Rosa

It took two days of grinding to get my enchanting up to a level that I was happy with. It was an excruciatingly long and tedious experience, but in the end, I was able to start playing with the crafting profession in earnest. My armour was enchanted without much fanfare, it was almost exactly like the normal spell system, except the effects were permanent.

Permanent, except when they weren’t. The major breakthrough in my new CORA career came when I found two rather interesting nodes in my actual skill trees. The first was the enchanting ritual node, which allowed me to bestow extra enchantments onto an item above what was normally allowed by the item’s magical affinity. The second was a node named combat ritual. It didn’t take me more than a moment to realise what this would allow me to do. Granted, the length of time the enchantment was on the item was dependent on the time spent in the ritual, but that limitation could be overcome with raw mana.

Besides my meteoric rise through the levels, I also ended up reluctantly joining Amelia’s guild. Once I was part of the guild, I could officially have a room to myself. I wasn’t actually all that thrilled to be separated from my new and only friend, so at the end of the second day, I found myself tentatively standing at her bedroom door.

“Ame?” I called softly through the door.

There was a crashing sound from beyond it, and then a thump. Finally, it swung open and revealed wispy lavender hair floating around her face. “Y-yeah?”

“It’s impossible to sleep in that coffin of a room,” I explained, scuffing my feet on the carpet. “It is too quiet, and much too large.”

She frowned, turning to look at her room, then back at me. “You can’t… sleep?”

“Yes, Ame… I can’t sleep,” I grumbled.

I swallowed when she chuckled, low and dusky. “Want to come in?”

“I… would prefer my own bed, but I don’t think there is enough room in there for it.”

She made a thoughtful sound of agreement, and turned to gaze over her room. Her foot tapped a strange rhythm on the ground for a moment, then she turned and arched an eyebrow at me. “Just how much can you fit in that inventory of yours?”

And so that was how we came to be sharing a larger room that could accommodate both of our belongings. I made it abundantly clear that we’d have separate beds, because while I liked her company to help me sleep, I was still feeling odd about any form of touch. It was hard to manage, because for some reason my body was drawn to her like iron filings to a magnet.

"Goodnight Rosa," said Ame as she crossed the room towards her bed.

Something about the way she said the simple ritual farewell made emotions boil in my heart. My initial response was to push down the bubbly feeling in my stomach. Instead, it was like something deep inside me relaxed for the first time in as long as I could remember.

My smoke moved before I was really conscious of it, and suddenly I was standing in front of her, blocking the path to her bed. She made an adorable squeak of surprise when she registered how fast I'd moved.

I hugged her, all but throwing myself at her, knowing full well that she'd catch me. "Thanks, Ame. Thank you. You've been really good to me… and good for me."

A wild bouquet of emotional tastes jumped off her, and she wrapped me up in her arms like I might fade back into smoke. "You too, babes. I'm so glad you decided to hunt me through that forest."

I laughed and shivered at the same time. My skin had gone all tingly with goosebumps. It was such a funny, exquisite sensation. I hugged her tighter, then stepped back and hopped under my sheets.

I watched while she shuffled around her bedside table for a minute, then slipped into her bed. She rustled for a moment and turned to look at me. "If I ever betray your trust, I want you to spawn camp me until I'm forced to quit this game, okay?"

"No," I replied instantly.

"Why not?"

All I could give her for reasoning was an awkward shrug.

“That seems very out of character for you,” she joked, throwing me a wink.

“I just don’t see you doing anything to really hurt me like that,” I mumbled, the confession too embarrassing to actually say with any volume. Well, not the words themselves, but the implication that I trusted her like that.

She didn’t press me on it, though. I could see she understood, but yeah… Ame was amazing.

“Goodnight,” she told me instead. “Sleep well, Rosa.”

“Good night, Ame,” I smiled, still watching her.

She grinned. “It’s a cute nickname by the way, I like it.”

“Ame?”

“Yeah.” 

“That’s good.”

****

Everything was a grey void, everything except me. I was smoke, black on the outside, glowing a sickly green-blue on the inside. The embodiment of an immaterial ghost. Beyond the limits of my sight, I could feel things, so many things, and they all moved with a singular purpose.

“Where am I?” I asked into the grey void, but nothing answered. One of the things noticed me, though, and it swam closer to me through the opaque grey ocean.

I felt prodding, inquisitive at first, and then more urgent, and much more painful. I screamed and writhed, trying to get away, but then it stopped. The touches were much more gentle after that, and more cautious. Like a confused and wounded animal, I could sense that whatever entity was prodding at me didn’t mean me any harm.

A voice penetrated the grey space I floated inside, distant and indistinct. “This one is different… yes, still alive, I think. Somehow.”

The voice drifted away, beyond the focus of whatever passed for ears in this place.

“Of course I’m helping them!” the voice said, coming back with all the volume of a TV turned up to max. I winced and tried to cover my ears, only for nothing to happen. “It’s like, so messy in there. I can’t even make sense of the architecture…”

Frustrated, I pulled my consciousness inwards and forced at my eyes, my ears, and my skin. Months of vicious fighting, of crushing armies beneath the boot of my willpower, it had honed my mind into a spike of pure intent.

Around me, the grey shifted. It morphed into colours first, and then a riot of sound, touch, and taste that had no ordered meaning to it.

“Holy fuck!” the voice exclaimed, noticeably feminine now. “They’re… they’re doing it on their own! What the hell?”

“Disconnect the pod, quick!” another one said, this one male, although vaguely on the effeminate side. “They’re hurting themselves.”

The grey shuddered, and for a moment, everything was black. Then the grey reappeared, more vivid than before, and very much not grey anymore. Two… things floated in the wild riot of colour, amorphous and hazy.

I looked around at the odd place I now found myself. It was… unique, if nothing else. It had very little structure or reason to the shapes, except that it seemed to have a vague sense of purpose to its construction. If I had to describe it as anything, I would say it appeared to be a three dimensional representation of every abstract piece of art ever created, but only after it’d been dosed with a lethal amount of acid.

This time, frowning seemed to work, and I glanced down at my body in surprise. Huh, interesting. My smoke body was back. Fuzzier at the edges than I was used to, but definitely there. Was this how I viewed myself now? Some sort of genderless black and blue smudge?

“Can you… understand us?” asked the girl blob. She sounded young, and her weird misty blob form looked almost like it was fidgeting nervously.

“I can,” I replied.

The second voice—the effeminate male one—let out a gasp of excited happiness. “Oh, oh, Rosa! I thought you were hurt, I was so worried! I had to call someone who knows about this sort of thing.”

“Tim, dude,” the girl scoffed. “I don’t know shit about this. She’s different from the others, even Aisling. Like, she’s still meat, for one thing, and she’s not connected to her pod.”

“She is right here,” I grumbled, trying to give the girl a pointed look. Then the name she’d used froze me solid. At least, as solid as a blob of shadow and smoke could be. “Wait, Tim?”

“Yes, yes! It’s me, Rosa!” he said, bouncing in place. “You’ve been in the game for so long! I’ve kept the farm running like you asked, but… I missed you.”

My heart skipped a beat, and then I felt myself smile. Somehow, I shifted over to his blobness, and reached out with a tendril to pat the top of his smudge. “Sorry, buddy. I was dealing with my trauma in a functional but probably very unhealthy way.”

“Trauma?” the girl asked, inching closer. “I can help with that. Have you ever considered playing CORA?”

“Last thing I remember before this was inside CORA,” I said, shrugging. “Why?”

The girl began to speak, or at least that was the impression I got, but then she paused and made a small humming noise. “Oh! You’re that Rosa! Wow, talk about aiming high. You’ve managed to break your own brain as well as my game.”

“Huh? Your game?”

“Well, it’s not mine, but I’m one of the AI that helps run it.” She explained, shooting out a tendril that… pulled a blackboard out of the strange primordial soup we were hanging out in. “I’m the AI you spoke to back in character creation, and it seems that your bugginess has now extended out of the digital and into the physical. Oh, and my name is May, by the way.”

“Um, hello May,” I replied, trying to process the revelations she was dropping on me like nukes.

The blackboard began to populate with gibberish quantum symbology and code. May began to study it, and even though I couldn’t actually see anything but a smudge, I felt her playing with a pair of glasses while she thought.

“Okay, there does appear to be some sort of hardware that’s still interfacing with your brain, so at least we know you haven’t suddenly gained the magical ability to connect to the FTLN,” she told me, although it sounded like she was just talking to herself. “I can see some familiar code here, but it’s all shaping stuff. Nothing points directly towards any network code. Ah, no…”

The blackboard changed again, showing even more gibberish. Except this script was gibberish even by the standards of the stuff that had just been displayed on the surface. It was a mess, but also vaguely pretty. It reminded me of a root system from a plant, actually. Don’t ask me how, either, because I had no idea how to read code. Well, I didn’t used to have that ability anyway.

“I am so fucking confused,” May muttered, twisting the blackboard around like it was made of rubber. “This doesn’t make sense, and—”

Both Tim and May focused on me again, right as the funny space around me flickered slightly.

“I think I’ll plug the pod back in,” Tim said slowly, like he had just noticed a sheep had somehow gotten stuck in a tree.

“Probably for the best,” May agreed, switching her focus from me to the blackboard and back again. “It seems you’re waking up, Rosa. I’ll touch base with you through more… normal means, once I have some sort of understanding over this situation.”

“Oh… uh, yeah. Sure,” I mumbled, even as my comprehension of the greyspace flickered in and out. What a truly strange dream.

QuietValerie

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