Playing God 4

Playing God 4

Charlie Foxtrot

The Explorer’s Refuge was everything I’d ever wanted in twenty-seven years of life in a dystopian corporatocracy. When I first obtained the World Explorer class, it was just a single log cabin situated in a forest. It came with a small yard where I could grow basic plants for alchemy.

It didn’t take long for me to find out that the devs had monetized the fuck out of it. Like any guild base, it could be expanded and upgraded with various data crystals. I could only occasionally afford data crystals from the cash shop to speed up the tedious farming, but that didn’t matter. I had ten years and the expectation that everything inside would one day become real. I wasn’t farming for a video game; I was investing in my personal retirement home.

About eight years into the game, I maxed it out. I expanded the space enough that calling it a “refuge” sounded somewhat disingenuous. Rather than a temporary lodge or pitstop, it was the size of a castle, or about the size of a small guild base.

I decided to lean into the Inari Okami bit and modeled the space after a Shinto shrine. It was filled with everything I found calming, a home rather than a mere place to store my things. That said, for as much time and effort as I’d spent on this place, I didn’t really know what to expect when I stepped inside for the first time.

There was a torii gate to mark the entrance, of course, but I doubted any actual shrine looked half as beautiful as my home. Typically, shrines had a fountain near the entrance where guests could wash themselves before heading deeper. But since I wouldn’t be accepting worshipers here, I instead opted to create a sprawling garden of ponds, stone bridges, islets, fox statues, and rock formations.

All around, various plants of both mundane and magical varieties provided tasteful accents. Some were rare reagents that I could harvest for select potions recipes I didn’t want to do without. Others were plain, mundane cattails, pond lilies, and young bamboo, placed simply because I liked the aesthetic. The same could be said for the koi that swam freely through the ponds and beneath the arched bridges.

The stone path meandered until it reached a stone stage. Shinto shrines often had those, called kaguraden, which were used for ceremonial dances and festivals. It had no roof but had four, sturdy posts on the corners, each wrapped with shimenawa and shide.

Lack of audience aside, the stage wasn’t merely decorative. The kaguraden was a space I’d set aside for rituals of the onmyoji and kannushi classes. Mana flowed more purely here, purified and guided by the shide in a way that would make those rituals all the more effective. I didn’t know when I’d need it, but it sounded like a good idea at the time and fit the theme.

I smiled happily as I took it all in. YGGDRASIL was known for realistic graphics, but there was a certain authenticity that the game couldn’t fully replicate. Strolling through my new home, I felt well and truly fulfilled; I was seeing the culmination of a decade of work, a reality I’d shaped with my own two hands.

The path wound around and I followed, at peace with myself for the first time in years. The shrine office sat off to the side of the main shrines. Normally, employees would distribute flyers and sell merchandise like omamori and ema. Local vendors would also sell snacks nearby.

In my case, I turned the whole space into a forge. I figured that when things became real, issues like smoke and fire hazards would also become legitimate concerns. Rather than deal with it, I separated the forge from the rest of the complex altogether.

Strictly speaking, I didn’t need a forge. I had no crafting classes so there was a hard cap of how good I could become in-game. In YGGDRASIL, it was far simpler to buy everything I needed.

But it was an experiment. I’d gathered several books on how to work magical metals. If the New World’s humans could pick up tier magic, however poorly, I should also be capable of learning new skills. It might take several lifetimes to rival a crafting class, but… I had time.

I eventually arrived at the haiden, the outer shrine. It was a large, single-story building which sat on its own little island in my network of ponds. An ornate, crimson bridge connected it to an even bigger island upon which the honden, the inner shrine, sat.

The haiden contained the worship hall and offering box in a typical Shinto shrine. I had those too, if only for aesthetic purposes, but I didn’t expect them to see any use. Instead, I thought of the worship hall as more of a greeting hall in the event I should have any guests. Two corridors spread out from either side, each leading to four guest rooms that looked out into the garden.

It was all beautiful, perfectly as I’d imagined it, but my attention was on the honden, the inner shrine. Though the entire complex was mine, this island was special. It alone occupied roughly a third of the total land I could claim and magical protections ensured that it was only accessible via the bridge from the haiden.

It was my inner sanctum, a secret, personal sanctuary even within this haven. Even without the rest of the Explorer’s Refuge, I felt I could feasibly live in the honden for a millennium and not grow bored.

I stepped into the central chamber. A long hall greeted me, crimson pillars stretching out on either side to give the place an austere look. At the far end was a mural, one I could change at will to depict the greatest of my accomplishments. Or, as it was now, a simple, peaceful meadow.

Here, the goshintai could be found. Usually, a goshintai was the shrine’s sacred object by which kami could commune with the priest. Seeing how I was both the priest and the kami of my own shrine, I had no need for such a thing.

Instead, I decided that my most precious treasures belonged on that altar before the mural. There was a stand upon which I could place the Ame no Nuboko horizontally. Below that were two, crimson cushions. The first empty, as the Yatagarasu was currently clipped to my ponytail. The second was the last World Item I obtained, Momonga’s crimson orb.

I still didn’t know what that did as I’d not had the time to look up the details. Momonga sure as shit wasn’t about to tell me. So, there it sat, the only one of my three World Items I left on display.

It felt oddly fitting. I wasn’t proud of what I’d done to him. My designation of his orb as a shintai, or “body of kami,” wasn’t because I gloried in my actions. It was the opposite. I wanted to remember what my freedom had cost someone else, someone who, in another life, I might have called a friend.

I stood there, lost in contemplation. There was no regret, not really, for I still considered what I’d done necessary. Instead, I was filled with a soft melancholy as I pondered what could have been. That orb’s pride of place was a tribute, not to Ainz Ooal Gown, but to the weight of possibilities.

Finally, I turned away. There were eight more chambers to explore, one per each of my tails.

I had two libraries. One was utterly mundane. I shamelessly ripped off Ainz Ooal Gown and collected every bit of the world’s media I could. Iconic movies, books, plays, and poems found their place here, stored in data crystals. Despite the expansiveness of the space, it was actually the least costly in terms of maximum data capacity. Turned out, storing what amounted to .zip files was quite cheap.

The second, much smaller library, was far more precious. It contained instruction manuals for all sorts of things, from tier magic and alchemy to mundane carpentry. These were skills, things I could potentially learn. After all, immortality would be rather dull without a way to improve myself.

I had an alchemy lab that sat somewhat detached from the rest of the honden. However, unlike the forge, I opted to keep it and the vault of reagents nearby because I expected I’d be revisiting the library quite often.

The two least interesting rooms were, in my opinion, the two vaults dedicated to armors, weapons, and other knick knacks. Some were useful, like the gear I’d farmed specifically to counter each of Nazarick’s Floor Guardians, while others were… not. Some, like a tanuki statue that would lock someone in prayer posture when set on top of them, was a gag item that I thought might be hilarious one day.

The final vault wasn’t so much a vault as it was a hangar. YGGDRASIL had a brief mecha, sci-fi phase during its final years. Though it was the archetypal DMMO-RPG, it was also old. And like any other successful game, it found itself drowning in copycats and outpaced by newcomers in terms of gameplay and graphics.

So, to retain old players and attract new ones, the devs jumped on what was the trend at the time and made magical mecha, “powered suits,” offering the basic model to all players in a free event.

To a top ranker like myself, Seraph, or most of Ainz Ooal Gown, the mecha were… worthless. A powered suit replaced the pilot’s stats, except HP and MP, with the suit’s. It allowed noncombatant classes like sage or alchemist to take on a more aggressive playstyle. Even better for the game’s popularity, a low-level player could compete with a high-level player in terms of attribute numbers, in theory.

In reality, the powered suit was considered full body armor. It therefore took up equipment slots. The result was what was functionally a naked high-level player, with the HP, MP, and PvP experience of a scrub. Suffice to say, rookies who thought they could join raids and other endgame content quickly found themselves disillusioned. 

That wasn’t to say the suits were unappealing. Noobs used them as leveling aids. Players whose races couldn’t fly naturally and lacked the spell used them as cheap mobility add-ons. They could also operate underwater and were largely immune to environmental damage so they had their place in exploration.

Mid-level fighter classes also sometimes used powered suits to add a bit of magic artillery to their playstyles. Sure, the suits could only store spells up to the tenth tier and they couldn’t be modified with metamagic, but it was still a neat wildcard to have in their back pockets. The main restriction here was the fighter’s MP, which likely wasn’t large to begin with.

Personally, I loved these things. I loved how customizable they were, with spell slots on their wrists, feet, torso, and even shoulder-mounted modules. I even agreed to power-level several rookies or sell them valuable information in exchange for their suits.

Combat wasn’t the only reason to acquire something, especially since I expected to keep it forever. Ultimately, as the Inari Okami, I couldn’t ignore such an important nod to Japan’s cultural zeitgeist.

Mecha was anime. Mecha was Japan. Mecha was the fiery passion of a man’s romance!

All that to say, I collected powered suits. No, I didn’t need them. No, I didn’t care. They looked cool and I could modify them like model Gundams. I couldn’t wait to ride around in one rapid-firing magic arrows and pretending they were plasma autocannons. They even made little “pew pew” sounds I modded just for authenticity’s sake.

Hobbies. I had them.

I looked them over. Briefly, I considered going back to that academy and gifting one of these to that Louise girl. Maybe Mekajiki or Otoro, those were beginner-friendly. The mages I saw didn’t seem like they knew anything about technology, or had ever conceptualized a HUD, but “big sword move fast” and “point and shoot” were pretty easy to understand.

No, that wouldn’t be right. Power was earned. If she wanted the power to conquer a country on her own, she’d better start reading the damn book I left her. I’d even made sure it was one of those attuned items just so people couldn’t steal the damn thing.

Or maybe I just didn’t want to part with my Gundam collection before I ever had a chance to ride them for myself. Yes, I had nine of them, but they were mine, damnit.

I must have spent at least an hour in the hangar, simply admiring my handiwork. Eventually, I moved on. The eighth chamber in the honden was a large, open space with walls that had been reinforced to be as magically inert and durable as possible. 

Countless seals hung from the walls, forming a complex matrix that would blunt the vast majority of magical damage. Beneath the warm, cherrywood tones, the walls and floor were further lined with a metal alloy that contained multiple caloric stones and enough celestial uranium to beggar most players.

I’d had a blacksmith contact sell me the recipe specifically so I could build this training hall. Here, I could practice almost every spell and martial technique from all of my classes without fear of ruining the rest of my refuge.

I moved to the center of the hall and thrust my spear experimentally. A tide of sensations flooded my mind, at once foreign and familiar. Cliche perhaps, but it really did feel like riding a bike again, like remembering the lyrics to a song I loved as a child and only now encountered again.

I thrust once more. This time, I stepped forward with my right foot. My step was gentle, like a dragonfly landing on a reed. Each strike made my step surer until I was flying through the hall with all the grace of the kitsune I now was.

A joyous laugh bubbled up from me. Truthfully, this was something I’d been unsure of, a big part of why I’d gone for a magic-heavy class.

I was a max level Monk as well as a Ki Master, of both the physical and spiritual varieties, even. Presumably, that should have made me a powerful martial artist with extensive skill chains, resistance to interruptions and status conditions, and the raw speed and agility to pick my battles. In-game, that’s exactly what I was.

Out here though… I hadn’t been sure. Spells were “fire and forget” in that I could point at something, say the name, then I’d get the output. Martial arts were a lot more nuanced than that and I hadn’t been sure that I’d inherit the skills as well as the raw parameters.

The only reason I kept my Monk and Ki Master classes was because I remembered Momonga dueling Shaltear using a spell called Perfect Warrior, temporarily mimicking Touch Me’s abilities. Even had he copied his friend’s attributes, dueling a True Ancestor vampire like Shaltear, and winning, should have been impossible had he not also received the skills that Touch Me’s class implied.

Still, it had never been explicitly confirmed, and so a risk, a question which I only now knew the answer to. I laughed like a loon and pranced around in a way that would have left me feeling terribly embarrassed. Here in the privacy of my temple, I allowed myself this much.

When I finally finished testing the limits of my new body, I headed to my living quarters. I felt giddy; I’d saved the best for last. Despite all the wonders in the Explorer’s Refuge, this was the place I’d been looking forward to most.

There was nothing special about this space. I had a living room, kitchen, bath, a private study, and a bedroom. It was, to the best of my ability, a recreation of a house from twenty-first century Japan. It was furnished, there were clothes I’d picked out, and the floor of my bedroom was lined with tasteful tatami mats. 

Materially speaking, it was the single least valuable of the nine chambers in the honden. And yet, had anyone pressed me to choose between my World Item spear and this suite, I might have seriously considered handing over my spear.

I cried.

I spent twenty-seven years living in an apartment the size of a shoebox. I slept where I ate because there wasn’t more room than that. The communal hotplate and microwave were the only nods to a warm meal. Baths were taken in shared showers reminiscent of car washes. For someone like me, who’d known only the brutal pragmatism of company housing, this little suite was paradise.

Once, a single slice of stale orange had brought me to tears. Its taste had been a spike of familiarity, a cruel reminder of the luxuries I’d taken for granted in the past. I’d felt so vulnerable then, scrubbed red and raw until old wounds had been torn open.

I was immortal now, a god. I had power and wealth beyond anything I could ever dream of. And should there ever come a time when I lacked a creature comfort, I could simply magic it up with Create Greater Item. But I’d yet to fully come to grips with that. It was so vast, like a child suddenly gifted a billion dollars.

This suite, however, I could understand. I could delight in the plush carpet beneath my feet. I could feel the smooth, marble countertop in the kitchen and know I’d never have to eat microwaved nutri-paste again. I could see the toilet and know no one else would bang on the door, shouting that my time was up and I’d better haul ass back to work.

I bolted into the bedroom. On one side of the room sat piles of futons. Literally dozens of them, rolled up and stacked like logs from floor to ceiling. On the opposite side was a similar pile made of pillows and blankets. It was beautiful, the work of a decade culminating in this moment of domestic bliss.

It was something I’d promised myself, the wisdom of Grandpa Foxtrot from way back when. He said that anything I put between me and the ground was worth spending money on. Shoes. Socks. Chairs. And of course, pillows and beds.

In line with grandpa’s wisdom, I promised myself that I’d find the plushest, comfiest bed possible, and I’d never let it go. Everything in the room was made of slightly different fabric or filling. I spent real money purchasing event-exclusive gimmicks and decorations just to expand my collection. People called me an idiot; it wasn’t like YGGDRASIL had tactile senses. But damnit, this was my Noah’s Ark. 

I smiled deliriously as I ran my fingers through each one. I took some pillows out, squishing them between my tails. They were all exquisite, but I ranked what I liked until I had a bedding combination for myself. I didn’t even know what these fabrics were called, only that these were the best of my collection.

I clutched an oversized pillow to my chest and allowed myself to drift off to sleep. “I would burn worlds for this pillow…”

X

Two weeks. I spent two full weeks dicking around in the Refuge. I fiddled around with my mecha collection, watched iconic movies and TV series via data crystal, and cooked real food from the vast stores beneath my living suite.

It was glorious.

I even delighted in doing chores, if only to prove to myself that I could do them if I wanted… for about five days. Then I created a platoon of shikigami familiars and summoned a zashiki warashi to command them all. Turned out, that was one aspect of owning a large complex that soon lost its luster.

But eventually, I had to move on. Though I could stay in the Refuge indefinitely, I had to admit that I was curious to see what lay beyond the torii gate.

I skipped merrily and tapped the crimson post. I was about to step through, then froze. In-game, the Explorer’s Refuge would deposit me wherever I’d been last.

I… didn’t really want that. I’d left in such a cool, mysterious way. What would happen if I just popped back up again? It wasn’t like I could claim to be checking up on Louise’s progress. How much could she have possibly learned in just two weeks?

I supposed I could say I was there to take the tome back, but that didn’t feel right. It’d be like giving a child a cupcake, only to snatch it back and eat it in front of them. It was pointlessly cruel, and not in a funny way.

I stood, paralyzed by my own social awkwardness. A part of me wanted to return to Tristain and announce my arrival with a huge, kingdom-wide prank. Go big or go home. But another part of me said there was nothing interesting there to discover… and being pestered for information about my “master” would be really annoying…

Then, I had a neat idea: What if I tested my teleportation magic?

YGGDRASIL had a lot of those. Practically every class had short-range “gap closers” like Blink, Misty Step, and Blitzkrieg that basically took you a few dozen meters in any direction. The distinction between a “dash” and a “teleport” got blurred fairly frequently in PvP.

Then there was “true” Teleportation, a fifth-tier spell that could be cast on the self and allies, albeit with a decent cooldown. Above that was Greater Teleportation at the seventh-tier, and Momonga’s favored Gate, which was a ninth-tier spell. The difference in tier was a function of several factors such as interruptibility, casting time, cooldown, maximum range, and whether the spell could target warded destinations or not.

My personal favorite was the World Penetration Gate, a spell exclusive to the World Explorer class. Every World-ranked class got an iconic spell that defined them: World Disasters got Grand Catastrophe, World Champions got World Break, and I got World Penetration Gate.

Just as World Break was an overpowered Reality Slash and Grand Catastrophe could be said to be a comically upscaled Nuclear Blast, World Penetration Gate was the superior version of… Gate. It was harder to interrupt, could ignore the vast majority of wards, and most importantly, could cross the Nine Realms.

All of it. Without using the game’s in-built teleportation waypoints or crossroads. I essentially had a dev’s map and could click on anywhere I’d been before to go there again. It was a huge part of what made ambushing me so damn difficult. It made me feel like a roaming legend from one of those old pokemon games.

More relevant in the present, it could also be used without a destination. In such a case, the torii gate would form absolutely anywhere across the Nine Realms at random, provided that the destination was a valid target and there was enough space for a torii gate to manifest.

I’d done some reading in the past two weeks. The lore behind my classes was the first thing I’d brushed up on. And now that there was no “Nine Realms” for me to roam, I came to a hypothesis: What if this spell could lead me anywhere?

What if I could truly explore the vast multiverse?

It might fail. I could just end up back at the academy, seeing how that was the only place in the New World I’d ever been to.

Or, I could go someplace new, perhaps an entirely new reality.

I grinned at the thought. “Only one way to find out!”

Author’s Note

Note that classes unlock a spell tier roughly every seven levels. “Tenth-tier,” while godly and unheard of for a New World mage like Fluder, is only about level 63-70.

After level 70, players pick up super-tier spells. The leader of an adamantite adventurer team named Red Drop rides one. He’s roughly considered to be about level 70-80 or so.

And so begins the fox’s journey across the multiverse. Will he show up in FMA to “lol nope” Ed’s fateful resurrection ritual? Will he teach Azula what a “master firebender” can really do? Will he give a random peasant in Westeros a flaming sword just for funsies?

Who knows? I sure don’t. Legit don’t have anything else written for this.

Shinto Shrine Glossary

Torii: Those pretty, red gates that don’t seem to serve any purpose.

Kaguraden: Stages used by shrines for dances.

Haiden: The outer shrine. The worship hall is usually here and is a place where petitioners can make offerings.

Honden: The inner shrine. This inner sanctum is usually accessible only to the priest and contains the goshintai.

Goshintai: The object that embodies the kami. It can be a sword, jewel, etc. and is thought that the kami can enter this object for various purposes.

Shide: Paper streamers shaped in zigzag patterns. These decorate holy places and are used in rituals.

Omamori: Amulets which are said to bring good luck, wisdom, or guidance. They’re the little, red things you see in anime.

Ema: Wooden plaques which contain wishes or prayers for the shrine.

Shimenawa: Hemp rope that is often found wrapped around sacred trees.