Chương 72: 2.30 Lux Aeterna - Clint Mansell (3:54)

Z3ke (Original Poster) Okay. We're done talking about my depression. I'm not going to add anything more and I'm not going to talk about what my life was like before I got to this world. I've answered enough of your questions, and as far as I'm concerned, this whole conversation is finished. If you all want to keep picking at it and discussing it, you can do it somewhere else. I'm just going to finish telling you all about the Witness Chambers, and then I'm taking a few days to rest.

I already went over how Patch and I got down to the Under-MIZ and found the Chambers, so I'm not repeating all that. We found ourselves in a massive circular room with a stone dais/plinth thingy in the middle. The entrance was sealed up behind us, plunging most of the room into darkness. That didn't really help that much because the room was so big that the light just got swallowed up before it could reach anything useful. I was kinda freaked, and something about the whole situation felt kinda off.

My brain did what it always does when something feels wrong, which is obsess over the situation until the dots started connecting, even if those dots didn't make any sense to connect. I started thinking about Binary and about how he'd acted when I first started writing up my experiences in this world. I thought about how he'd always been kind of a dick, and how when he became my Primary it seemed like he was trying to hide something from all of you.

He was trying to get me to do something without letting all of you know about it, and now that I was trapped in the Witness Chambers with the exit sealed behind me, I started thinking: maybe he planned all this. Maybe this was a setup. Maybe it was a way to screw me over. Maybe he was using all that lore and canon knowledge that I don't have because I've never played any of the games, and he's trying to push me into a situation that would get me killed.

That thought didn't really sit well with me and all the frustration and anger that had slowly been building up over the past month or two - my anger at the forum and at the local scavengers and at myself - started to boil over. Instead of ranting and raving and cursing and screaming, I pushed those thoughts down. It didn't matter if Binary had tried to screw me over. Getting mad wasn't going to get me out of the room. I felt my Persona skill kick in and calm me down.

Patch was standing a little off to the side, watching me. He saw the moment my Persona skill kicked in and it looked like it had taken him aback slightly. Then this look crossed his face and I still don't fully understand it. It was equal parts confusion and regret and acceptance. It didn't make sense to me, and instead of trying to figure him out, I turned my attention to the rest of the room. There were walls and darkness and a stone dais in the middle. And nothing else.

But before I could bemoan that lack of anything that could get me out of that room, my Puzzle Intuition activated. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm not a writer. I can describe objects just fine. Place me in front of a tool or a house or something like that and I can tell you what it looks like and jot down a few descriptive words. But when it comes to experiences and emotions and all the other things outside the norm that have been happening to me lately, it gets so much harder to explain.

The best way I can describe the Puzzle Intuition skill activating was by saying that it felt like a muscle I never had before suddenly started twitching. Which… kinda sounds stupid. Let me try it another way. Imagine that you've lived your entire life with two arms - as most humans do. You know how they move and you know how they feel and you don't even think about them. You just move them. If you want to pick up a glass of water, you just do it.

Now imagine that you wake up one day and there's a third arm growing out of your back. Are you going to know how to move it? Are you going to know how not to move it? Or is it just going to be there twitching and reacting and doing things that you don't fully understand? That's what it felt like. I read something once about how hard it is to explain things that don't have a direct comparison. When talking about food you can say something tastes like chicken. But how do you describe something ineffable?

How do you describe color to a blind man? I've thought about that a lot and realized that there is a way you can describe color. Light blue is the feeling of a perfect day. There's a soft, gentle breeze that brushes across your skin and the sun is warm on your face but not overwhelming. There's a light breeze of air that exists just outside your body and it moves with you and whispers to you. That's how to describe light blue.

Aquamarine is more like when the sun is too hot and you're sweaty and sticky and your clothes are too heavy and they're clinging to you. You come across a water fountain in the park and you know that the water is going to be lukewarm because that's how all park water fountains are like. But today, you press the little button and let the water run across your skin and it's somehow cold and it resets everything for a second. Red is for frustration.

It's the pressure that slowly builds in your forehead, just behind your eyes, and it spreads through your body and makes everything go tight. Yellow is for fear, but not the panicky kind. It's more the kind of fear that you get when you're staring at a barking dog and you know that you're bigger and stronger and can fend it off, but you also see its sharp teeth and snapping jaw and you know that you're not getting away without taking at least one bite.

Green is for confidence and the color of the day where everything is going right for you. Your body moves right and your steps feel light and your hair - which is usually a tangled mess that blows in your face with the wind - somehow just falls the way that it should. People look at you and smile without knowing why. There's a bounce in your step and you feel like everything is coming up roses. So you can explain color to a blind person.

That's easy compared to trying to explain what a skill activating in your body feels like. My Puzzle Intuition skill activated and there was this buzzing in the back of my head. Except, it wasn't a buzzing sound. It was more a buzzing pressure. It was like something was trying to get my attention and point me in the right direction but it didn't know how to communicate. It kept pulling my attention, first to the wall and then to Patch. Then back to the wall and then to Patch again.

Every time I looked at Patch he had that same look on his face that I mentioned before. It was half confusion and half resignation and half acceptance, and if you're going to complain about there being too many halves then you're starting to understand how I felt trying to decipher his look. I sat in the middle of the room and stared at the wall, trying to figure out what my Puzzle intuition was trying to tell me. Then I opened up my dimensional storage space.

I figured that if this was a puzzle, maybe there was something there that could help me. I started pulling out random bits and bobs of what I had: leather scraps, tools, food, my canteen, some clothes, and a whole bunch of other junk that I'd been carrying around. One by one I picked those things up and waved them at the wall, trying to feel something that might get the buzzing to react. Nothing was hitting though. The knife from the Pale Regiment didn't do anything. The books and the elixir were next to useless.

Even my busted and torn Converse All-Stars that I couldn't get rid of even though they were falling to pieces, didn't do anything for the buzzing. I must have looked ridiculous, sitting there in the middle of the room, surrounded by a pile of junk that I'd been waving at the walls. Patch didn't say a word though, he just kept an eye on me as I grabbed more and more items from my dimensional storage space.

Finally, I grabbed the sensor stalk that I'd looted from the Hemocyte Swarm back in the Fossilized Factory Belt. It was the thing that you all complained about when I looted it and called it vendor trash. It was a bunch of mismatched lenses that had been layered on top of each other, mixed with a few mechanical pieces that clicked when they were moved. The moment I grabbed it, the buzzing in the back of my mind changed. It grew sharper and more focused, letting me know that I was on the right track.

My eyes drifted back to the walls of the room and I had a thought. Light. That's what I needed. To get into the room I was forced to shine my flashlight over a bunch of graffiti on an illusionary wall, and that opened up the stone path to the room. Wouldn't it stand to reason that I'd have to do the same thing here to get out of the room? I grabbed my flashlight and tried to rig the sensor stalk onto it. It wasn't really a good job on my part.

I basically just held the thing in front of the flashlight beam and hoped for the best. I adjusted the angle of the flashlight and started sweeping it across the wall. I don't know what I expected… maybe suddenly the wall would glow and there'd be a big EXIT sign that would let me go outside. But none of that happened. I felt my hopes die a little bit, and for a second I thought that I'd completely misread the signals coming from my Puzzle Intuition skill. Then I shifted the sensor stalk a little bit.

There are these tiny lenses on it, like little flaps that fold in and out. I hadn't messed around with them much because they didn't seem too important, but when I clicked one of them down over the flashlight, something in the room changed. Faint markings started to glow on the formerly bare walls. They looked like ink that was slowly soaking through thin paper. I froze and leaned in and realized that the markings were writings, but I couldn't read any of it. I frowned and adjusted another lens on the sensor stalk.

The markings shifted a bit. I was still pointing my flashlight at the same spot on the same wall, but the writing had suddenly changed. Patch made a quiet "hmm" behind me as he took in the writing, but I ignored him as I swept my flashlight across the room. Whenever I flipped a lens down - or a combination of lenses - the walls changed and showed something new. There were dozens of different languages on the wall, all layered over and on top of each other. Unfortunately, I don't speak 12 different languages.

Yea, I grew up in New York and I've met people from seemingly all the countries, but I never picked up another language beyond some very questionable Spanish. And since I wasn't seeing puta or pendejo anywhere on those walls, I doubted I was going to be translating anything. Some of the languages looked Mandarin, or maybe Japanese or Korean.

I honestly can't tell you what the difference is between those languages other than one has incredibly complicated characters and the other has even more complicated characters. There were fragments of French and German, something that might have been Dutch, and there was also Cyrillic. I don't know if it was Russian Cyrillic or if it was Czech or Latvian. I don't even know if those languages use different scripts and I'm being unfortunately hateful in my description of the languages.

Again, languages aren't my forte, and suddenly I was in a room filled to the brim with them. But wait, it was so much worse, because they changed. Staring at the wall, it felt like someone had taken a set of instructions on how to build an IKEA dinner table, and then ran each section through google translate a couple times. I saw a sentence that was in French and it stopped halfway through. I flipped a lens on my flashlight and the same sentence suddenly continued in Italian. That's not even the worst part.

I shifted my feet a bit and noticed that the sentences changed when I moved. At first I figured that I just needed to figure out the right lens combination on my flashlight. I'd be able to stand in one spot, flip through everything, and then figure it out. But nope. That was completely wrong. I actually had to shift and move to get the whole view of the puzzle. The sentence that had once been in French, if I moved a few steps to the side and flashed the light, was suddenly in Urdu or Farsi.

I walked around the room and tried to jot down all the new sentences, but at the same time I knew it was kinda pointless. The buzzing of my Puzzle Intuition grew steadier and a notification popped up in the corner of my vision, letting me know that I'd ranked up. Even with that though, I couldn't really understand the puzzle that I was looking at. Thoughts about the forum started popping up in my mind.

I realized that if I had been able to post everything here, all the screenshots and the notes I took, you guys would have had a field day. Someone would have run everything through Google Translate to explain what the sentences meant, someone else would have cross-referenced everything, and you'd all eventually piece together the whole thing in an hour or two.

I was actually about to pull out my Tech Slate to check in with you when I remembered the thoughts that had first came to mind when I realized I was stuck in this world. I was still pissed at Binary, rightfully or not, and didn't want to deal with any of you guys. Instead, I'd try to stumble my way through the puzzle on my own. I walked along the wall and shined my flashlight and changed my angle and all the sentences shifted and morphed into one another.

While I was pacing around, trying to make sense of the world's smallest Tower of Babel, I realized that this room wasn't just a translation puzzle. I mean, sure, if I wanted to solve this thing then I needed to figure out all the languages on the wall. But it was also something like… a perspective puzzle. You couldn't understand the whole thing just by standing in one spot and reading all the languages. You needed to move and shift and combine all that you saw into a single whole.

You needed to take pieces from completely different viewpoints and try to mash them all together. It kinda reminded me of this book that I bought once as a Christmas present for someone. It was called Cain's Jawbone. The book is one big puzzle where every single page of it is out of order. It's a mystery novel and the only way to solve it is to physically take the book apart and rearrange all the pages until the story actually makes sense. That's what this whole room felt like.

All told, it was a giant pain in the ass. I walked around the room in a slow circle and flipped the lenses on my flashlight. Whenever I caught a fragment of a sentence that looked important, I'd stop and crouch down and scribble it all in my little notebook. Then I'd take a few more steps, flip another lens and check the same spot again to see what changed. Then I'd compare, and repeat, and move on. About thirty minutes into the whole exercise and I was ready to lose it.

I couldn't understand most of what I was looking at. There were dozens of different languages that were shifting and morphing in front of me. And even if I could translate all those languages, I still wouldn't have any idea on what I was supposed to do. The instructions kept shifting depending on where I stood, so what does that mean for solving the puzzle? I was seriously thinking about just throwing my hands in the air and asking Patch if he had any idea on what to do.

I turned to him and he was standing in the middle of the room, right on top of the stone plinth thingy. When my flashlight passed over him I noticed small markings carved into the base of the stone plinth. Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. They were shallow and barely visible, so it was no wonder that I'd missed them before. The only reason I could see them now was because of my flashlight. I walked over and crouched down to take a closer look.

The top of the dais/plinth was segmented into these wedge-shaped pieces - like slices of pie - that were all fitted together into a circle. There were tiny seams between them that were just barely wide enough to get a fingernail into it if you tried. I worked my fingers into one of the gaps and pried a piece loose. It popped out easier than I expected, which made me realize that the pieces probably were designed to be loosened.

I slowly worked my way through all the pieces until I had them all scattered around me on the floor. Each of the wedge pieces had different markings on them, and looking at them all made me figure out how the puzzle was supposed to work. I think that you're supposed to solve it by reading all of the walls around the room. You've got to translate all the languages, combine them all together, and then adjust for the shifts in perspective.

Imagine you get one section and the sentence is in French and it tells you to add 2 + 2. Then you walk a few steps and another language, maybe Mandarin or something, adds a condition like "subtract 3 from the result." The real answer would then be 1 instead of 4. Does that make sense? You read through all the instructions, follow them, add in the extra conditions, and then input the final answers into the plinth using those wedge pieces. That's how the puzzle is supposed to be solved. But that's not what I did.

I brute forced the whole damn thing. I picked up one of the wedge pieces and held it over a slot and waited for the buzzing of my Puzzle Intuition to react. If it was weak, I knew to move the wedge to another slot. If it was strong, I knew to place it down. I picked up a piece, moved it around and waited for the feeling. I picked up another, moved it around and waited for the feeling. I picked up a piece and… you know the drill. I didn't completely ignore the puzzle.

There were symbols on the wedge pieces and they matched up to a few things I'd seen on the walls, so you can say I used that as a loose guide for everything. But mostly, I just trusted my Puzzle Intuition. It might not have been the "right" way to solve it, but it worked. Piece by piece I rearranged the entire top of the dais/plinth. The buzzing got stronger as I closed in on the final answer. When every piece was finally locked in I heard a satisfying click and the symbols on the wedges glowed faintly.

Then the room reacted. A low grinding sound rolled through the chamber. My head snapped up just in time to see a section of the wall shift and open. I grinned and turned to look at Patch who'd been watching me work the entire time. He glanced over at the opening, let out a small sight, and then looked back at me.

"Well, good job. Let's go see what you just unlocked, shall we?" We stepped into a smaller chamber than what we'd just left. It was still big, but… well, the size wasn't the only difference. Where the last chamber was completely empty, this one wasn't. There was a man seated in a chair in the middle of the room, looking completely out of place. The chair was big and padded and I could imagine it being something you found in a hoarder's living room.

It was like one of those La-Z-Boy chairs that you could put your feet up in. Wrapped around it and threaded throughout it were these strange tube things. Tubes or cables or… thin metal arms maybe. Whatever they kept the man latched into his chair. Patch moved up beside me and he stared down at the man in the chair. His entire demeanor had changed from before, when I was solving the puzzle. Back then he'd been more reserved and resigned, but now he was… quiet. He almost felt reverent.

He leaned forward just a little and squinted down at the man, then said under his breath "... well I'll be damned."

"What?" He didn't look my way, instead he kept his eyes on the figure in the chair.

"That," he said in a low voice, "is the Unfed Witness." I blinked at that. Binary had mentioned a Witness, but Patch calling him the Unfed Witness felt pretty important. Patch looked over at me and caught the confusion on my face.

"I thought you said you were hunting for him?"

"Uh…I said I was going to find the Witness. But you're adding a whole new name to him." He scratched at his jaw a bit, like he was trying to figure out how to explain something that he didn't completely believe in himself.

"Okay. So, this is gonna sound like some campfire nonsense, but bear with me." He gestured vaguely towards the man in the chair.

"Folks talk about him. You hear it from other adventurers. I traveled around a lot and got to talking a lot and heard all sorts of stories that people pass around. He's an urban legend except…well." He gestured towards the man again.

"Well, looks like this one turned out to be real." He stepped closer to the chair and leaned in to get a better look.

"Story goes, before the Fracture this man worked for the government. He was some kind of analyst or something, doing real high-level government work. They said that he had a gift." I raised an eyebrow.

"What kind of gift?"

"Well, the man could take in information like nobody else. You throw a bunch of numbers and data at him, and he'd take it all. He'd grab all the conflicting viewpoints, all the garbled mess of information, and he'd sort it out and turn it into somethin' useful. The stories go that he could look at the whole world from a thousand angles at once and still make sense of it." I glanced back at the room behind us, at the mess of languages and the fact that they shifted and morphed depending on where you stood.

"The puzzle."

"Yep," Patch nodded.

"Except that room's just a cheap imitation of what it's said he could do." He straightened and I saw him glance around the room, taking it all in. He looked at the man and at the tubes that were coming out of him. Each tube slithered away into various machinery parts that were scattered about the room.

"It's said that the government, when they knew what he could do, built a room for him. Or somethin' like that. All this tech," he pointed around at the cables and the machines and the man seemingly fused into the chair, "it was meant to let him stretch his ability out. He could see across the entire MIZ." I felt my breath catch in my chest. So Binary wasn't lying about that.

"Well, that's the story anyway. Actually, the story said he could see way more than just The MIZ."

"So then what happened?" I asked. Patch let out a snort.

"What always happens in these types of stories. The Fracture hit and everything went to hell. Most stories end with him dying in the Fracture, afraid and alone after witnessing all that chaos and death." He glanced around at the different machines.

"But…"

"But what?" I prodded.

"Well, it looks like this tech is scrambled. Whatever was keepin' this whole setup stable…isn't anymore." Silence reigned in the room for a bit, both of us left to our own thoughts. I don't know what Patch was thinking, but I was wondering what next? Binary had promised that if I found the Witness I'd get answers to any question that I asked. Looking down at the withered man in the chair, that obviously wasn't going to happen.

"What about the 'unfed' part?" I asked.

"I heard the story saying that he was the Witness. I didn't hear anything about him being the 'Unfed Witness.'" Patch paused and grimaced at my question. Then he sighed before turning back to me.

"Yea. They called him the Witness cause he sees, right? That's what he does. They call him Unfed because…well," he gestured towards all the machinery.

"He can't see without input. He needs data. He needs experiences. He needs perspectives. He's gotta consume it, in a way. But there ain't much of that down here, is there. Also, it's not like he was able to call for takeout, was he?" I looked at the man in the chair again and his body was wrong. It was withered and thinned down to almost nothing. Skin was stretched tight in some places and sunken in others.

There were bed sores all over his body, and where his back met the chair I couldn't tell where he ended and the chair began. It looked like he'd grown into it, or the chair had grown out of him. The cables and those thin metal arms weren't just holding him in place, they were part of him now. They were threaded through his flesh and they disappeared under his skin. It was obvious that the man had been there for a very long time.

"Unfed," Patch said softly.

"Starved of data. Starved of interactions. Starved of…well, everything. These systems look like they kept him alive, but barely. If he's from before the Fracture, well, he's been here long enough that folks stopped thinking he was real." Silence stretched for a few seconds and it was interrupted by a soft, wheezy voice.

"I see you." The voice was dry and thin, like it hadn't been used in years.

"I see you both." The man's eyes opened, barely, and shifted just enough to look at the two of us.

"I see everything you are, and everything you have done." My eyes went wide and I found myself taking a step back, suddenly frightened of this emaciated man latched into a chair in the middle of a room. I looked over at Patch but he was ignoring me now, completely engrossed in the Witness.

"I see you both…but not much more than that."

"Uh…" I couldn't think of what to say to that. I mean, what could you say to that? Whenever thin, malnourished dudes in New York babbled at me with strange sentences, I always averted my eyes and walked around them.

"I used to see the city," he continued. Patch stepped up closer to the man and I had the odd thought that it looked like a son kneeling by his elderly father's death bed.

"I used to see all of it. I saw every street, every moment, every decision. I used to see more than that. I used to see beyond it. I saw patterns outside your walls and threads you couldn't begin to understand." He blinked and slowly, with as much effort as he could bring to bear, he shifted his head to take in Patch standing next to him.

"I am weak. My eyesight is failing." There wasn't any self-pity in his statement, it was just a fact.

"Even if it wasn't…I'm tired." I saw Patch stretch out his hand and cover the Witness' liverspotted one.

"Tell me," the Witness whispered.

"Are you here to end my life?" What the hell do you say to something like that? The Witness was just sitting there asking if I was here to kill him and I just froze. My brain kept trying to reframe it into something simpler. I tried thinking of this all like you do: that this is just a game world and this was a quest and here was an NPC. But I couldn't. He wasn't just some objective. This was a man sitting in front of me.

"I.." I started but couldn't finish the sentence. He watched me struggle with my response and I got the feeling of a deep sense of tiredness radiating from him.

"I do not wish to see anymore," he said quietly.

"I am rotting…in a prison that I helped to build." I looked around at all the machines that were scattered about the place and tried to think of what the room must have looked like back before the Fracture. This place had been built for him. This place had been made specifically to work with the man's sight. But it was broken now. If everything that both Binary and Patch said was true, this man used to be able to see everything, but now his sight only extended throughout this room.

"My sight fades. My reach collapses. What once expanded me now only sustains the barest of functions. I'm alive, but I'm not living." There was silence again and I opened my mouth, trying to find something to say. Patch beat me to it.

"Yea. Figured as much," he said softly. I turned to him to find him staring at the Witness. There was something settled in his face, like he'd made a decision a long time ago and was only just now getting around to acting on it.

"I can do it. I can end it for you." There was relief on the Witness' face. It was a slight easing in his muscles, as if he was finally allowed to set down a burden.

"Names Patch, and I'm a pathfinder too." He jerked his head towards me while still looking at the Witness.

"That's why I tagged along with this one. He said he was out here searching for you, and I figured I'd take a look too. I get it. It's the end of the road and all that. I'll help." Both of them looked my way, expecting me to say something but I couldn't think what. Then I remembered what Binary had said about the Witness being able to answer any question, and I steeled up my nerve to ask. Both of them gave me a small smile. Hundreds of questions ran through my head in that moment. How do I get back home?

How do I find a way back to New York? Why the hell am I in this world? What happened to me? All those questions flittered around my head, but only one seemed pressing in that moment.

"How do we get out of here? This room locked us in when we walked down that passage, and I don't really want to be stuck down here." The Witness was quiet for a moment before gathering up his strength and whispering his answer.

"There is a way, but it requires the system to work." The machines around us seemed to beep in mocking tones at that. We needed to free the Witness from the machines, but at the same time they were the only thing that would set us free.

"The machines must be operated," he added.

"The chamber only responds to someone who can see. But I am too weak now." Just like that, whatever hope I'd been holding onto fell away. I looked at Patch, wondering if he knew what we could do to find a way out. He was already looking at me with that same expression he had on when I was solving the puzzle: resigned acceptance. It was like he'd already known this was coming. He let out a slow breath and cracked a small smile.

"You know, I've been thinking about expanding the Roaring Drake." I blinked at that, wondering what the hell he was saying. We were stuck down here with no way out, and he was talking about his bar.

"What?"

"A satellite location," he went on, like we weren't standing in a room with a dying man wired into a machine.

"I was thinking it might be nice to have something a little more underground." He gestured around us.

"There's a real rough crowd in the Under-MIZ. But they pay well. All you need is someone to keep the rowdy types in line and make sure everyone behaves themselves." It took me a second to understand what he was saying, but then it hit me.

"No," I said immediately. Patch chuckled at that.

"C'mon. Picture it. It's a bit cramped in here, but I'll make it work. I can expand out into that chamber out there. Set the entrance up in those buildings up top. Spruce the place up and I can take a bunch of the customers from the Anchor Guild."

"Patch-""I knew what this place was when we were nearby," he said, cutting me off.

"Hell, I knew what we'd find when I first started on this little adventure. I knew that it would lead to something like this." I shook my head.

"That doesn't mean you have to-""Somebody does," he said simply. The Witness cut in at that moment, as if he knew what both of us were going to say and he wanted to skip ahead in the conversation.

"The system requires a mind capable of integration. It requires…perspective." His gaze rested on Patch.

"You are suitable." Patch gave a small smile.

"Yea. I already figured." I clenched my jaw.

"There's gotta be some other way." None of them responded, which was enough of an answer that it stabbed into my chest. We didn't say much after that. I mean, what can you say? What can you do? Both the Witness and Patch had made up their minds and this was going to happen. Patch and I worked on the chair and the Witness. The cables were threaded through the man's muscles and, after getting an up close look at everything, Patch turned to me.

"Gonna need a hand," he said. My stomach twisted but I nodded and we got to work. We carefully disconnected what we could and tried to reposition what we couldn't. The system responded to our work, as if it understood what we were trying to do. The Witness watched us as we worked and, at the very end, when the last wire was cut and the machines stopped working for him, he let out a long, slow breath. Then he went still. And that was that. He didn't have any final last words. He was just gone.

We shifted him out of the chair and Patch took the seat. The machines seemed to glow with energy. Then the chamber reacted. Light exploded and blinded me. The cables pulsed and twitched. I staggered back and threw up an arm to shield my eyes. Patch shifted in the chair and I could just make out the sight of the cables moving. They wrapped around Patch and slid into place and connected. He tensed and then went still. The light intensified and then, all at once, it cut out.

I lowered my arm slowly and took in the new sight. Patch was in the chair with all sorts of tubes piercing his skin and wrapping themselves around his body.

"Patch?" He shifted slightly, then leaned forward in the chair. He rolled his shoulders like he was trying to work out a knot. Then he laughed. It came out booming and sharp and clear.

"Well, I'll be damned," he said. He turned to look at me and I noticed his eyes were…different. There was a light behind them that was unnatural but not dangerous. Whatever it was, it didn't really make him feel human. Or, maybe it made him more than human? I don't know.

"Would you look at that," he said grinning up at me.

"I just gained a rank in my Pathfinding skill."