading and re-reading all of the books in the game ever since. Speaking of which, why haven’t you read Grace Before Glory or Charm and Courtesy from the school library? They would- No, never mind,” he held up a hand as Pandy started to answer, and she subsided.

He was right, though, any normal gamer would have gone after those books immediately, hoping to gain the stat boosts they provided. Pandy just didn’t want Reputation or Charm. If people liked her, she wanted it to be for her, not because some stat forced them into it. She especially didn’t want to have to wonder if Augustus liked her because she was Pandy or because she had ten levels in some obscure stat.

“In any case, what I gathered is that there was a king, Lawrence, who found or was given a powerful item which allowed him to summon a whole army of Demons and other Dark elementals. Eventually, those Demons broke free, or maybe he died, but in any case he lost control of them, and instead they were led by the most powerful of their number; the one you call Asparagus.”

Pandy nodded. She didn’t remember any books in Gacha Love that explained all of this, but that was certainly what she’d figured out from talking to Augustus and Professor Beeswick, as well as digging into the sordid history of the Avington family.

Seeing that she was following along, Keros continued. “During all of this, a powerful Light elementalist named Nora rose from among either the common people or low-level nobility who had an estate on the west side of the country, far from the capital. Nora came up against Asparagus and won, either killing the Demon Queen or sending her back to wherever she came from.”

He leaned forward, gaze fixed on Pandy. “Now, this is important, because this is a very standard version of one of the contests we gods use to determine who will become the true World God of a planet that hasn’t yet been claimed.”

Lifting a hand, Keros made a ball of light appear in the air. With a flick of his finger, he set it to spinning, and its surface erupted with color; red lava flowed into blue water, forming brown land that gradually flushed green. White clouds drifted in the miniature sky, and flickers passed over the newly formed land as cities rose and fell.

“Certain gods enjoy the act of creation, but after a few millenia, when their worlds or galaxies become stable, they grow bored and move on. Lesser gods move in then. Some are experienced World Gods, who have lost or been forgotten by their old worlds, while others are only hopeful spirits, with more aspirations than power.”

He tapped his finger on the slowly spinning world, and blooms of luminous light burst forth from the places he touched. “They are not creators, but they attempt to turn what others created to their own purposes: drawing strength or simple amusement from interacting with the intelligent creatures who have appeared on the planet. But there’s no overall organization, no rules or laws controlling who gets what planet or what they can do with it other than those recognized by gods in general and enforced by Zeus or other leaders among the gods.”

An iridescent sheen covered the planet like a shell, and where different colors ran into each other, sometimes one vanished, sometimes the two colors merged into a secondary color, and sometimes a gap appeared, separating the two with a line of land or water bleached of all color.

“This can go on forever. If none of the small gods or spirits is strong enough or interested in becoming a World God, the planet sometimes settles into a place where all exist more or less harmoniously. Usually – almost always, in fact – someone begins aggressively pushing out the others, often by killing or converting any native beings who worship the gods they consider their enemies. At that point the others have to decide if they will leave or fight. I believe that’s what happened here.”

Keros swept his hand across the globe, and most of the lustrous patches shattered, sending explosions of glitter fleeing into the nearby space. When he was done, only two remained: a dark and a light area, their borders pressing against each other, shifting and moving like an expanding tide meeting the shore.

“Most of the time, a winner emerges fairly quickly, but sometimes… not.” Keros looked away from his little simulation, meeting Pandy’s eyes. “When two or more gods reach this level of conflict, other gods step in, preventing them from destroying the world or the intelligent races upon it. A contest is agreed upon, and the type and length of conflict allowed is strictly controlled.”

The black and white areas both began to shrink, pulling back into two sharply defined points. Keros pointed at the Dark one, then the Light. “In the most common of these contests, each god selects a champion, and they must work through that champion in order to capture or kill the other champion or-” he bent his finger, and the ‘world’ expanded, zooming in and in until it revealed a man in black armor swinging a sword toward a woman in white, who had her arms raised as she cast a spell. On both of their chests hung a stone, each blazing with power.

“Sometimes they have to capture or destroy an object that represents the other god. A sort of divine game of Capture the Flag, if I understand that game correctly. Usually, the person bearing the item becomes the champion by default, and when one kills the other, their god wins. In this case, however, I think the Dark god – the one Aglaea named – lost their own item. It was neither captured nor destroyed, and so the game never ended, but because Ismara had more followers, or because she did know where her item was, she ‘won’ by default. Now, in her absence, that god is claiming the victory, and he will succeed if it comes before Zeus. He can prove he’s been here for centuries at least, and Ismara seems to have abdicated, given that she’s missing and hasn’t yet served even a millennium.”

Pandy shook her head. She’d known that gods had laws and courts, but this was far more organized than she’d realized. More importantly, though… “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”

Keros sighed. “The ways of gods are not meant for mortals to know. There’s no strict law against telling you, but by tradition – and tradition is very important to beings who have existed since the beginning of time, and will continue to exist until the end – we don’t speak of such things to ephemerals. Even those of us who interact directly with you rarely bother explaining ourselves to you. It would be like trying to have a philosophical discussion with a gnat.”

Pandy felt a bit attacked by this, and Keros had the good grace to look embarrassed. “I’m explaining now,” he reminded her, then grimaced as he added, “because I think Ismara has somehow become trapped in her enemy’s object, much as I was trapped in this place.” He gestured around at the ghostly apartment.

“So what are we supposed to do?” Pandy asked, though she could already feel her chest tightening in fear.

“We have to do what Ismara’s champion couldn’t: find and destroy the other god’s object, thus ending the game,” Keros said. His voice was steady, but his gaze on hers was sympathetic.

“But it’s keeping Thaniel alive,” Pandy barely managed to whisper.

“It is,” he agreed. “Which means Nathaniel Conroy is currently the champion of the god who wants to kill you and feed my liver to a bird for the rest of eternity.”