Chương 81: 79: Temptation

Okay, this wasn't my RMI. My heart rate went from normal to pounding. No dogs, no Pen, no Chelsea, no Nat, no coffee shop. And no shopping bags. Where had my groceries gone? I was standing, empty-handed, in an office. It looked like something out of an old movie, The Maltese Falcon or His Girl Friday. No windows, though, but also no color. Except for the woman who sat at the desk and the dogs crowding every available foot of space. She had pink hair and eyes that were a spooky lavender color, too light to be human.

The chihuahua on her lap was amber; the cocker spaniel squeezed into the same space was the classic brown-and-white. The mastiff sitting next to her was mostly black, the border collie shiny black-and-white, the golden, well, obviously, golden, and the three dogs whose breeds I couldn't immediately identify were various shades of brown. The pit bull behind the desk was mostly white, ugly as sin, and absolutely adorable. The woman pointed at the chair across from her desk. Her fingers were webbed.

"Take a seat. We've got a lot to go over and—" she yawned in the middle of her sentence.

"—Sorry. A lot to go over and I'd like to get it done quickly." Her eyes half closed, eyelids fluttering, then popped open again as she jerked herself awake.

"Who are you and where am I?" I kept my voice even. I wasn't ready to panic—mostly because of the dogs—but I did a quick check to make sure [Invisible Armor] was still up. It was.

"Ugh," she groaned, rolling her eyes.

"Much to my utmost dismay, I'm the representative of the Rift Management Oversight Board. Which is not what I'm here for. I'm on your planet as part of the Multiverse Sanctuary Authority. Rescuing sanctuary species, that's why I came. But just look. Look at this mess." She waved a hand, indicating the office, and the cocker spaniel in her lap whimpered. She immediately dropped said hand onto the cocker spaniel, stroking its body, as she whispered, "Oh, yes, yes, love, I know. It's all gonna be okay, I promise."

I dropped into the chair she'd pointed at.

"How can I help?" Okay, maybe that was a weird question. The pink-haired girl obviously worked for the System somehow. But, you know, she was surrounded by dogs. She had two of them jammed into her lap. I was obviously immediately on her side, one way or another.

"This rift you closed… no, wait." Pink-haired girl took a deep breath, then forced a smile.

"Hello, Rift Keeper. My name is Eleanor Evandil, call me Ellie, and I represent the Rift Management Oversight Board. I'm here, as per…" She circled her hand in the air. I had no idea what she was looking for, but I had figured out that this was the administrative review I'd been warned about.

"The notification?" I offered.

"Um, yes, thank you," she said. She dropped her head onto the desk. The cocker spaniel licked her cheek, the chihuahua patted her face, and the ridiculously cute pittie woofed. She sat upright again and shook her head.

"Right, yes."

"And this is the administrative review?" I suggested.

"Yes. Right." She pointed at me.

"I'm supposed to slap your wrist. Could you…" She gestured toward my arm. I held it out for her. She heaved a sigh, shifted the chihuahua onto the desk, reached out, and literally tapped my wrist.

"So, please don't close rifts without doing the proper paperwork. It's, like, uncool."

"What is the proper paperwork?" I asked.

"To close a rift? Honestly?" She shrugged and started stroking the cocker spaniel.

"I don't know what you were thinking. In general? Bad idea. Lousy idea. But you should at least do a proper rift report first. Justify the lousy decision."

"Kids with guns?" I offered.

"Stars, no. Invisible parasitic leeches, okay. Sentient fungal bloom with aggressive spore dispersal, yeah, maybe. Undead plague with active necromancer involvement, understandable. But closing a rift is permanent. You're not gonna get to choose what takes its place. Frying pan, meet fire." Okay, all of those things sounded terrible. Maybe kids with guns weren't so bad after all.

"Plus, uneven mana pressure differentials are just—" she yawned, waved a hand toward her mouth in apology, and continued, "—just destined to create bursts. Unbalanced mana flow is so hard on the environment. If you wind up with pools, the locals are screwed." She gestured, open hands spreading wide.

"Big, big mess on the horizon. For them, at least. I guess it doesn't matter so much to you." The locals. That would be JJ. Alma. The people I'd tried to help. Instead, I'd made things worse for them? That… yeah, that did matter to me.

"It does, actually," I said, keeping my voice even.

"What sort of mess? And how do I fix it?" The pink-haired girl rubbed her face. She'd told me her name. What was it? Ellie, that was it.

"That's, like, three semesters worth of coursework that you wouldn't even be allowed to take until you'd already cleared your first fifty instances," Ellie said.

"No way am I explaining it in ten minutes." Three semesters of coursework? Was that the multiverse using my mental models again or did these people really have schools for this shit? And if there were schools, how did I enroll? Not that I could—I had dogs to take care of—but maybe there was some nice distance learning, a little more comprehensible than the tutorial? Except fifty instance clears? I was at what, five?

"Did I slap your wrist? Right, yes, I did. I'm so tired, you wouldn't believe. I thought I was going for this simple job—dolphins, I was so excited—but instead I'm trying to rescue dogs and you wouldn't believe how many of them there are. And they just—" She waved a hand.

"—they're so attached. You pet them once and they say, you, you, you're my person. I don't know how to say no." You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. I knew exactly what I would have said to another human being a week ago. You can't save them all. You do the best you can. One rescued dog is better than zero rescued dogs. But somehow this pink-haired teenager was the representative of the Multiverse.

I was okay with her rescuing all the dogs she was capable of rescuing. The white pittie made a classic dog move: it dropped its head onto her leg and stared up at her with wide eyes.

"Oh, sweetie, yes. You're a good girl, yes, you are," Ellie crooned. I did not smirk. No, really, not the slightest smirk. Yeah, okay, I was delighted that the System's representative was just as susceptible to dog love as the average human being, but I wasn't going to do anything that might make her change her mind. Sure, dogs were parasites, but they were the best parasites. Okay, symbionts. Yes, of course, symbionts.

"All right, so, slap on the wrist, accomplished. What next?" Ellie flipped open a file folder on her desk and began rapidly scanning pages while muttering to herself. I didn't think I was supposed to hear the mutters, and I definitely wouldn't have been able to a week ago, but my Perception stat was now 46. Plus, I had [Senses Beyond Sight], which I'd mostly noticed as an unfortunately improved sense of smell, but which had done its job on my hearing, too.

"Mid-tech world. Fond of acronyms. Right, no training, that's unfortunate. Although, hmm… well, there's utilizing mental models and then there's just being silly. Whose idea was this, anyway? That's clever, though. I like that one. But big picture, oof. This isn't good." She finished with a quiet snort and snapped the file folder shut. And then she looked at me. Not five seconds ago, I'd thought she was a teenager. She was not a teenager. I had absolutely no real-world equivalent to what I saw in her eyes.

The head of a university? The president of a billion-dollar corporation or maybe a major nation? The Dalai Lama? A dragon? Honestly, a dragon was closest, and obviously dragons didn't exist in the real world. Or they hadn't, anyway. Did the multiverse have dragons? I swallowed. She smiled and the moment was over. She looked like a teenage girl again.

"You are not remotely qualified to have the Rift Keeper class. No offense intended." I looked at the cocker spaniel in her lap. It was nudging its head under her hand, trying to get her fingers to hit the perfect spot for the ideal ear rub. I licked my lips and said, "None taken." I hesitated for about half a second, feeling the kind of breathlessness in my chest that came with true fear—was I really going to talk back to a dragon? Really? —and then said, "But I don't have the Rift Keeper class.

My class is Thorn's Edge Guardian. Rift Keeper is a title I was awarded for my performance in the First Defender Challenge Scenario." Ellie pursed her lips. The dragon glinted behind her eyes, and then she sighed and said, "Fair point." She let her head fall back and shut her eyes. Under her breath, she said, "I don't have time for this shit." I wasn't sure whether the words were intended for me, but since she still had her eyes closed, I decided I'd just keep my mouth closed and wait this out.

I felt a flicker of worry for everyone I'd left behind—what had happened to Nat? Were my dogs okay? —and then I suppressed it firmly. I'd worry about all that after I made it through this. After what felt like forever, but was probably, you know, twenty seconds, maybe thirty, she opened her eyes and sat forward again.

"How about a trade? You give up Rift Keeper, we move the rift in your backyard, and you get an enclave seed instead. Not a full enclave, I understand you already rejected one of those, but a seed." I blinked.

"What exactly is an enclave seed?" Ellie's mouth dropped open.

"How can you—?" She pulled herself together, shook her head, and said, "Right. Sorry. New integration. You don't know anything. Ah, an enclave seed is how an enclave begins, usually. Sometimes they're given as quest rewards, or once in a while, as a really good loot drop. Essentially it's an anchor for a mana domain with limited functionality and minimal population capacity."

In other words, I'd lose my Dollar General and gas station for a bare-bones enclave like Emma had, except in my backyard and with not a lot of room for other people.

"No, thank you." My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it thumping in my ears. I was not an idiot. That was a lousy deal. One of the brown dogs stood up and did a full stretch, first up dog, then down, before trotting over to me and beginning to investigate the smells on my shoes. You good? You good. Smell good. The golden flopped its tail against the ground a couple of times and turned its eyes away from mine. Afraid. But no threat here. Soft lady is soft. Ellie tapped her fingers against the file folder.

"How about a rift conversion? I'll close the secondary gate, eliminate the monster spawns, and convert the core to basic anchor functionality. The bare minimum for population capacity, but you get to keep all the buildings and contents, including the regenerative abilities." That was a better deal. A Dollar General with no bugs. That might work. But if I weren't a Rift Keeper, I wouldn't have a Rift Management Interface. No coffee shop, and much more important, no map of other rifts.

No easy transportation between one place and another.

"No, thank you." I swallowed. My mouth felt ridiculously dry. I dropped my hand so that my visitor could take a good sniff, and then gave her a few good scratches under her chin. She promptly turned so I could get the spot on top of her tail, while said tail began wagging appreciatively. Ellie dropped her eyes to the happy dog now leaning into my leg.

"Hmm…" She leaned forward, flipped open the file folder again, and began skimming down the paper inside, and then her eyes widened.

"Eeep! It was you! Or, you know, your dog. Ha!" She sat upright in her chair and beamed at me, a smile that made her look more like a little kid than a dragon.

"I've got it. The perfect solution! You're gonna love it and it helps me out, too." She gestured at the dogs around her.

"I told you I was rescuing dogs, right?" I nodded.

"So turns out dogs need people. Everybody else, they're fine on the sanctuary planet we prepped for them. The gorillas are loving their rainforest. But the dogs made it clear really quickly that a world without human beings wasn't their idea of sanctuary. It was a mess for a minute, but you know, a deal's a deal, and if that's what they need…" She shrugged. I said, "Okay?"

"So I've been offering people positions on the sanctuary planet."

"Positions?"

"Yes! Vets, vet techs, people who run shelters and rescues. I've been hiring as fast as I can." She chuckled.

"Which, with a little temporal displacement, has been really dang fast. I've interviewed 6, 418 people since I woke up." She yawned, tapping her hand against her mouth.

"Almost all of them said yes."

"You're hiring them to do what exactly?" My hand tightened on the dog's fur before I resumed my scratching.

"To live on the sanctuary planet and take care of the dogs." Ellie beamed at me.

"Sanctuary planet's already at 100% mana density, so no messy integration business. The System store's max tier, so you can order anything you need. Or want."

"Max tier?"

"Fully connected to the multiverse. No limits on purchases. A credit budget, of course, but it's very generous."

"And are you offering me this job?" I asked for clarification. I was pretty sure that's what was happening, but she hadn't really said as much.

"Yes, yes!" She laughed.

"Sorry if that wasn't clear. Um, let me tell you about a couple of the drawbacks. You'll have to give up your class and that pesky title. Your new class will be Dog Person. Any abilities you gain will be related to meeting the needs of your charges. And there won't be much chance for advancement. No monsters to fight, no dungeons or rifts, so…" She looked briefly uncomfortable, shifting in her seat.

"Let me be specific: you've already got Citizen One, but you'll never advance farther than that. And you'll have no chance at immortality. But you know, that's always a long-shot, anyway. Hardly anyone reaches those kinds of levels. And meanwhile, you'll get dogs. All the dogs you can handle, in fact."

"And my dogs?"

"Oh, they can absolutely come with you." She nodded toward the one I was still scratching.

"That one, too, if she likes you."