Last Command of the Witheld Arc 1: Rebirth

SARAH AVERY VASILIAS, GREAT HOUSE SCION, REBORN LVL 5

SKYLAND

Sarah stood with Gammon at the grill in the odd illusory reality she was pretty sure Gammon was projecting somehow. He seemed oddly peaceful for an AI who knew it was under dire threat. Sarah kept stealing glances over at him, trying to see the lie, to sense the truth.

Maybe she was trying to find the humanity there where there wasn’t any? Gammon wasn’t a tall man. Though, as Griffon would say, his muscles had muscles. He was covered in weird tattoos and wore that armored kilt. He’d always reminded Sarah of a bird, even if the comparison was more than a little ludicrous. But she couldn’t see whatever it was in him that made him different from her.

“Does your confidence and weird laissez faire attitude about all this have something to do with why we’re in your backyard instead of that shimmery rainbow room?” She asked.

“You always were a quick study,” Gammon said. He took the last couple of skewers off the grill and put them on the plate. He gestured and the grill disappeared like it was never there, replaced with a pair of cheap plastic patio chairs. He sat in one and gestured to the other seat impatiently.

“Sit down and eat and we’ll talk about what’s going to happen next.”

What’ll happen if I say no? Sarah wondered. Better play along for now. Be a good distraction. She sat down, snagging a skewer of tenji eel as she did.

She dug in, using the opportunity to gather her thoughts (it helped that the eel was delicious). She finished quickly though, and in just a few short minutes, she was tipping the last of the tasp into her mouth with a satisfied sigh.

After a minute, she said, “So you know what I’ll generously call our ‘plan’, but Kimi-Lim seemed to be pretty damn sure that you’d be attacking me. Obviously, we were wrong about you unless you decided to poison the eel—in which case if you did, fuck you, that’s cold—but if you wanted to kill me, something tells me that you wouldn’t do it in such a roundabout way.”

“I cannot fault your logic there,” Gammon replied, stretching his legs out in front of him and relaxing into the chair. He dug in his armored kilt’s sporran (the leather pouch on the front of the kilt) and pulled out a pale, cloudy green skeleton key. He held it out to Sarah.

“What’s this?” She asked, making no move to take it.

Gammon laughed, “Open your Quest Log.”

That’s right! Sarah thought as she opened her Quest log. Let’s see here… She read the Quest again:

Quest

Claim the Prize

Details: Claim the Prize hidden on the floating Skyland of the Tutorial Realm. COMPLETE

Optional Objective 1 of 2: Fight Entresis the Guardian and claim its treasure trove.

Optional Objective 2 of 2: Claim the Jade Key from Entresis and present it to Gammon.

Rewards: 4 ethershards of Common to Epic quality. COLLECTED

Additional Reward: Entresis’ Treasure OR Class Guide

She re-read it and laughed, taking the key from him. She then handed it back to him and the Quest notification changed again, this time showing that Optional Objective 2 had been completed.

“Why?” She asked, “Why the deception? Why the complicated story when you could’ve just given me the key this whole time? What was the point?”

“The idea was that you’d round out your Imperial Reborn training by facing a Boss monster that would adapt itself to you, test you to your limits, and see what you’d learned. Or, if you’d asked it, Entresis would’ve been able to give you treasures to help you start out.” Gammon took a sip from his bottle. “There were going to be positives and negatives to each approach: you risk much when you fight a Boss but if you were to take the treasure then you would miss out on being able to test yourself.

“Then you took the third approach,” he shook his head, chuckling softly. He continued, “Your behavior changed not long after you climbed the Vine. It’s clear that you met someone, though I can’t tell who. Despite my…skills, I am unable to detect your companion. Very curious. Very curious indeed.” There was a very pregnant pause when he finished, but Sarah wouldn’t satisfy his curiosity.

“So the point was…education?” she shook her head disbelievingly. “You guys have a really… different culture around honesty and consent.” She paused for a moment, reflecting on all the training he put her through, and something struck her. “You know, for all that I’ve been stuck in this time loop and training, I’ve been learning combat techniques and movement methodologies, strategies and tactics, how to use magic—”

“Oh please don’t call it magic,” Gammon interrupted, “if you take nothing else from my lessons, at least take that!”

“Fuck off, it’s magic—and don’t interrupt me, it’s fucking rude,” she glared at him, and he put his hands up in surrender. “My point is that you taught me all this practical stuff, but I know almost nothing about the world I’m going into. I don’t know any history, I don’t know the countries or the people… so my question here is what were you training me for, a deathmatch with magic swords? Against monsters?”

“I’m constrained by my nature and by my programming,” Gammon said, “as an offshoot of the System, I am bound by its rules. The System is not a historical record-keeper. The purpose of the System has been and always will be to create Reborn who will follow Quests which will empower them to protect the people against the monsters that inhabit this and other worlds. I’m not a historian and I don’t keep track of what kingdom does what or what civilization does what, so I don’t have any expertise to teach in those areas.”

“Pretty shitty tutorial,” Sarah said.

“It’s worked well enough for the majority of those who use it,” Gammon said drily, “you’re a bit of an edge case.”

“Still a pretty shitty tutorial,” Sarah said, but there was no bite in it. “I… I still don’t see the need to be so deceptive about everything. Would it have hurt my training to know what was up the whole time?”

Gammon burst out laughing, “Hahahaha! It was not explained to you because it doesn’t get explained to anyone who undergoes the Tutorial training. It’s expected. Reborn come in knowing that they’re getting a System-designed AI teacher who will provide Quests for them to draw them into their Tutorial world and provide them with the kind of first System Quests that will show them how to use Quests and the System and do all the things a Reborn needs to do!” He shrugged, “I expounded more on the topics you asked about, didn’t I? There was never anything that was taboo here.”

Sarah thought back, realizing that she’d tried fighting with Gammon so much in those early days, but nothing she said or did could cause him to even twitch in annoyance. Of course, it was a different story entirely if she slacked on her training routine or didn’t put her whole effort into learning something new. She’d learned that over the last eight years.

“That reminds me…So if you’re not a real person, that little jade key I got you wouldn’t have solved anything, right?”

“I think I’m offended by you denying my personhood,” Gammon said. “Am I any less a person than you are because my mind was built? Don’t think the assumptions from your world will apply here.”

“Uh, I… Um,” She subsided into an awkward silence. She cleared her throat, a blush rising in her cheeks until she felt like her whole face was burning, “You’re absolutely right,” she said, emotion thick in her voice. “Uhm.” She swallowed. “Let me try again.” She cleared her throat and looked him in the eye. “I’m sorry—God I feel like I’m saying that a lot, maybe I should pay closer attention… Anyway, what I was trying to say was you don’t need this key to break free. There’s nothing to break free from.”

“The key had intrinsic value due to what it was: a System Quest objective. Sometimes you’ll get a quest from someone—a powerful or influential person or organization, for instance—but that is different from a System Quest. A System Quest always has rewards, and it always pays those rewards as soon as the conditions are met.” Gammon held the key in his hand, then flipped it onto the back of his fingers and walked it along the back of his knuckles and Sarah couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “The lessons of the Tutorial Realms are not subtle… they’re meant to guide you to the best path forward.”

“No, I understood your lessons, if that’s what they were.” Sarah fell silent for a while, gnawing at her lip. There was something on the edge of her memory, something that had been bothering her ever since she’d climbed the Vine. It was damn hard to pin down though.

Gammon considered her from the corner of his eye. “You look like you have something on your mind.”

“No…” Sarah furrowed her brow, what was it? “Wait…No that’s it! That’s what’s been bothering me!”

“Oh? Please do tell,” Gammon said.

“I’ve been training here for most of eight years but I’m having the damndest time remembering any specific training regimen. But that’s not even entirely true: I remember the tenji eels and anima detection, and I remember how I figured out how to use my Willful racial gift…”

“Ah, that’s right! This is another one of those assumptions that all Reborn who access the Tutorial Realms already understand,” Gammon began. “What you described is known as Training Fugue. I enable a low-level subharmonic with your brainwaves, and this makes it so that you can take much more intense training—both in terms of the quantity of the training as well as how much you retain.”

He gestured vaguely with one hand, a dismissive, throwaway gesture. “The Training Fugue is valued by the Reborn because it helps to shorten what most view as a chore at best. They go through training, never really caring why there’s no memory of them learning how to use their grafts, only caring that once they’re done, they’ll have the expert use of their abilities.”

“That’s so… stra—y’know what? I’m going to stop making value judgments on these things. It is what it is; Training Fugue…okay cool, sounds keen. So what now?”

“What now? I just wanted to share one last meal with you before you left this place. See you before you were gone forever—before I am gone forever. I’ve used some of my processing power to increase the time delay effect, but I can feel that capability…becoming…reduced.” He placed the green bottle of tasp on the end table, but he lagged behind his movement, stuttering like he was playing a first-person shooter game at high ping.

“What…?” Sarah started up from her chair, reaching for Gammon.

The world around her was behaving oddly. A fierce wind started howling through the redgrass valley, though no grass moved. The tree in the front yard whipped back and forth, but the movement was as laggy as Gammon’s abortive attempt to place the tasp on the table. The grill popped back into existence, but upside down.

“Brain. Is. Being… Pulled.” Gammon said, his voice slurred and slowed. “You… Back…” He smiled and waved, his hand clipping through his head.

Sarah tried to go to him, but before she could take a single step, the world shattered into a trillion pieces, and she was suddenly back in the small room with the rainbow walls. Only the rainbow walls weren’t rainbow anymore, they were all bright red. The rainbow tunnel was still there, though it was pulsing and flickering like a candle in a breeze.

“GO! GO NOW!” Kimi-Lim’s voice distorted and wavery came warbling through the tunnel.

Sarah startled and shouted, “Kimi-Lim! Where are you? Are you still in the tunnel?”

“GOOOO!” Kimi-Lim’s voice suddenly sounded like it was dopplering towards her and Sarah nervously brought up the System menu of her completed Quest.

CONGRATULATIONS!

You have completed the Tutorial Realm Quest. Do you wish to return to Nolm now?

YES / NO

With Kimi-Lim’s shout still getting closer, Sarah selected YES, and once again, the entire world shattered into a trillion pieces as everything went dark and her mind fuzzed with activating teleportation magic.