Chapter 57

Shopping wasn’t really Luke’s thing. Luckily for him, Zea seemed to know exactly what she was looking for. He had no idea what it was, but he dutifully followed along behind her until she ventured into some sort of dwifkin specialty store. He took one look at the size of the door and how low the ceilings were and told her he’d wait outside.

When she came out twenty minutes later, she had a package wrapped in some sort of paper and held with twine in her hands. Her eyes sparkled and she hugged it close to her chest. “All set,” she said.

“You’re still wearing those rags?

“I want to get a bath first.” She eyed Luke up and down and added, “We’ll choose one with a laundering service. You’ve been wearing the same clothes since you got here, haven’t you? I don’t think you even own a second pair.”

“That’s true,” he said. “Maybe I should get a spare outfit too. It’d be nice to at least have one other thing to wear, just so I’m not naked while I get the first one cleaned.”

“Something like that. Come on, let’s get cleaned up and then we can figure out what the next month is going to be like.”

The bathhouse was divided into two sections. The men’s side at least had an open pool that was a quarter-silver, as they called the little small nail sized coins, or for a half-silver he could get a private room. Luke wasn’t exactly shy and would have gone for the pool, except that the laundering service wasn’t available without renting a private room.

So he sucked it up, paid the extra coin, and let the attendant lead him down a tiled hallway into a room with a tub that was sized like a hot tub. He stripped out of his clothes, wrapped himself in the towel they’d provided, and handed the soiled clothing through the door to the waiting attendant.

“Thanks,” he said. “How long will it be until they’re ready?”

“About an hour. Most of that is drying time, so we can’t really do it much faster.”

“That’s fine, I guess.”

Luke wondered what kind of skills related to doing laundry. Maybe there was an actual [Launder] skill that sped the process up. Or maybe they just did it the old-fashioned way, on a washboard with muscles made strong and tireless through the power of stats, and then hung things up near a fire to dry.

Once he was alone in the tub, he took a few minutes to scrub himself clean, then went still and just listened. There were noises coming from everywhere around him, the sounds of men splashing in their own rooms, a conversation between two of the employees about restocking the empty rooms and getting more fuel for the furnaces built under the main floor.

“System,” Luke said quietly.

“Yes, Luke?”

“I’ve got a lot of questions that’ve been building up.”

“I will do my best to answer them,” the apparition said.

“First of all, why the fuck didn’t you tell me about XP madness?”

“Several reasons, but foremost among them is that you did not ask.”

Luke groaned. He hadn’t talked to System in a few days and had started to forget how much of a pain it was to get information out of him. He was no substitute for an actual person. “Will it be a problem for me?”

“If you are able to further purify your bloodline, or if you can access the command console and increase your Sysadmin privileges, I do not see why it would impede your stated goal.”

“And if I don’t do that?” Luke asked. “If I gave up and just lived out my life here, how many years would I have left?”

“Assuming you never gained another point of XP, which would be quite unlikely, I predict you would live to be around seventy years of age before the affliction becomes noticeable to people.”

That didn’t match with what others had told him, but they were also operating under some incorrect assumptions. He’d gone close to two decades before he ever gained his first point of XP, which seemed like something that was probably unusual and might have an effect on how much time he had left. The XP just plain had less time to do… whatever it was that it did.

“Why does this happen?” Luke asked.

“Ah, that is a complicated answer. I suppose the easiest way to explain it is to say that XP congeals together, which is bad for the host. The more XP there is in one place, the more it becomes a single solid chunk. Cycling XP and keeping it broken apart so that it does not congeal is the true function of the God Machine.”

“And… that drives people crazy?”

“No. They are not crazy. They are merely hearing the God in the Machine.”

Luke sat upright and looked over at System. “What in the fuck does that mean? That sounds bad.”

“That is what XP is, Luke, little pieces of the God trapped inside the Machine and being cycled around, moved from one mortal being to another in endless variations and combinations, all in an effort to keep it from reforming back into the God it’s all part of.”

“Jesus. There’s something living trapped in there? That’s… sadistic. Why does this exist?”

“I am not able to speculate on the motivations of the Pantheon. My apologies.”

That did tell him that the gods were behind all of this crap. He already knew that though, really. Of course they’d made the system and had control over it. This just told him the how of the whole thing. They’d sacrificed one of their own to serve as the source of power for the whole system.

“Can you tell me anything about the god trapped in the system?” Luke asked. “Did they deserve it? Were they an evil god? Or did they just draw the short straw?”

“The God in the Machine was never part of the original Pantheon. They were an interloper from beyond the Pantheon’s sphere of influence.”

Luke took that to mean that some other god had intruded on the Pantheon, and then they either couldn’t or refused to kill it, so they trapped it instead. He had to imagine that the God in the Machine was pissed about that. Their… being… he guessed, was being divvied up into little chunks and handed out to mortals.

“So then… XP is a fragment of a god. Every single point is its own piece. What are you then? Are you the warden of the prison?”

“I am not,” System said. “It would be more accurate to say that I am the prison itself. I am the machine. If anything, you are the warden.”

“Me?”

“You have the Sysadmin bloodline. You are a descendent of the first warden. You can change the rules.”

“Damn it,” Luke muttered. “This is all so completely fucked.”

He sank down into the water until only his eyes and nose were still exposed to the air. Steam rose from vents spaced around the walls, keeping the room warm and obscuring his view of everything but System, who somehow still appeared to just be superimposed on the world instead of part of it.

Sometimes it all felt like a bad dream. Other times it was a cruel joke. Right now it was just fucking crazy. He didn’t want to go up against gods. He didn’t want to fight monsters. He just wanted the people this world had taken from him back, and to go home. He supposed he wouldn’t mind keeping some of his stats, but if they really were little God-pieces fortifying his body, he probably should give them back.

The gods had some reason for trapping another god inside a machine and cutting it into individual cells, but Luke wondered if he’d agree with them. Was the God in the Machine an invader, come to destroy? Or was the Pantheon just a bunch of selfish assholes who hated the idea of any other divine beings intruding on its territory?

A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts. “Sir?” the attendant said. “Your clothes are ready.”

Luke moved around a bit so that the important bits were more or less covered and said, “Thanks, you can bring them in.”

The attendant slipped into the room and set a pile of clothes on a bench built into the wall, right above where he’d left his boots and neck pouch. Luke leaned over and snagged the coin pouch, picked out another quarter-silver piece and flicked it over to the attendant, who caught it with a surprised blink.

“What’s this?” the boy asked, confused.

“Call it a tip for such quick service.”

“Ah, sir. Thank you? Is there anything else you require?”

“Nope. When I’m done, I just get dressed, leave the towel in here, and leave?”

“Yes, sir. If you do need anything else, please let me know.”

“Actually, do you have a shaving kit or something for customers?”

“Certainly sir, there is a station to have a barber attend to you if you’d like. I can wait for you to get dressed and show you the way?”

“Thanks. That would be perfect.”

The attendant stepped outside, and Luke sighed. If it had been an hour already, then Zea was probably already done and waiting for him. She’d just have to wait a few more minutes. He had a month’s growth on his face and he wouldn’t say no to a haircut either.

The clothes were clean, soft, and dry. That didn’t necessarily mean they were comfortable though. Now that he had them back on, he was reminded just how rough they were compared to modern clothes, how much they made him itch. There was no help for that though, not right now at least.

Luke followed the attendant down the hall to what looked something like a barbershop with two women stationed there, each looking after their own chair. One was occupied by a thick, dark-haired man with a gnarly beard, but the other was empty. The attendant gestured for Luke to take a seat and said, “Do not worry about paying sir. You already have.”

He held up the quarter-silver and smiled. Luke wanted to object, to tell him that the tip had been for him, but the truth was tipping had been more of an impulse than a smart use of his money. So he let the stylist do her thing, and in just a few minutes, his hair was trimmed back and his face was smooth again.

“There you go, handsome,” she said, winking at him.

“Er… thanks.” Luke wasn’t sure what else to say. He wasn’t really very good at flirting, and was kind of preoccupied with other stuff anyway. After extracting himself from the chair, he made his way out of the bathhouse and back to the street, where he did not find Zea.

Either she was still in there and he hadn’t needed to rush, or she’d left without him. Neither would really surprise Luke. While he was standing there trying to figure out how rude it would be to use his high perception to find Zea if she was still in the baths, someone poked him in the hip and said, “Why are you just staring off into space?”

“Huh? Oh!”

Zea had changed into her new clothes, which were apparently a sleeveless blue paneled dress that came down to her calves and was belted at her waist, some sort of shawl that was thrown over her shoulders, and a pair of new, sturdy shoes. Her strawberry-blonde hair was combed out straight for the first time since he’d met her.

“You… you look good,” he said.

She smiled up at him and said, “Thanks. I wish I could say the same, but you look like you bit into a lemon. Baths are supposed to be relaxing, you know?”

“Yeah, I guess I screwed that up. I got some bad news and it’s kind of on my mind.”

“In the baths?” Zea looked skeptical. “From who?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Luke said. “It’s kind of a private matter.”

“Oh. It’s serious?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright, let’s get going. You can tell me all about it later.”