Chapter 70: Meeting the Administration
As the golden light faded, Lexi found herself clutching the pulsing warmth of the Starseed in her remaining hand. Danica stood to her left, and Samantha — gently carrying Gretel’s remains — on her right. No longer did they stand in the gore splattered room set high in the ruined tower. Through some enchantment possessed by the stone, they had all ben transported back to the very point where this quest began, the high priestess’ chamber set within the Temple of Xoth in Astyanax. Moreover, they were joined here by the high priestess herself.
“Welcome, my brave adv—”
The smile which had lit Anya’s face, illuminating the older woman’s large green eyes as they glowed from behind her loosely curled shock of pastel blue hair, disappeared as soon as her eyes took in the entirety of the scene before her. A deep and abiding sorrow filled those eyes, transforming them from sparkling mirrors of radiant joy into deep pools of warm compassion. Despite the obvious and manifest sincerity of Anya’s reaction to the fact of Gretel’s death, Lexi found that rather than serving to pacify her simmering rage, something about this whole scenario served rather to amplify it — bringing her fury from a slow simmer to a roaring boil in the flash of an instant.
“Cut the shit!” Lexi snapped, her eyes narrowed in a baleful glare. Physically shaking with barely suppressed hysteria, Lexi unloaded on the high priestess. “We got back your fucking stone, all because you were too fucking incompetent of a priestess to get rid of a goddamned goblin curse! So yeah, we finished the fucking quest, but Gretel died in the p-process! Sh-she’s dead because of your stupid quest…a-all to help me…a-and…I’m just so fucking sick of this goddamned dumbass game! I wish I’d never gotten sucked into this fucking RPG in the first place!”
As soon as the word “game” left Lexi’s lips, a sudden and incredible change came over both the high priestess and the entire room.
Anya’s eyes first began to glow, each one looking like a radiant star somehow set within the soft confines of an aged human’s face. Her lean and compact body went completely rigid, arms locked out straight at her sides in a “T” shape. Slowly, the glow emanating from her eyes became so bright, that her entire body began to radiate the same soft glow, making the woman look like a human night-light. As the glow intensified, the illuminated figure lifted gently off the ground, hovering several inches above the chamber floor.
Naturally, Lexi gaped at the woman. She did not exactly know what kind of response she had expected her emotional outburst to elicit, but this was certainly not it. The paladin looked left and right to see how her two surviving companions were taking the change, and was doubly shocked to see that they appeared to have been completely and utterly frozen in place. As still as statues, each girl stood completely unmoving — not a breath was drawn, nor eye blinked, nor nose twitched even slightly. It was almost as if time itself had stopped within the room, and that Lexi and Anya had somehow been exempted from its usual flux.
“What the fu—”
Lexi’s question was cut off midstream when the glowing high priestess’ mouth opened. What issued forth was not her — or any other human — voice. Rather, it sounded far more like what Lexi imagined a computer would sound like. There was a timber and cadence to it that was wholly inhuman. And, instead of coming solely from the apparent speaker, it filled the entirety of the space around Lexi, coming from everywhere and nowhere at all at once.
“Greetings from the Administration.”
This gave Lexi a pause, not in any way erasing her storm of emotions, but temporarily pushing “pause” on the swirling currents of rage. This was her first encounter with any representatives of the system administration since her original orientation session with Felicity on the very first day. If an administrator was appearing now — in such a dramatic fashion no less — then this must mean that something important was about to happen. The paladin closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying to re-center herself so that she could have something resembling a conversation.
“So what gives?” Lexi finally asked.
“The Administration has taken control of this NPC and temporarily paused the game due to the extraordinary situation developing here,” the nameless administrator said.
“You mean my best friend fucking dying!?” Lexi asked, the barely sublimated rage and pain rising to the surface almost as soon as the specter of Gretel reared its head in her mind.
“No,” the administrator responded, its digital voice completely devoid of emotion. “This intervention was triggered by your discussion of the true nature of this world with a specific NPC, the high priestess of Xoth.”
“…”
“Normally,” the digital voice continued. “Any NPC hearing certain keywords, or combinations of non-keywords, which directly or indirectly make reference to the game itself, your status as a player character, or their status as a non-player character will be simply ignored — with the NPC in question acting as if they did not hear the comment. If, however, an NPC is directly and repeatedly questioned along these lines, certain genera of system errors tend to be introduced which can be disruptive to both the specific situation’s gameplay as well as the broader game logic itself.”
“Let me get this straight,” Lexi cut in, her words as cold as ice. “You don’t give a fuck about what happened to the most important person in my life. I don’t even fucking care if she was an NPC or not. She was real to me. Our relationship was real — our love was true.”
“Be that as it may,” the administrator replied. “The death of an NPC central to only a single story-line is not an event which would disrupt the fabric of the game itself, and is thus not something which will ever typically trigger intercession from the system administration. However, given your highly emotional and erratic state, the concern arose that you might act rashly and kill the high priestess were she to respond in typical fashion to your statements regarding the true nature of this world.”
“If Gretel’s death apparently doesn’t fucking matter to you, then why the fuck would Anya’s?”
“The difference is that this particular NPC is a special class, not her character class as a high priestess, but rather her subsystem class as a Quest Giver. As a central figure within the capital’s hierarchy and the initiator of significant numbers of active quests, Anya is currently integral to a great many storylines — not just yours. As such, killing her would have proved extraordinarily disruptive to the game as a whole.”
“Hence this meeting,” Lexi reasoned.
“Precisely,” the digital voice concluded.
“OK, so you stopped me from doing something incredibly disruptive to your super fucking important NPC here. Is that it? Are we fucking done? Because I’m just about done with this whole goddamned game. Without Gretel…”
Lexi trailed off, tears streaming down her face as her time spent with the mage flashed before her mind’s eye. For someone who, in the old world, had been a true introvert like Lexi, her friendship with Gretel represented something so different and special that Lexi could hardly express just how much the mage had meant to her. Granted, she still had Samantha and Danica, and treasured each girl greatly in their own special ways. But, Gretel had been her first — first follower, first friend, and first lover.
“The point is,” the administrator responded, as if it could read Lexi’s mind, which, Lexi later realized, it probably could. “NPCs within Fantasy Adventure Quest do not actually die.”
“…”
“Most of them end up being recycled into similar roles, and get repopulated into different parts of the world. You have apparently been laboring under a misunderstanding, which new player characters often fall into. It is understandable given the intentional hyper-realism of the game, but although the NPCs believe that new life comes into this world through the usual biological processes, that is not the case. At the end of the day, this entire world is very much an architected simulation, and all character creation — be it players or NPCs — is managed and controlled by the administration.”
Lexi forgot to breath.
A second stretched out to an eternity within the horizon of the paladin’s mind, dropping her into a spinning abyss of possibilities. The implications of what the administrator had just revealed were almost too staggering for Lexi’s mind to even handle. So great was the shock that, for a moment, all she could do was stare in awed silence. As her intellect gradually comprehended the shape of the conclusion implied by the administrator’s revelation, an upswelling of hope began to surge within her, threatening to burst forth like a geyser and completely overwhelm the young futanari — building and building until her reaction exploded in the form of a single question.
“You mean Gretel’s alive somewhere!?”
“Yes, and no,” the digital voice replied with its cool electronic tone. “Although the core of this particular NPC has already been recycled elsewhere, her memories have been stripped and her backstory reset and adjusted to fit the new storyline into which she has been inserted.”
“But you could restore those!” Lexi shouted, her excitement palpable.
“We could, if…” the administrator said, intentionally allowing the response to trail off meaningfully.
“If what?” Lexi asked, realizing the true reason that this little chat was occurring. The administration wanted something from her.
“We would be willing to restore your companion’s identity and memories,” the administrator answered. “If you could assist us with a small matter. Architectural policy does not permit the administration to kill player characters for any reason. However, every once in a while, a particularly problematic player character must be…handled. As we are not permitted to do this ourselves, we are forced to recruit player characters to aid us.”
“You know,” Lexi said, thrusting an accusatory finger out towards the high priestess’ co-opted body, and planting the other hand on her hip. “I should tell you to fuck right off, since you sick bitches probably orchestrated all this just to get me in a position that I’d be willing to consider helping. But, you’ve got me bent over a fucking barrel right now, so it’s not like I really have any choice at all.”
“Can we take this to mean that you accept the commission?” the voice asked.
“Yeah,” Lexi said, her face set. “What’s the fucking job?”
The administrator controlling the high priestess’ illuminated floating body reached out into that same insane direction that was neither in front of, above, below, behind, or to either side of the figure — but was in some other direction that made Lexi’s brain hurt to even think about. From that non-Euclidean space, she pulled forth a scroll, tied with a single piece of braided golden cord, and handed it to Lexi. As soon as the paladin’s hand touched the scroll’s velum surface, two things happened at once. First, Lexi felt her missing arm regrow itself, the limb at first appearing as a ghostly image and quickly coalescing into solid flesh and bone. And second, there was a blinding flash of light which blotted out everything from Lexi’s field of vision. When the starburst of brilliance finally faded enough for the paladin to once again see, she noted with a start that the flow of time around her appeared to have restarted.
“W-Whaaat?!” gaped Danica, pointing a finger from her small delicate hand up at the figure of the high priestess.
Although the glow which had suffused her form during the NPC’s possession by the administration’s representative had largely subsided, there was still a faint halo surrounding her body as Anya gradually descended back to the ground. When her feet finally touched down, the high priestess’ eyes cleared — the golden glow replaced once again by deep pools of liquid emerald. Her gaze locked onto Lexi, a look of utter awe and reverence overcoming the older woman’s face.
“You’ve h-had an audience w-with Xoth herself!” Anya gasped, staring at the still glowing scroll Lexi held.
“I did,” the futanari paladin replied, her mouth tight and eyes narrowed in cold resolve. She had been given hope, but there was a price — and time would tell what kind of toll this quest would enact. Turning to her companions, Lexi began to unroll the scroll. “The goddess gave us a job to do.”
As soon as the undid the golden cord, an all too familiar alert messages from the system popped into Lexi’s augmented field of vision.
Quest Number
Description
Status
1
Rescue Adventurers from Goblins
Complete
2
Defeat Samantha von der Faust
Complete
3
Rescue Nobles from Goblins
Complete
4
Remove Goblin Priestess’ Curse
Complete
5
Defeat the Dungeon Mistress
Incomplete