Chương 82: 80: Top-of-the-line Pixies

"What do you think?" Ellie asked brightly.

"You'll be perfect for the job. I can sign you up right now." I was motionless. I'm not sure I was even breathing. I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to think.

"Oh, one other thing," Ellie said, wrinkling her nose.

"A few people had issues with this, so it's only right to warn you. There aren't any towns or cities on the sanctuary world, nor will there ever be any. Not even villages, really. You'll have neighbors, but only a few of them. Of course, they'll all be people who love dogs. That's the key criteria for being invited to live there." Great. That was just… great. No people, plenty of dogs. I cleared my throat.

"What's the climate like?"

"Temperate. Seasonal variation is minor, but the range is basically 55 to 75 degrees using your local temperature units. You'll get vacations, of course, during which you'll be able to travel to other sites on the planet, either with or without your dogs. The beach, the mountains, maybe even that rainforest. Oh, and the coral reefs are really quite lovely, if I do say so myself. They'd be worth a trip." My nose started to prickle. I could feel the tears stinging my eyes.

No people, plenty of dogs, nice weather, beach visits, and anything the System could provide for me. And all I would have to do would be to abandon Emma to her own devices. And Pen. And the folks in San Celeste. And JJ and Alma, who might be in danger from something to do with mana pools, which were probably not nearly as nice as a pleasant tropical swimming pool. And give up on ever seeing Jules and Toby again. That was it. Oh, and that mother with the crying baby, back in Emma's enclave.

She'd never get the formula we'd found for her. The baby would just keep crying, I guess. Until it stopped.

"No," I said, voice so soft I could barely hear it myself.

"No?" Ellie repeated after me, sounding surprised.

"No, thank you. I…" The tears were beginning to overflow, and the lump in my throat was too big to talk around, so I bent my head, pressing my tear ducts with my index fingers. Some people—extroverts, cat owners, guys like Jack who saw the System as opportunity—might have found it easy to reject Ellie's offer. But for me, it was a shiny fantasy, a glittering possibility of future peaceful happiness. As long as I could be happy after fucking over everyone I'd met in the past week.

No crying, no crying, no crying, I told myself silently but furiously. I did not want to cry in front of this dragon. I know, ridiculous concern. She seemed like a really nice dragon most of the time. And I'd been to enough therapy to know that crying is a positive stress response. You're releasing cortisol and prolactin and other unhealthy crap from your body when you let the tears flow. A notification dinged in the corner of my eye, and for once I glanced at it immediately, welcoming the distraction.

Skill gained: +1 to dissociation. Right. I should have expected that.

"Okay, then," Ellie said.

"I guess we'll just see where the tide takes us, yeah?" I took a deep breath, let my fingers drop, and forced a smile. The tears were still flowing, dripping down my cheeks, but I was just going to ignore them, pretend they weren't there, and move on with this nightmare.

"I need to get back," I said, voice husky.

"I was in the middle of something when you, uh, summoned me." Was that the right word for magically transporting a person out of their surroundings into an unexpected administrative meeting? Thank goodness employers in the old world hadn't had that ability. I could think of at least a couple of my own who would have abused it with great delight.

"We're temporally displaced right now." Ellie scooped up the cocker spaniel and stood. She picked her way around the desk and placed it in my lap.

"Try this one. He's very soft. Quite comforting to touch." Automatically, my arms curled around it. The brown dog by my side huffed. I heard the indignation in the sound.

"You're good, too, of course," Ellie replied, patting the top of the dog's head with one hand and using the other to balance herself on her way back to her chair. Her legs were bare, purple, and scaled. I wasn't sure they were the most important thing at the moment, but they were definitely a thing I noticed. They didn't look like a dragon's legs. Ellie plopped into her chair, sighing with relief.

"Sorry," she said, gesturing toward her legs.

"I'm practicing, but I'm still not very good at it. Walking, that is." She looked at me. I opened my mouth, then closed it. So many questions. So, so, so many questions. But I was going to stay focused.

"Temporally displaced?"

"The mana costs are crazy, but this meeting is being charged to Rift Oversight and they can afford it. So we can take our time." Did we have to? She was right that holding the cocker spaniel was comforting, but it would be infinitely more comforting to be crying into Riley's soft fur. Zelda wasn't the best at tears because she always wanted to fix things. Tears meant face kisses and wiggling and demands for walks. Bear… well, I'd never even tried.

But I'd silently wept into Riley's fur for hours when my dad was sick and more hours after he died. Riley was good at unconditionally accepting saltwater and snot on his coat.

"System integrations are pretty strictly controlled, you know," Ellie said.

"I mean, it might not feel like that to you—I'm sure it's chaos out there where you come from. But no one's gonna be buying your planet for a handful of beads or subjugating your population into eternal servitude or anything along those lines."

"Um, that's good, I guess?"

"Letting you sink or swim probably seems pretty shitty. But if you can't learn to swim in the shallow waters, you'll drown as soon as you hit a rip." She stopped talking. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. I waited, stroking the spaniel's soft coat while he obligingly rested his head on my arm, until the silence began to feel awkward.

"We wouldn't want that?" I offered.

"No. No, we wouldn't." She picked up the file folder, but she didn't open it.

"You seem like a good swimmer, though. I mean that marginal viability business, that's just poor judgment on the System's part, right?" Wrong. In a dog-eat-dog world, I wasn't gonna survive. Except that phrase, dog-eat-dog, doesn't really make sense. Dogs are innately social and cooperative. They won't turn on one another unless they're forced to. With wild dogs, the alpha isn't the toughest, the fiercest, or the biggest: it's the most sociable. The nicest. Huh.

Maybe I was marginally viable not because I didn't want to kill things, but because I didn't much like people? That, however, was gonna have to be an idea to explore some other time, because those pale lavender eyes were looking at me as if she were trying to read my soul. Or at least my mind. Maybe I should just skip the viability question?

"I am a good swimmer, yes," I finally said. Not that I wanted to battle any rip tides, but I grew up in Florida. I'd been swimming all my life.

"All right." Ellie slapped the file folder onto the desk. The chihuahua, who had curled up to take a nap, startled, raising its head.

"I don't work for Rift Oversight anymore, anyway. They just asked me to come out because I'm the only Rift Master on site."

"Rift Master?" She waved a hand.

"Rift Keeper, Rank One authorization, is the lowest rank in the Rift Management Authority. Rift Master's the highest, with plenty of steps in between, but I retired a few decades ago. A millennium managing rifts was long enough." I swallowed. Maybe the legs didn't belong to a dragon, but a millennium? That was a long time. She leaned back in her chair.

"You know, you don't have to do the paperwork yourself. You early integrators all get top-of-the-line pixies. Get your pixie to do it."

"My what?" My first thought was, of course, Tinkerbell, but I was sure I would have noticed if Tinkerbell had been flying around. (What can I say? Disney was a staple of my Floridian childhood.)"Your pixie." She sighed at my blank look.

"All right, let's get yours here." Ellie waited expectantly.

"Um…" I raised my eyebrows.

"Summon it," she said, as if that ought to mean something to me. I raised my shoulders, too. I didn't know what she was looking for.

"Your pixie. The one who gave you a rift and the Rift Keeper title instead of convincing you to take a perfectly nice, not at all dangerous, enclave." I inadvertently snorted a little. Not at all dangerous? In the new world order, owning an enclave made you a target for every mayor-turned-mind-control-mage or wannabe supervillain. I wouldn't exactly call that safe. But I wasn't about to argue with Ellie.

"Chelsea?" I said.

"She's in my… um, RMI." It felt silly to use the jargon, but not as silly as calling it a cafe.

"Yes? So? Summon her."

"I don't know how." Ellie put a hand to her temple and muttered, "I am definitely taking a nap after this one." And then, in a somewhat louder voice, she said, "Tell her we need to talk." After a moment of hesitation, I said, "Um, Chelsea—" Before I could finish the sentence, System Chelsea gave an exaggerated sigh from right next to me, and I jumped and yelped. The chihuahua leapt to its feet and stood on top of Ellie's file folder, yapping ferociously. Stranger, stranger, danger, danger. Go away, stranger.

The golden gave a single muted woof. Hush, you. The person wants quiet in the den, remember? The chihuahua stopped barking and sat down. Okay, that was perhaps the most magical thing I'd seen so far. In my experience, chihuahuas were committed to the belief that they were the boss. Chelsea pointed at Ellie.

"You should not be doing this. Multiversal citizens are not permitted to instruct members of integrating worlds, unless the world is accessed via a natural gate. Members of the MSA are expressly forbidden to interact with non-sanctuary species." Ellie rolled her eyes.

"Personalized Interface Construct? Really?"

"It's a mid-tech world. It fits their vocabulary."

"It limits their understanding. She thinks you're stuck in that…that…whatever that place is." System Chelsea folded her arms with an indignant energy I'd never seen from the real Chelsea.

"That place is fantastic." I knew I wasn't following the subtext of this conversation—the eye-rolling and the indignation made that clear—but it wasn't hard to realize they were talking about my cafe.

"Yes. Yes, it is," I said.

"Please don't take it away from me."

"I'm not—pfft. I don't care what your workspace looks like. That map is actually quite clever and if you want intoxicants before you venture into a rift, who am I to stop you? But your pixie is not constrained to that space. The fact that you believe she is looks like sheer laziness on her part." I had a brief blip on intoxicants. Coffee? Really? But then I grasped the important info: Chelsea was my pixie, and she was not stuck in the coffee shop. It hadn't even occurred to me she was, really. I just…

hadn't thought about it. She appeared in the coffee shop, so, yeah, I assumed that was where I could find her.

"Olivia doesn't want to live in a surveillance state," Chelsea said to Ellie.

"She doesn't like having an omnipresent being hovering around her." Absolutely true.

"And yet…" Ellie spread her arms wide.

"Reality check, my friend." System Chelsea huffed. And then she twirled and with a spray of sparkles, she turned into Tinkerbell.

"This form is no closer to the truth than any other form I take," she said indignantly.

"But fine." I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and worked my way through the options. Obvious option #1: I was hallucinating. Nope. Hallucinations are almost always auditory during a bipolar manic episode. They're the voices you hear that aren't really there. Sure, sometimes they're visual, but even when you're seeing halos around objects or people who look suspiciously similar to other people, you don't hallucinate entire worlds. Dogs and office furniture and pink-haired girls who might be dragons?

That's all way too complicated for a mania-induced hallucination. Now mania-based delusions are a whole different story; those can be deeply, deeply complicated. But delusions are ideas, not tiny fairies wearing green bathing suits. Option #2: I was dead. I'd been dead all along. Maybe I'd had a heart attack when I was chopping back my bougainvillea and everything since then was all… what? The last flickering thoughts of a shutting down brain? Wasn't I supposed to see my whole life in reverse? I'd met people.

Pen and Danny and Nat, JJ and Alma, Jack and Emma—why the hell would they have been my post-death white light experience? Option #3: Yeah, no. All the options I could think of were just bullshit. This was weird, but it was the same kind of weird that had been happening since that squirrel first attacked Zelda and I needed to just… play along. One way or another.

"Your pixie," Ellie started.

"Personalized Interface Construct," Chelsea/Tink interjected.

"A magical being that exists to assist you, however you see fit. Making excellent coffee is within the rules."

"Right, yeah, whatever." Ellie aimed a thumb at Chelsea/Tink.

"Her. She can help you with anything that's managed by the System. Paperwork, forms, questions; she has the answers. And she's with you all the time. She's not stuck in a coffee shop, making crazy coffees for—" Tink pointed at Ellie.

"You are going to love my caramel macchiato. You are going to say that it is the best thing about this world." Ellie rolled her eyes. Then she looked down at the golden retriever sitting patiently by her side, glanced around at the other dogs in the room, smirked at the chihuahua on her desk, and chuckled.

"Probably not. The competition is awfully sweet." She looked back toward me.

"She can't help you kill monsters, but if you need to know how to kill a creature, you should ask her. She can tell you weak points, best weapons, major risks. No offense, I hope—" She looked between us, as if she were addressing her words to both the tiny fairy and me.

"—but she is a tool you should be using far more effectively than you are." I wasn't offended, but I was creeped out. It was the same thought I'd had and suppressed before: Chelsea looked and acted so much like a person that "using" her felt flat-out wrong.

"It's fine," Tink said with a resigned sigh.

"It's my job. I don't mind, I like it. I was trying to respect your concerns, that's all. But yes, I'm around all the time."

"And what about her quests? What's going on there?" Ellie asked.

"She's doing great. Level 20 already. World First titles. Highest level on the planet."

"Ka-ching." Ellie snapped her fingers.

"If she's doing great, she should be raking it in. Why aren't you assigning her all the basic shit? Kill ten monsters, get fifty credits. Collect some crap, get another fifty."

"Quests are meant to function as a motivational tool to—" Tink started, all prim officialese.

"Can it," Ellie interrupted.

"Girl is gonna need every bit of help she can get, so quit cheaping out on her."

"There's a budget, you know." Tink's tiny wings were fluttering at high-speed, even though she was just hovering. I had a sense—was it from [Uncanny Instinct]? —that the speed related to emotion and that she was pissed.

"And the budget is not your problem. Keeping this baby Rift Keeper alive is."

"You make it sound like I'm sabotaging her!" The wings fluttered even faster.

"You'd best not be, because that would be a far more serious offense than a little instruction from an outside influence."

"I'm not!" Tink spun in the air again and turned back into Chelsea.

"I'm supporting her to the best of my ability within the rules. All the rules." Ellie gave her a long look. Chelsea stuck her chin out and took it without wincing.

"Fine." Ellie turned her attention back to me.

"I cannot help you any more than this." She gave me a half smile: a little wry, a little helpless, and very much the expression of a big sister telling her little sister not to date that loser.

"Involuntary System integrations suck. But file your reports, demand your quests, use the tools provided to you, and try to avoid cascades." Cascades? What were cascades? But it was too late to ask, because I was back in the nowhere space for a fleeting second and then dumped, yes, dumped, on the floor of my RMI.