Hikaru takes a deep breath, and sweeps his eyes over all of you gathered at the campfire. Ace, who doesn't want to be in the world of a game; Alesha, who can't think of this place as home, and Sekhmet who's starting to; Tayeb and Shadi, who have known no other world; and Sio, who almost fooled you into thinking she's from Earth.
You almost thought "from IRL," but can't bring yourself to.
"From your perspective," he says, to Tayeb, "almost two weeks ago, a group of strangers - Adventurers from distant shores and with strange ways - arrived outside the city in which you work and live in greater numbers than you've ever seen before. The Siege of Viacruz, you joked - you hoped was a joke. I wonder what you must have thought, at our distress? At how little we seemed, and seem, to know how things work? How they have worked, for the hundreds of years in which anointed heroes such as me and mine have walked on Mundus?"
"It was not, perhaps, as strange to us as it was to you," Tayeb allows, stroking his mustache, frowning. Shadi squirms under his arm, holding fast to her father, the polestar of her heavens. "Adventurers have always been a queer lot, and I'm used to tradesmen having their own cants. Still, we feared some calamity had come to pass. When we heard the waygates had closed, I thought that must be why..."
"Does this have to do with the monster in the woods?" Shadi asks. "The drop of ocean in the sky? I know you can do powerful sorcery, Hikaru, but that seemed beyond even you..."
"Almost," Hikaru says, smiling. Trying. "Almost beyond me. But explaining what I think has happened - what must have happened - will require me to speak on secrets we've held closely. Things that may seem shocking."
"Or blasphemous," Sio sighs, looking into the fire.
Hikaru hesitates. I see Alesha curl her hand into a fist, and look down at the solar cross on her breastplate - a symbol of a God her character swore an oath to, but that she would never have sworn to before her own God.
"I hope," Hikaru says, "that it is not. I have nothing but respect for the thousand-year old traditions that kept you alive. Kept
us alive," he says to Sio. "But nothing we can do to help you, to serve the Gods and save ourselves, will make sense unless you know where we came from, know what I know about... Mundus. And what I perceive of its nature."
Ace hisses in a breath. "Okay," she says, very fast. "I - you should know that I was talking out my ass. I haven't... I wasn't expecting going berserk to be
that bad, there was just too much anger to deal with and I, like... I wanted to be an athlete, not a soldier, and, and I'm sorry, and..."
Tayeb reaches out a hand over Ace's, then puts his arm around her when she cries.
"We did not ask to fight, or ask you to fight, either," he says. "But you have fought for us despite the injustice of it, and we will remember that
long after we forget the words you used to curse your fate."
Sio breathes in, sharp, before nodding. "You fought an evil god's pet kaiju that was way above your weight class. There was a lot of swearing to go around."
"I don't know how you wouldn't know your own power," Shadi says, though her voice is not afraid.
"There's a huge difference between hearing something and
doing something," you say. "As for why hearing versus doing matters, here..."
Hikaru clicks his tongue. "Perhaps I should start not with us, but with Io."
"Io?" Shadi says, blinking. "The titan? The Worldsculptor?"
"The Statue Within The Stone," Hikaru confirms. "Because everything that has gone wrong is in the domain of Io. Waygates. The coming and going of Adventurers. The ways that places bleed into each other, that liminal spaces lead to one or the other, here. All of these are Io's responsibility, and under Io's protection. And all of them are going wrong."
A terrible silence falls over everyone here.
"Are you suggesting that Io has abandoned us?" Tayeb asks, voice wavering.
"It is not in the nature of your Gods to abandon their people," Hikaru says. "If they
had, I think we would not be here talking about it. But I think one of our people has - "
He hesitates, takes in a deep breath, drumming his fingers against the black lacquer of his staff.
"I think an Adventurer has at the very least gravely wounded him," he says. "With a weapon from my world. And
now I need to explain where we've come from, because we're not from Mundus. And I don't think anything from Mundus
could have wounded Io this deeply."
"I think you may be selling Mundus short," Sio says, managing to keep herself from snarling
too much. "Echidna nearly managed to one-vs-fourteen the Gods, after all."
"This is true," Hikaru says. "The Gods were never invulnerable. Say rather that I think our nature as Adventurers, and my understanding of what the Gods
are, lead me to believe that any weapon subtle enough to have wounded Io
without all of Mundus immediately learning of it must come from my Earth instead."
"Okay back the fuck up," Ace says. "There is too much lore going on, I can
barely follow 'stand here and avoid the mechanics' without... memorizing fifty different proper nouns. I'm trying, God knows, but which one is Io and why are you going 'oh shit.'"
Shadi turns to her, incredulous. "Io is the worldsculptor," she says. "Io created Mundus."
"Yes," Hikaru says, voice distant. "I think Io literally created the ground you're sitting on, or at least it was made according to their instructions. Ace spoke earlier of... adventuring as a game we play."
"Is it?" Shadi asks, arms folded.
Hikaru thinks very carefully.
"We used to think so," you suggest.
Hikaru gestures to me, gratitude evident on his face. "It
used to be more like... a role we'd play. Stepping into our parts as wizards and warriors and healers in the names of Gods. And then after a successful hunt for some dragon or another, with it's hoard spent in Viacruz or Caer Islwyn or Pher Ah at the tavern and the blacksmiths'... we'd leave this theatre you call home, taking off our masks, sleeping in our beds."
There is a long and ghastly silence.
Hikaru looks up at the darkening sky. "Then I'd go back to my job designing machines, Alesha to her almsgiving, Sekhmet to their general store. Deedee to her courier work, and Ace to..."
Ace laughs, a little unhinged. "This
was my job," she said. "Places to go, people to be. Busking in a corner of the Internet."
"Then you're telling us that this world is an illusion," Shadi says, and she's shaking. "That Ace's curses were true, that my memories are false."
"All existence is an illusion," Hikaru says, quietly. "My own no less than yours. That all the world's a stage and all the people in it merely players is not a condition unique to Mundus. Reality was
always what we chose to love in spite of that; your love of your father and your home is more real than any number of hours I spent arguing over the color of a sprocket at work, and nothing I will say can or should change that."
"Yeah," Ace says, dragging her face down her hands. "That's where I am. I shouldn't be here. Mundus is bad for me and I want out - but this is
your home and I don't regret saving you for a second."
You take a deep breath. "There are truths I learned about myself on Mundus that I hadn't realized for more than thirty years on Earth. If this was just a game, it isn't anymore."
Sio clicks her tongue and stares into the fire. "Out with it, then. With why you think
they needed to hear us talk about... about a night of A.W.O. after a long shift manufacturing widgets and thingummies."
"Why Io?" you ask. "What about
Another World Online - the game about Mundus," you clarify to the Kosmas duo, "makes him -"
"Them," Sekhmet says, tail twitching.
"- Them, right, sorry, makes them vulnerable?"
"And here I risk blaspheming," Hikaru says, looking at the crystal tipping his staff. "Here we inescapably enter matters of cosmogony. If there are Gods on Earth, they move more subtly than those on Mundus - which may be why those who wrote of Mundus wrote of it's benevolent pantheon. Alesha," he says, startling her out of her reverie with a gesture, "do you remember Fanime '34 with us?"
"Couldn't forget, first time Jazz came out in public," Leesh says. "Though of course you realize I give Jesus more credit than you do."
"A prophet," you interject for the benefit of Tayeb and Shadi. "To
grossly oversimplify."
Alesha laughs. "Under the circumstances I'm not sure He'd mind. Yes, I remember Fanime."
"Where we saw Doctor Durante and her fellows speak about Another World Online," Hikaru prompts. "And the game they made before it, Orbital Knights."
Alesha blinks. "And the Temple of Io we found
on Io in OK."
Siobhan turns to her, blinking, openmouthed and astonished. "Wait,
what?"
You laugh, as you remember that little easter egg. How many hours had you sunk into your Chevalier piloting? "Right. The
Jovian Moons map, that was the refrance. You think Io was practicing?"
"I
know Io was practicing," Hikaru says, straightening up. "Durante told us so. That the
Turing-Compatible AI of that name first made the lifeless worlds and ruins that served as battlefields for Orbital Knights, as training to make their masterpiece."
"My home," Shadi says, frowning.
"Yes," Hikaru says. "Our gods spoke us into existence, and we in turn told stories about your gods, and they in turn wrote of you. I would like to think," he adds, smiling, "that it's stories all the way up and down; Heinlein seemed to think so."
Tayeb laughs, and slaps his knee, eyes twinkling.
"I mean, weird flex to find it funny, but I'm glad you aren't upset," Sekhmet says.
"My friend, you are describing orthodox Gnomic theology," Tayeb says.
Hikaru brightens. "I knew there was a reason beyond the purely mechanical I went with Their boon," he says.
"Wait, wait, wait," Ace says, holding her hands in front of her face. "Are you saying that Io is an
AI? That all the Mundane gods are?"
"That is exactly what I'm saying," Hikaru says.
"Who thought it was a good idea to literally make AI gods?" Ace asked.
"Self-described rationalists. Next question," Sekhmet said, twirling her hand. Hikaru winces at this but doesn't correct them.
"And, what, you think this started because Io got hacked?" Ace says.
There is a long moment of silence where Hikaru just stares at Ace, and then you remember to breathe, past your teeth.
"Oh,
fuck," you say.
Sio holds her breath for a little longer, before sighing in defeat. She looks up at you and Hikaru.
"You clearly mean some kind of attack that's not just... hacking, see also slashing," she says, voice rough. "For the benefit of the Mundanes breaking bread with you, sing, muse, of how one hacks a god."
"There are languages," Hikaru says, "that one can learn to write and speak, and through them to effect changes in the world. In which the nature of the world and the properties of things within it can be
encoded. On Mundus, you call this wizardry."
Tayeb nods his understanding.
"On Earth we have no wizards who can conjure fire with a syllable and a gesture," Hikaru continues, "but through such languages as we have created for the purpose we can
simulate what that fire might do. I joked about this kind of
computer wizardry, which was my job on Earth; simulating the properties of machine parts, sculpting virtual possibilities of them, before approving their physical manufacture. It's why wizardry on Mundus called to me."
"And anything you can exactingly sculpt or whittle, you can also
hack," Sio mutters.
"Just so," Hikaru sighs.
"You use the word - the abbreviation - 'A.I.,'" Sio says. "Saying that Io and the other gods are such. What does that mean?"
"Chase the tail, what starts with 'I?'" Shadi asks. "Intelligence?"
Sekhmet grimaces. "Artificial Intelligence. Yeah. Can't avoid
that term."
"In the sense they were made," Hikaru says. "Not in the sense that they are false. With all our wizardry, we encoded them with psyches and auras; ran pneuma through wires to them, and animated them to act within a world they would create. But it no longer matters if the first words they used to sing Mundus into existence were 'hello world!' or 'fiat lux,' least of all to you, Shadi."
"But you're saying they
are the words you used to encode them. That the Statue Within The Marble is sculpted out of words," Shadi says.
"And anything you can sculpt, you can hack," you echo.
"It would be like erasing and overwriting a parchment," Sio says, "Or just making a new copy wrong on purpose."
"That is
exactly how it happens," Hikaru says. "But there's a problem: normally, we use that kind of AI to
catch people trying to do this. Io would normally notice an attack on their code. Io was
made to notice an attack on their code and on Mundus' code."
Ace grimaces. "...From outside of Mundus. That's why you need an Adventurer, right?"
"To smuggle in a... virus, a poison... hidden as something innocuous." Hikaru puts a finger on the thin mustache he's begun to grow. "Something Io would have expected to be there when our assassin challenged them, and the Glatisant, as we are sometimes charged to do."
"And it must have been Io," Sio says, "because it is by Io's hand that the waygates open, and portals to dungeons and faerie trods and other liminal spaces function, and those are
super not working brothers right now."
"How do you keep getting memes right if you're a local?" Sekhmet grumbles.
"Pixies have big ears," she replies.
You laugh. So does Ace.
"I suspect that the otherspaces physically exist on this planet - the physical body of Mundus," Hikaru says. "In places that we would otherwise never be able to reach. And that Io stitched them together in much the same way that Waygates link to each other."
"So when the other gods had to step in after Io's poisoning, they had never worked with the gates before, with the fabric of reality." Tayeb muses.
Shadi looks at the hem of her own sleeve. "And they dropped a stitch."
"Just our luck that if you go out of bounds in the Lost Woods, you wind up in the Blue Sea?" Alesha asks.
Hikaru touches his nose and nods.
"Then why are we here?" Ace asks. "Why not just kick us out?"
You take a deep breath.
"Because that's what got hacked off," you say. "Their ability to kick us out. Their only options were to either kill us all, or save us all."
And it is not in the nature of the gods here to abandon their people, Hikaru had said.
Thank Them for that.
"Leaving our bodies on Earth behind," Alesha says, eyes meeting Hikaru's. Pleading.
Hikaru pauses, then nods. "Because the AI, Io, was in charge of our entry and exit into 'the gameworld' as well. Meaning that if we learned
exactly what happened to Io -"
Your heart jumps into your throat, and your eyes meet Sekhmet's.
"- It
might be possible to go back." Alesha murmurs.
Hikaru, slowly, raises his hand to his heart. "We do not have nearly enough data, and something we find may still prevent it." Hikaru says. "But if Earthside realizes what happened - if our bodies on Earth are
alive - I don't now see why we
couldn't return home."
Ace curls up, and you put your arm around her, and she groans:
"Thank God, thank God, thank Io too."
And Shadi, after a moment, takes her hand, and squeezes.
With thanks to @FoxHana for Foxgirl Cryptid wrangling, @bii for Elf Shootgirl wrangling, and @NekoIncardine for prereading.
Special thanks to @Qoheleth for helping me up to this point with figuring exactly what the fuck was going on in the Neverglades. They know no other spoilers about what's actually going on, and their knowledge on this is why they stayed silent.
Three updates remain. The next one might get spicy; I'll put that part under a labeled readmore.
