Chương 21: The Portal Ate My Drone

The next steps Scarlet took would come down to a simple question. Was the portal a 'right now' type of problem, or an 'after a meal and a nap' type of problem. Unfortunately, she had no prior experience with massive distortions in the fabric of space and time. Experience that would be helpful right about now. Gritting her teeth she took a single step towards the boundary of the clearing.

She wasn't even sure-her toe had fully crossed that invisible barrier – hadn't even known there was a barrier there – when a prompt popped into her field of view. [Enter Tier 1 Portal?] [Yes | No] She startled herself with just how quickly she pulled her leg back. The prompt disappeared. She stared at the distorted clearing for a while. Probed at it with her senses, old and new. It wasn't a large clearing, perhaps three, three and a half meters in diameter.

In the centre was the most obvious distortion, that lattice of colour that she had naively assumed was the portal itself. However, she had come to realize that the portal was the clearing. She hadn't missed this place in earlier scans because it hadn't existed before. A terrifying and awe-inspiring concept. She'd felt the force of the portal, the way it warped the world, the way those spatial energies had pressed into her, around her.

It had turned 'space' from a concept into a palpable force in a way she hadn't felt before. If it hadn't been for the prompt, for whatever failsafe the System had in place to prevent people from just being at the whims of these anomalies Scarlet couldn't imagine the kinds of chaos that could bring. She looked over at Maus, the Spatial Mouse. The little guy was grooming his face nonchalantly on her shoulder, and Scarlet had to wonder just what kind of force he'd grow into.

She went to give his head a little scritch until she realized she was holding the drone. Her eyes went from the drone to the portal, and back again perhaps three or four times before – made up her mind. Sending the drone into the distortion would help her answer the question about her next steps. Scarlet lowered the drone into position with a practiced motion. Instead of letting it fly freely, she routed the video feed into her phone through a direct link. It was a very long cable.

Then, she activated it with a flick of her thumb before guiding it forward. Though the device was low to the ground, it moved smoothly through the air, its small frame steady as it approached the boundary. Scarlet watched its progress through the feed. Just like when it had been flying overhead the cameras weren't picking up any of the distortion that Scarlet could see. However, the video wasn't static.

Through the screen she watched as the camera appeared to fisheye before stuttering and snapping back to normal, then zooming, or ballooning the picture in a single corner, or point of the frame. It wasn't pleasant to watch, but it mostly just looked like something in the software was glitching disturbingly, or that the hardware was malfunctioning. The drone made it almost a meter into the clearing, the feedback getting worse as it went before suddenly, nothing. The screen went black; the drone just disappeared.

It wasn't crushed, or warped, or thrown out of the clearing. It was just… Gone. The slackened cable dropped to the grass with a muted thud Scarlet couldn't hear over the pounding of her heartbeat. The portal ate her drone. No wonder anything that could get the hell out had fled. As she contemplated what this meant she began absentmindedly coiling the now ruined cable. It hadn't gone far, and so it didn't take long for the distorted end to come into view.

She brought the mutilated blob of what could now only charitably be called 'wire' to her face. Unlike the clean cutaway point she'd been expecting, the cable looked wrong. Warped, and pitted, like it had been burned, and frozen, and inverted. Simultaneously.

"Yeah," Scarlet drew out the word.

"Nope." She turned and began to walk away. No way on this green Earth was she about to enter that portal before she had a meal, a sleep, and a think. <-… -> Scarlet had re-entered the bunker, showered again, twice, reheated a meal for herself and her bond, and settled in the control centre to eat it. She would have loved a meal in leisure, but there was a giant, gaping hole in reality, literally in her own backyard. It really put a damper on any thoughts of relaxation.

So, instead of letting her mind rest, she did the healthy thing and got to work. She ate with one hand as she took another look at the quest in her Interface. With the other hand she pulled out the notebook she had dubbed 'Preliminary Plans Post-Apocalypse'. A safe zone, based on what she could deduce, was more than just a monster-free area. If administrative rights meant what she believed they meant, then safe zones were established settlements.

Settlement meant order, government, bureaucracy, and it meant dealing with the headache that unironically called itself civilization. Not only that, but the System would be – incidentally or by design – pitting her against the powers that be. Governments were known as 'administrations' for a reason. Not that she believed the status quo would last too long, however in the short term she had no interest in spearheading that type of conflict. Not when she had other, better, options. Could Scarlet deal with people?

Sure she could. Would Scarlet deal with people? Certainly. There were many situations in which there was no real other choice. Was Scarlet inclined to deal with people? Was she enthusiastic to take on a role that would so obviously expose her? Absolutely not. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. She had no desire to be a politician. She was no champion of humanity.

She had no feeling one way or another about how random strangers handled the rapidly changing world on an individual level. Sure, on a collective level she cared. She wasn't cheering on mass casualties, and she wasn't unsympathetic to some of the horrors people were sharing in real time that were caused by the Integration. Would that make her stick her neck out? Not on the lives of millions more. It might seem callous, however dying to save ten meant she wouldn't be alive to save hundreds.

More importantly to her, she wouldn't be alive, period. She wasn't okay with that. She opened the backend of STAR and found that the engagement had ballooned. Her site was filling a gap; for information, for communication, for connection. More than how to get new skills, or grind stats, it looked like most people just wanted to know they weren't alone. To share, to be seen, to be heard. Community. STAR was becoming a community.

She tweaked some filters and set some new functions to help moderate and curate the environment. See, Scarlet was great at this politics thing. Give people what they thought they needed so she could get what she wanted. She just didn't want to do it in person. Inconveniently, in order for those people to exist, and to continue to spend their time contemplating, iterating, and creating, they required a relatively safe environment.

Unfortunately, the most reliable way to assure peace and stability was through force, or the threat of it. And for once she wanted to be the one wielding it. That meant she need to be in a role of unassailable authority. This quest was her opportunity to begin doing just that. Of course, whether people knew she wielded that authority or not was entirely on them. So, she needed her own people. Not just any random people, people she trusted. That thought was so absurd a spontaneous chuckle burst out of her.

Okay, not people she trusted, but people she could trust to do a job, and people she could subordinate. Yes, that was much more likely.

"You know, buddy, I also have absolutely no intention of being the public face of an entire settlement." She narrowed her eyes playfully at him.

"You are the damage dealer of this little duo we have going on. I don't suppose you'd be interested in taking on some political battles as well?" Maus stared back at her with a vacancy so profound she wondered for a moment if he was sleeping with his eyes open. She probed the bond to ensure that there was, in fact, still an intelligence in there. And yep, he was still present, just, not paying her any attention at all. Apparently, he'd gained the ability to completely tune her out now.

The corners of her mouth twitched.

"Maus," she called.

"Buddy," she tickled the little guy and watched the life return to his eyes. Watched him scratch at his ear before latching onto her hand so he could groom her fingers. For a moment, an unassailable tide of emotion tried to overwhelm her. Feelings so achingly familiar they– She ruthlessly suppressed them. Such weakness would not be tolerated. She had neither the time, nor patience to indulge in such useless things.

Pulling herself together, she gently extracted her hand from Maus, stroking his head before she pulled up a secure messaging app on a screen. Just before she got back to work, she felt something subtly shift. She checked her log. Her vitality had just increased. What the- How? Why? Then she remembered: 'Vitality is increased through recovery' Recovery. Just what counted as recovery. She had hypothesized that the Guide had been referring to recovering from physical exertion and injuries.

However, the Guide had never explicitly stated that VIT only affected her physical body. Even if it did, was her mind not a part of her body? It only made sense that she could also improve her VIT by overcoming mental fatigue, and exhaustion. If that truly were the case, then what about emotional recovery, magical recovery?

"What a holistically sadistic little stat you are," she murmured to herself, scarcely registering that the corners of her own lips had pulled up just a little. She could work with this. Scarlet pulled out a completely new - 100% necessary, this one had grid paper - notebook and began to make notes. Her stats did not exist in a vacuum. Much as she'd often wished it were so, her mind was not independent of the rest of her, and she could not simply divorce herself from her emotions either.

If she was going to be strategic about getting stronger, becoming more powerful, she needed to think of every step of her progression as pieces of a connected whole; the various parts of her working in tandem to make up who she was. When she felt overwhelmed, a higher willpower would help her recover more quickly, boosting her vitality, just as a higher vitality would better support her intelligence when she was physically exhausted or her intelligence would inform her perception when she encountered something new.

She was aware she had been gearing towards a higher 'perception' and 'intelligence' build to help her leverage her strengths. However, she realized that it wouldn't be enough to just shore up her weaknesses. She couldn't just be exceptional in her strengths, she needed to be strong overall. It was the only way to truly get ahead and stay ahead. To not become painfully unbalanced or only able to leverage the bare minimum of her talents. Scarlet would not advance half-heartedly.

While her body may never be on par with her mind, she would make well sure it was strong enough to keep up. She'd always considered Dexterity as a stat that she would leverage for flexibility of thought instead of body. However, that increase in Vitality had shown her that she would be doing a grave disservice to herself if she didn't make full use of her physical stats as well. Not only that, but she had been primarily relying on Maus for combat capability. This wasn't necessarily bad, it just wasn't ideal.

What if they got separated? What if – any and all gods forbid – something took him out and then he was on a five-day cooldown. She'd be more than just alone, she'd be vulnerable. That Empathy trick she'd pulled off with the bat was neat, but she had no idea how she'd done it, no actual control over it, and no ability to practice it unless she was able to physically get to places where there were enemies that she could fight. If she wanted to hone her mental skills, she would need to hone her body.

It would simply be the rational thing to do. If she wanted to do that and keep her edge in this new world, it meant not relying on other people, even if those people were her bond. As much as she loved her little companion, there was no such thing as a guarantee in this life. She resolved herself that the next day, she would head into that breach. Wasn't the Guide always insisting she advance? Didn't she want information? Yes. She had a leg injury, but it wasn't crippling.

Her biggest issue would be the pain, and it wasn't like she was new to pushing through pain. So what if she wasn't at 100%. Until this new world had some stability, she couldn't count on always making a full recovery before being thrust into the next crisis. This would just be good practice. Tonight, she needed to send out messages to the people she wanted on the team she needed to assemble. In her Planning notebook she began working on a list.

She just really hoped the people she contacted hadn't been mauled to death by magical wildlife or murdered in the few hours since the timer ran out. Then she needed some rest before she dove back into her stat sheet. She had FS to allocate, stats to grind, and a head start she needed to capitalise on. She'd always planned to enter the portal, she just hadn't planned to do so this soon. With her new insights, and with everything she was seeing on STAR, she realized waiting wasn't an option.

She'd need to gain strength, absolute overwhelming power before she even considered completing her quest. From everything she'd read, that gaping spatial distortion on her property was the way to do it. First thing when she woke, she would prepare to enter the portal.