Chương 91: The Weight of Design

The boots moved again. Slowly. Then stopped. Domrek was giving him time. Domrek always gave him time. Domrek had probably given more people time than Kaito had ever spent thinking about anything. Kaito didn't turn around.

'Sable,' he said. His voice was low. He kept it in Japanese because he didn't have the energy to translate himself right now.

'I'm here,' Sable said. In Japanese too. She had been listening. She could match him.

'Tell me if I'm being stupid.'

'Try me.'

'She said the world was based on the game.' He kept looking at his hands.

'She said she put it there. On purpose.'

'She said that.'

'Then everything I designed is here.'

'A version of it.'

'Every dungeon I built to kill people is killing people.'

'That is one possible reading,' Sable said.

'Is it the reading you would go with.' She was quiet a moment.

'I would want more information before I said,' she said.

'But it is the reading a careful person would prepare for.'

'That's what I thought.' He stood up. He did it slow because his legs were still not being his legs the right way, but they held. He walked to the end of the dock and looked at the water for a second and then walked back and stopped in the middle. He didn't want to sit again but he didn't want to walk anywhere either. He stood. Tessara was still at the library door. She was not looking at him. She was giving him privacy the way an old librarian would, by being still and pretending not to see.

'I'm going to make a list,' Kaito said.

'All right.'

'Out loud. So you can catch me if I miss.'

'Go.'

'Ashfen,' he said.

'Starting village on the north road out of Verath's central tutorial zone. I put a grief quest in there. A woman whose husband and daughter died in a mining accident. Every new player who came through that quest learned how loss worked in the game. I wrote her dialogue over two nights on cold pizza. Her name was Halda.'

'Halda of Ashfen is on the current census,' Sable said. Quiet.

'She's alive.'

'Is her family.'

'No.' Kaito took that.

'Next,' he said.

'The Iron Cathedral. Dungeon I put north of Solara. Emotion-responsive layout. I made it that way because I wanted the encounter to feel personal — the boss would show you your fears, and the rooms would rearrange around what you were carrying in. It was a mechanic. I was proud of it.'

'It is doing what you designed it to do.'

'Which means every party that has ever run it has been forced to look at their worst thing while something with a very big axe hunted them.'

'Yes.'

'I told Domrek that was cool level design. Two months ago.'

'You did.' He laughed once. It was a bad laugh. It came out short and sharp and stopped.

'Next,' he said.

'The Glitch Labyrinth. Tutorial-adjacent area. I wrote the flavor text about a mage who broke a piece of the world by trying to look at it too directly. I wrote it because it was a fun way to explain why the puzzle rules changed halfway through. That mage was a piece of set dressing to me.'

'That mage was a person,' Sable said.

'His name was Aelwin. He is one of the people whose registration signature is in the Labyrinth's substrate. He is what makes the puzzle work.'

'How long has he been in there.'

'A long time.'

'That's a specific answer that isn't an answer.'

'You don't want the number today.'

'No,' Kaito said.

'I don't.' He rubbed both hands over his face. He was cold. The sun was not out and the beach had no fire on it and his coat was still damp from spray. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

'Next,' he said.

'Every wanted-poster template on every board in every town. I wrote three of them. Three templates. The system rotates them and generates the specific bounties. Every single one of those posters is describing a real person that another real person is going to try to kill.'

'Yes.'

'Every random encounter table.'

'Yes.'

'The bandit archetype in the woods outside Ashfen. I called them "Roadfell Bandits" because I thought it sounded gritty. Every one of them has a mother somewhere.'

'Yes.' Kaito was quiet a second. He'd been going to skip this next one. He didn't skip it.

'The Compact,' he said.

'Yes.'

'I designed the Compact.' He said it flat.

'The Vanguard Compact. Inquisitorial faction, anti-magic, anti-anomaly, structured on a three-tier officer chain with a shadow-priority ledger. I wrote the whole hierarchy on a Tuesday because I wanted a late-game antagonist faction that felt bureaucratic instead of evil. I wrote their creed. I wrote their bounty tiers. I wrote the doctrine that lets a senior officer terminate a target in the field without a hearing.'

'Yes,' Sable said.

'Level Three,' Kaito said.

'The classification they just used on me. I wrote that classification. I wrote it as a plot device.'

'Yes.'

'Nara Kesht took an oath to a set of words I wrote on a Tuesday.'

'She did.' He rubbed one hand across his mouth.

'Move on,' he said.

'I can't sit in that one.'

'Move on,' Sable agreed.

'Erebus,' Kaito said. He said the name and then he stopped. He waited for Sable to say something. She didn't. He said it again.

'Erebus,' he said.

'I gave him a philosophy. I wrote the backstory where his village was destroyed to teach him that everything ends. I wrote his sister dying in a flood because it would give the player a reason to feel bad about killing him at the end. I wrote it. On purpose. So the player would feel something.'

'Yes,' Sable said.

'He remembers all of it.'

'He does.'

'He remembers a childhood I wrote for him at a kitchen table on a Sunday.'

'Yes.'

'That's — ' Kaito stopped. He didn't finish the sentence. He couldn't find the plain word for what that was. He walked once around a small circle on the stones and then he stopped again.

'One more,' he said.

'Then I'm going to shut up.'

'Go.'

'The tutorial NPCs in the first hour. The three little ones in Ashfen who teach you how to swing a sword. I wrote their names in a spreadsheet as a joke. I named them after three of my coworkers.' He said the names, quietly, in Japanese.

'Yes,' Sable said.

'All three of them are alive. All three of them are named those things. They do not know why.' Kaito nodded at his hands. His hands were shaking again. He watched them do it and did not try to make them stop this time.

'Sable,' he said.

'How much of what I designed is people.'

'Most of it,' she said.

'The parts that are not people are places, and places have people in them.'

'Give me one thing that isn't my fault.' She was quiet a moment.

'The suns,' she said.

'The three suns. You did not put them there. You did not know about them when you designed the game. They were already here when Hana arrived, and they are older than her and older than you and older than anything you could have touched. If you want a piece of ground to stand on that is not on your account, stand on the fact that there are three of them and you did not draw one of them.' Kaito looked up. He hadn't looked up in — he didn't know how long. The sky was grey. He couldn't see all three of them right now.

He could see the one, faint through the cloud.

'Thank you,' he said.

'You are welcome.'

'I'm not standing on it yet. But I know it's there.'

'Good.' He drank from his flask because he needed something in his mouth that wasn't the taste of his own breath. The water was fine and cold and did not taste right. Nothing was going to taste right today. He put the flask away.

'Sable,' he said.

'One question.'

'Yes.'

'Hana said she put it there. She said the world was based on the game and she was the one who did it.' He looked at his hands.

'Is that the whole truth. Or is it what she believes about a bigger true thing.' Sable was quiet for a longer moment than usual.

'I think she believes it,' she said.

'I think she is very honest and she wrote a very short message and she wanted you to hear the part of it that would land. I do not know if it is the whole story. There are pieces of what I have seen that do not fit if she is the only cause. I would not tell you today which pieces. I want you to be able to stand up first.'

'So it might be worse than she said.'

'It might. It might also be different. That is not the same as worse.' He nodded. He didn't know what to do with that either. He filed it in the same place he was filing everything else today, which was a place he was going to have to open later, when he had the tools. Tessara had gone inside. He hadn't heard her go. She'd left the book on the bench. He looked at the book for a second. He didn't go pick it up. He walked to the edge of the beach where the stones met the sand and sat down on a low rock.

The Grey Line was thirty paces off. He could see Pell on the deck, tying a knot he didn't need to tie, giving Kaito the same kind of privacy Tessara had. He could see Oska by the wheel, watching the water and not him. He couldn't see Domrek. Which meant Domrek was moving. Domrek came down the gangplank at a normal walk. He came across the dock at a normal walk. He came past the bench and glanced at the book and did not touch it.

He came across the beach and stopped six feet from where Kaito was sitting and looked at him one long steady look.

'May I sit,' Domrek said.

'Yes.' Domrek sat. He didn't sit close. He sat about a person's width away, on the same low rock, facing the same water. He put his hands on his knees. He did not put his hand on Kaito's shoulder. He did not speak. They sat like that for a while. Kaito counted his breath. That was something he'd been taught to do a long time ago in a different life when a different thing had been going wrong. It still worked. After a while — he didn't know how long — Kaito said one thing.

'I built a bad house,' he said.

'And then somebody made it real. And now everybody who lives in it is real. And I don't know what to do with that.' Domrek did not say anything. Kaito hadn't expected him to. He hadn't said it to make Domrek talk. He'd said it because it was the smallest true sentence he could get out of his mouth, and he needed to hear it out loud before he could think about the next one. Domrek kept looking at the water.

After another while, Domrek breathed in like a man about to start a sentence, and stopped, and let the breath out, and shifted a little on the rock so his shoulder was in Kaito's line of sight without touching him. He was going to say something. Kaito could feel him getting ready to. He waited.