"But why call it mana?" Virgil asked.

"It's fantasy fulfillment man." Walker said with exasperation. He'd already explained this once, but Virgil was adamant that it either be called a magic tree or spirit tree like the original. "Look, we did something terrible, released a monster. A Kraken if you will. But now, we've built something new and fresh! Spirit is just....boring. But mana! That's got some kick."

"I still disagree" Virgil said, stomping one foot. "The basis for your world will be these trees now, you do realize that?"

"Yep!" Walker said with a grin. "And I couldn't be happier."

"Be that as it may, I need to fix the atmosphere since Symphony is now put back together. Please relax for a few moments while I work on this."

Walker grabbed a seat in the grass and, after several minutes, grew bored. Terminally bored. Since he'd arrived here, aside from one real break, he'd been moving from one idea, one crisis, to the next. Just sitting down again felt....strange. Virgil didn't want him playing with anything without talking to him first, but Walker, as he has shown throughout his time in the protocol, was always a learn-by-doing kind of person. He pulled up his overlay and looked through his abilities and systems as a refresher. The subsystem assistant button was pulsing and he quickly looked at Virgil, who was fervently viewing his screens. Walker looked at the subsystem assistant button, then Virgil again, then back to the button. Virgil finished working on the atmosphere and started to walk over.

The giant squirrel gave him an odd look like he knew what he was thinking, as Walker slowly started to reach out and touch the button. His dark eyes grew wide.

"Wai-" Virgil tried to say, but of course, Walker had already clicked it.

.....Loading.....

.....

Expelling new subsystem assistant.

 

That's funny, Walker thought, What does it mean by expelling?

In front of him, Virgil fell to his knees in the grass, grabbing his throat with his paws while making sounds like he was choking. Walker yelled out his name as he ran up and dropped to the grass with him. He got behind him and tried slapping his back a few times, but nothing was coming up. The Heimlich didn't seem to work either, and he didn't know enough about squirrel anatomy to truly help. He started telling Virgil how much he appreciated him and about how great he was. He illuminated all of the things he had done to help him since he'd arrived, from the first landmass to the Mana Tree, while tears formed at the corners of his eyes. He expounded on his intelligence and emotional understanding, expressing their friendship as a lifeline that had kept him going all this time. He continued speaking while his own throat felt like it was closing, "I...I..."

Virgil reached a paw into his mouth, pushing his arm as far back into his throat as he could, before seeming to grab something. He threw it toward the grass with a disgusted wheeze. A blue and brown ball of fur landed no more than five feet away.

Walker paused as his mind went blank, while Virgil continued to gasp beside him.

......

.........

"Did you just cough out a hairball while I tearfully told you how much you mean to me?" he asked in a deadly serious voice.

Virgil's only response was to collapse onto his back, still trying to catch his breath while sharp sounds squeaked out of the sides of his mouth.

The hairball in the short distance moved, and before Walker could think about what was happening, it stood up and looked at him. There was no doubt about it, it was a squirrel.

It was larger than the standard Walker was used to back home. Not Virgil's size certainly, but still much larger than his home planet's, standing at over two feet tall with blue fur and dark blue eyes. As he looked closer, he realized it wasn't actually blue fur, but brown fur tipped in blue. It had a curious look on its face as it tilted its head before speaking. Its first words were, "Are you my creator?"

Walker said the only appropriate response he knew to that question, from years of study and experience, "I'm not the father."

He grimaced as he belatedly realized that was only the second sentence the newborn had ever heard.

"Ha-Ha." Virgil's weak voice said from the ground. He sat up and looked at his blue mini-me. "I tried to ask you to wait so I could be ready. Each appearance model produces secondary assistants differently. If I were a cloud this would have been so much easier. Thankfully, you did not choose the Stork appearance" He said with a shudder.

"Strange thing for a mother to say after giving birth", Walker said, a slanted smile appearing on his face. "Who knew all of our interactions, all of our time together, could lead to this? Maybe we should think about getting married. We could ask Blitzburg7 to officiate it. OHHH, a marriage system. I like it. I wonder if I could get bonus marks for having a mistress hidden for a lengthy period of time without detection."

"You should stop, you know I do not find this form of humor to be funny." Virgil said.

But Walker didn't stop, he was on a roll now. "Then we could have a parent system, a grandparent system, a lineage and bloodline system. Systems for days! All inter-." Walker stopped speaking as an idea came to him. Interlinked systems. His mind screamed at him as clarity arrived, but it was just in the beginning stages. He would have to really plan it out for things to work, and the new addition to their family was his ticket to success.

Virgil looked at Walker staring into space and vacantly wondered what kind of husband he would be, maybe it wouldn't be so bad. He shook his head immediately to clear those thoughts.

"Walker." Virgil said, "As much as I'd love to speak with our new assistant here, he can sit tight for a moment. We need to look at the Mana Tree and see if it will suffice or if we need to try again."

Walker stared into space for another few moments before his eyes moved back into focus. He looked at Virgil and said, "You're right. Let's see what we've got." He clicked on the monitor button, which had closed when his notifications appeared, and zoomed in on the tree. It was only about two feet tall and had a similar coloration to the original Spirit Tree, with a thin dark blue trunk and light blue bulbs that tapered into cyan. After clicking identify, the screen showed more than he expected.

Name: The Mana Tree

Genus: The Mana Tree

Organism Type: Plant

Modifications: Sterility, Oblivious, Mana impaired, Gigantism, Grafted, Reaching roots, Overwhelming magical discharge

Evolutionary traits: Unavailable

 

 

Something was bothering Walker about these identities and he had forgotten to ask about it before. "Hey Virgil, why is the name always matching the Genus?"

"That is what you want to ask about? Okay, that is simple Walker. You are the one naming them, and with the name of a unique entity, the genus follows suit. Once you start creating entities with logical reasoning who have children of their own, that will change. These parents, who can rationally think, will name their children, but the original name you gave them upon creation will become their genus."

"Cool cool cool. And the colors?"

"They fit the description of the entity. The Slicer is aggressive and violent, so it gained a deep red color to remind their Creator, you, of blood. It is a warning. The Mana Tree focuses on magic and connections, thus it has gained the color of unattuned magic."

"Mana."

"Whatever. But what I'm really worried about here is the word overwhelming. Can you click on that please?"

"Sure."

Overwhelming magical discharge:

The Mana Tree will continuously discharge magic in a misty form, accelerating over time. The discharge will gain strength as it matures to adulthood.

 

 

"That's what we were looking for", Walker said pointing at the screen. "Plant some of these babies all over Symphony and literally watch the magic happen."

"No Walker, that is not a good thing. This is not a perfect entity for your plan. It needs to produce magic-"

"Mana."

"Please stop doing that. It needs to produce MANA at a steady rate. In this amount, my estimate says one tree will fill the entire atmosphere."

"Mmmm, to be honest, that seems like the opposite of a problem." Walker said with an open smile.

"And what happens if the tree were to die? Or be destroyed accidentally? How would your plan work then? If you plant multiple Mana Trees across the planet, instead of a world full of magic, you may have a world full of accidental magical evolutions as your entities become over-saturated. It is a balance. Not to mention, WHEN it is destroyed, not if as it is impossible to assume it would happen, the explosion would be catastrophic magically speaking."

Walker's smile slid away from his face. "Oh."

Several minutes later a small tree floated out to space and imploded, while a man and large squirrel watched soberly from a distance. "He was so young." Walker said pantomiming a false tear falling down his face.

"It is nice to see you back to normal Walker."

"Yah, I feel better. Time is always great for things like that. When my grandfather died a decade ago, I buried it, deep. It's a trick I learned in the military, to put my grief in a chokehold until I'm ready emotionally to deal with it."

"I do not think that is much better Walker." Virgil said with disapproval in his eyes. "You are just pushing problems back, then allowing them to build up and stack upon each other until it becomes too much and you collapse, emotionally and mentally. That is not healthy."

Walker shrugged his shoulders, "Maybe, but it's what I know for now. I'm sure I'll have plenty of time to figure it out."

"As long as you choose to ignore your issues, you will never find balance as a person, but that is all I will say, for now." The large squirrel said before walking over to the evolution chamber and placing a new Mana Tree inside. Like the one before, it was already two years old, as Virgil said it would be. "I believe I know what the problem is."

"Okay, shoot."

"I believe the funnels were too large. If we squeeze them down in size, it should reduce the amount of magical discharge, and allow us to further bring balance to the magical state of the atmosphere."

Walker was about to say mana again, but Virgil just looked at him and said, "Do not. Please fix this."

Walker nodded and began by removing all of the funnels. He couldn't just squeeze them down on an already modified entity, so he started from scratch and burned away more of their limited time. He knew how important this was. It was the first step of a much larger plan to succeed in the Alpha Protocol. He started the same as before, moving from through the roots, into the kernel, and lastly to the branches and leaves. When he finished, he fixed the landmass again, which was still broken from shooting the original Mana Tree into space, then planted the new model in the same spot. After pulling up the monitor and identifying the tree, the word overwhelming was gone, and Virgil said that's what they needed for the leyline to work. Walker spent some time looking at the young sapling, still trying to understand how he was going to go forward with his next steps. He shook his head to get the thoughts out of his head and moved back toward Virgil. Walker placed another Mana Tree on the eastern side of the center without any fanfare, and they moved on to modifying the rest.

To create a Mana Tree for the desert, they had to make sure its exterior was not only resilient, but insulated. They spent some time, arguing back and forth over what the value was in a Mana Tree that produced magic water, before Walker relented and said he would find another way to give the desert an oasis. They finished their modifications and placed one at the beginning of the connection between the desert and the center. His overlay lit up.

 

.....Scanning.....

- - -

As your entity is modified from its original form, please name it.

 

"Stupid names"

 

Entity: The Insulated Mana Tree is named.

.....Analyzing.....

 

Entity named The Insulated Mana Tree analyzed.

Size: medium.

Entity category: Magical.

Organism type: Plant.

Modification: Extreme.

Ability to evolve: No.

Age: 2 Years.

Grade: C

No extra marks earned.

Rewards calculated.

-

 

Walker pulled up the identify window to make sure there were no issues.

 

Name: The Insulated Mana Tree

Genus: The Insulated Mana Tree

Organism Type: Plant

Modifications: Sterility, Oblivious, Mana impaired, Gigantism, Grafted, Reaching roots, Overwhelming magical discharge, Resilient, Insulated

Evolutionary traits: Unavailable

 

Walker noticed that he only got a C on his grade, and his creation materials back, so he asked Virgil about it.

"It is not truly a unique entity, that is why you also did not get an update to your unique entity task. It may be a different genus, but you are really just slightly modifying the original Mana Tree. The Alpha Protocol knows when you are trying to play with the system rewards."

"That's bullshit." Walker said. They'd worked for an hour to modify the tree and received no recognition whatsoever. He looked at the timer, a constant reminder in his skull of an approaching struggle.

 

Time remaining until next battle: 88+ hours.

 

Walker sighed and rubbed the back of his head, mussing his hair. They needed to move faster, or he would have to spend a large amount of his temporal resources to get the next step completed. He looked over at the whiteboard only to realize it was missing, and in its place was a computer that looked like an old Macintosh.

"What the fuck?" He said as he walked over to take a closer look. It had all of the peripherals one would expect of an early 90s Macintosh: a monitor/desktop combination, a large mouse, a small desk, and a chair. No mousepad for some reason, but that was okay, they were for fancy people. The computer caused Walker to find some nostalgia from his youth, remembering his time playing Number Munchers in Mrs. Johnson's computer class. Good times for him. He loved how fast the game let him move and remembered the caped muncher with affection. Looking back at the computer, he asked Virgil what was going on.

"Well Walker, one of your rewards upgraded your creation instrument twice. The next upgrade after the whiteboard would have been a projector and screen. This is the upgrade that would have come after."

"Ok, quick question. Do all of the Creators get blackboards or whiteboards? How is it decided?"

"No no. Your guide chooses the first creation instrument, then the upgrades naturally take place based on the Creator's memories of what comes after. There is a requirement for the first instruments to be quite primitive, thus requiring resourcefulness or what you would call out-of-the-box thinking."

"This is relatively primitive where I'm from." Walker said, thinking. "Couldn't I have started with this."

"Welllll." Virgil said with a shrug. "It is what your guide picked."

Then, it dawned on Walker. "Motherfucker. I bet he didn't even want me to complete this. He somehow knew I had dysgraphia and was fucking with me. That son of a bitch."

"That seems the most likely reason, yes. Also, he shortened his time by bringing a magical artifact intentionally."

"So he was always against me?"

"I believe so, yes. I do not know or understand what he is attempting to do. But we need to move forward, so let us take a look at your new instrument. It is already turned on, how about you take a look."

Walker sat in the chair and pressed the mouse button with excessive force. The screen turned on and showed a plain white window, with the top holding a series of drawing icons like pencils and erasers. There were two tabs he could click on, one said landmass and the other entity. This meant that the fears he'd held from the previous creation instrument didn't apply anymore and he grew more angry at the thought of what he could have started with. He could fix his mistakes with this, and wouldn't have had to spend all that time drawing. He calmed himself down, although the effort was greater than he thought it would be.

"What kind of restrictions can I expect?" Walker asked, thinking it over. "The markers are what held us back before."

Virgil replied, "Look behind the computer."

Walker did so and found an old printer. He opened the tray and found there were two slots, one with the word entity stamped on the front and holding six pieces of paper, while the other said landmass and was holding four. "So I'm limited by how much I can fit on the paper now?"

"And the detail that the printer can manage, which I have to say, is likely still more than what you could do before."

"Ok Ok, What is the next upgrade going to be?" Walker asked, pushing away the last remnants of his anger and growing excited. They could use the evolution chamber for all of their future entity modifications, no sweat there, but drawing the landmass had still been painful. With the new creation instrument, he could get his work done much faster and more accurately at that.

"The next upgrade should be a higher-end or newer computer." Virgil responded.

"And after that?" Walker couldn't help but ask.

"How about you just wait and see Walker? There is no fun in knowing the end of the story before you get to experience the thrills of how you got there."

"Fair." He said lamely. Virgil suggested they come back to the instrument when it was time to work on the next series of landmasses, so they walked over to the evolution chamber to finish their work on the leyline. Virgil placed an original mana tree into the chamber, and they heavily modified it for the cold, before placing two down in the snowy region accordingly. After receiving only another C grade, Walker was resigned to the idea that they were stuck with what they got. They ran into trouble with their root system for modifying the water trees, but solved that problem by Walker stepping into the World Editor and creating two peninsulas, so it could still be placed on land. They took a few minutes for a break as they had been going nonstop for a couple of hours.

"Man, he doesn't do much." Walker said from a seated position as he looked at the smaller squirrel, still standing in the exact spot they'd last seen him.

"You have not given him any instructions, and he does not need breaks as he is a part of the Alpha Protocol directly, just as I am."

"Yeah, but still. It's creepy. He just stands there, staring at us." Walker said, watching the squirrel stare at him with its dark blue eyes. He looked deep into the squirrel's eyes and found...nothing.

"We will get to him soon enough Walker. We only have one more duo of Mana Trees before we can move on, so let us get to it."

Walker agreed and spent a few more minutes thinking over his plans and how they would align with his future goals. The most obvious goal was to complete the Alpha Protocol itself so that he wouldn't be sent back to Earth and whatever was happening there, not to mention killing Virgil and dooming Symphony. The secondary goal was to make sure that Symphony was balanced and allowed its denizens the ability to grow. He knew he should probably think the opposite here. That he needed to make sure Symphony came first, and the Alpha Protocol second, but without getting through the finals, there would be no Symphony and no Walker to maintain it. So he was stuck. He got up and got back to work as it weighed on his mind.

The swamp trees were tricky, but in the end, they further increased the resiliency of the roots and trunk to compensate for the amount of water seepage that was to be expected from the environment, and modified the bark to be more resistant to decay and rot. Walker placed both down on the two sides of the swamp, and they were done. Everything was ready for the last phase.

"Are you ready?" Virgil asked with excitement in his eyes while hopping up and down.

He really loves his magic. Mana. Damn, now I'm doing it to myself.

Walker's expression became somber. He knew this was a big moment, and that something with poignancy or some gravitas should be said. He had been really trying to get his mind around what he should be in relation to Symphony. Not just its creator, but something more. He felt a need to express it out loud, to cement within himself who he was going to be here and what they were going to do. He looked at Virgil, and, with a nod of his head, knew what needed to be said. Walker stood tall.

"It's all about moving forward, right Virgil? We've pushed past the first step for Symphony, but really, that first step was just an illusion. A foundation of faulty bricks that got us here. To this moment. The first true step toward Symphony being a great place to live, is what we do right now. I've been doing a lot of thinking, and it isn't enough to just survive the Alpha Protocol. We need to be better than those who came before us. Maybe not smarter, but kinder. More importantly, we need to build something that can last and adapt to the needs of its people. Everything we do will be weighed in the future, not by us or the alpha protocol, but by the citizens of Symphony. We cannot allow ourselves to become apathetic killers, nor can we allow ourselves to forget where we started. We must hold ourselves to a higher ideal, a better version of what we are now. I choose, now, to become a Creator who feels for his people. I choose to be not all-powerful, or all-knowing, but to learn from the experiences that are forthcoming, and grant mercy to those who have erred and need another chance to find themselves, deep within. The Slicer destroyed our world, but, I choose forgiveness. Mr. Harrison threw me here with no information and at a severe disadvantage, strictly out of selfishness, but, I choose forgiveness again. Nothing and no one should be judged by a singular moment, but by the moments that come together to form a picture of who you are. The Alpha Protocol, life itself, will throw more shit our way. I choose to meet it and find a better path. One that leads to a stronger Symphony, and a day where joy is found throughout and the people and creatures who walk the paths we lay down can find true miracles on a daily basis. Where challenges are met by the worthy and righteous, and a simple crafter basks in the glow of their creations. We make this moment our declaration of purpose. We are the creators of Symphony, you and I, and we will not allow ourselves to be disillusioned by time and changed by hatred. We will grow. We will become better. We will caretake this world and all of its future people, together. This is who we are, and I pledge that this is all I will ever be."

Walker was good at speeches when he put in the effort, although it always took a little something out of him.

"Well said" was the giant squirrel's only response.

Walker said, "And you think I ruin things.", before clicking on Time and advancing all of Symphony by 50 years.