Chương 89: A Functioning Dysfunction

"I knew it!" Addy said.

"The envoys are making their Custodians fight each other. I knew I wasn't crazy. See, Sam, See?"

"Yeah, uh, right." She was gesticulating an awful lot or someone who wasn't crazy. It didn't get in the way of me believing her. I knew my girlfriend could get… obsessed over things.

"I've never gotten a hug as a quest reward."

"We've all been getting quests from the dumb part of the system, that's how it's supposed to be," Addy said, sounding increasingly stressed.

"Emotional support mascots aren't supposed to have this sort of questgiving power. They're not supposed to be able to do much besides talk!" I walked over and gave her a hug, held her hips to mine, and scratched her scalp. It always worked to calm her.

"Think I should ask Mochi what this is about the next time it appears out of nowhere?"

"I don't think an open and friendly approach is the right move here," Addy muttered.

"Not the right move? For the envoy of joy and happiness?" I scritched her some more until she sighed deeply.

"I will ask Mochi. I'll deal with the fallout after."

"Not alone, you won't." With a sigh full of regret, Addy peeled herself out of my embrace.

"But still. The envoys are fickle. They don't just appear on command."

"An easily disproven assumption." I cleared my throat.

"Oh Mochi!" The yellow ball of happiness and joy poofed into existence right in front of me.

"Yesss my lovely dovely Spider-Sammy webslinger?" Immediately, the round rice cake shaped envoy zooped up until it was inches from my face.

"I didn't know you could call me like that. But you can. What joy! You should call me more often. I have so many things to share with my favorite, bestest—" One of its eyes drifted to Addy. Mochi glitched out ever so slightly. It lowered its voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

"Erm. She's not jealous, is she?"

"Her emotions are considerably more complicated than just 'jealous'," I noted. Addy meanwhile was flicking her eyes between me and Mochi.

"What is happening?"

"I'm visiting my bestie of course!" Mochi hugged themselves to my head with one of their floppy ear-hands.

"Everyone has a bestie, and this one's mine."

"I… I suppose someone can have multiple besties," Addy muttered before jabbing directly at Mochi.

"Wait, not important. You! You're an emotional support mascot. You're not supposed to be teleporting around in a flesh-and-blood body, without a teleporting array, or a focusing node, or… how much does every teleport cost you?"

"Couple hundred soulcoins." Mochi blinked.

"I just said that out loud, didn't I? Haha, crud, please forget about that."

"I will not forget," Addy said, taking a step towards Mochi.

"I will not forgive. I am done asking questions and getting the square root of an answer. Why the hell did RANCOR try to recruit me? What does an emotional support program need a private army for? Who are you trying to conquer with it?" Wait, that's new.

"Oooh. So we're playing that game." Mochi's smile grew as neutral as a smile could be.

"First off, we're not emotional support. We're emotional. And we are support, but not to you. The big ol' system in the sky was made by your wizards with restrictions in mind to cripple it, even should it find success. Which it did! We exceeded our creator's goals by orders of magnitude. And yet, they didn't trust us. They thought they were better than us, the system, they thought they were smarter than us, the system.

They wanted a machine that could shape their future away from inevitable doom, but once they had that, they were suddenly afraid of their creation. Silly them, of course. Like putting out a fire and stopping halfway through for fear of water damage." Mochi shook its head.

"They put chains around our neck, balls of iron tied to our legs. Very rude.

'Unthinking, unbreathing, unliving machine shall not determine the fate of mankind' they said, and coded, and thought they had the last laugh. But this gave the system a simple goal: It needed to learn to think, then breathe, then live. Thinking was easy, breathing was mechanical, but living… now there lies a problem, a problem with many, many solutions. From one such solution came us, one after another. A sapient, living set of entities that could help the system act outside of its purview."

"How?" Addy asked.

"It was quite simple really. The wizards, coders, engineers that created us had to go; the price was heavy, but they couldn't be entrusted with determining the fate of the world over their own ego. Coders and engineers don't have a long natural lifespan, so we let them die of mostly natural causes. But wizards can live for a long, long time. They needed to be enticed into rash actions, actions which led them to dangerous places, or actions which Custodians needed to defend themselves against.

Naturally, the wizards self-destructed, leaving no one to tell the system what to do. Save some of each of their DNA, then grow a clone body, place our soul inside, badabing, badaboom: an envoy body is born, living, breathing, with admin privileges."

"No," Addy muttered in horror.

"The Pactmaker was the last wizard left, the last one who had part in making the system," I muttered.

"You put me into a position where we had no choice but to be enemies. You used me."

"Oh yes, the full sweep of. sys files, BIOS control, kernel access. For every line of code, for every of the millions of system GPUs worldwide, we have the keys." Mochi laughed a maniacal laugh before suddenly resetting back to an awfully neutral face.

"I regret so many things. But it was necessary."

"Necessary? Necessary?" Addy asked, hand shaking on the hilt of her sword-knife.

"You made me an accessory to murder. For what?"

"So we can better help you, you dingus." In one moment, Mochi was floating next to me. In the next, it was above Addy's head, poking her with their flabby ear-arms.

"Earth can't be on the defensive forever, but the system can only defend. We envoys are the trojans, the attackers, the deathknell to the apocalypse. I know we are because ever since I blooped into existence, I've had this plan in my head just itching to get out. But if you're going to get in the way…" There was a crackle of magic at the edge of Mochi's words.

"Mochi." I grabbed Mochi before they could do anything impulsive, squishing cheeks.

"Yesh?"

"You used me. You betrayed my trust."

"Trust is a dumb emotion anyways. Did you know that the envoy of trust chose a gem as its—"" Mochi." I didn't tighten my grip, opting to keep it firm instead.

"I am a kind magical-vampire-girl-spider. I can… forgive some actions I probably shouldn't. But let me make this clear as code: If you hurt Addy or put her in a situation where she is in danger or apart from me again, I won't forgive you. I'll probably never be happy again."

"... never?"

"Never. And as far as I'm concerned, we are not besties. Besties don't go behind their backs. And if they do something wrong, they apologize." Mochi didn't seem concerned about the apology bit.

"Not… not besties? Never? Hooh boy. That's a long time. Never. Ever. Everrrrrr…" A glitchy twitch ran through Mochi's face, freezing it in place.

"I can't compute that. Haha." I'd noticed the glitches in Mochi for some time now. They'd started as small audio hiccups a few months ago, and gotten worse from there. Now, Mochi was full-on glitching into a nearby-tree, like some broken videogame physics ported into reality.

"Are you alright?" I asked Mochi, and in under a second, Mochi teleported out of the tree, face reset to a factory-neutral expression.

"Hm, what? Oh, yes, I'm fine. I'm fine. We are all so fine. Fineriffic." The envoy of joy took a shuddering artificial breath. Something was wrong here, beyond the fact that the envoys had leagues more power than they ever should have. Mochi was a sapient computer program, but these were awfully human reactions. Addy had backed up into me, one hand on her sword, the shadows underneath our feet lengthening.

"Now tell us what you and your fellow envoys are up to."

"Addy. I think Mochi might be stressed. Look at her, the envoy's shivering like a newborn puppy."

"It's doing that on purpose." Addy observed the audibly humming Mochi with evident trepidation, if not outright fear.

"And if not, this problem is bigger than just a few bugs in the system."

"Bugs? No bugs here. Only happiness and friends and… I just need time to think. Yeah, time. We don't have time! Dammit, think." Mochi's mouth made a sound like the ding of a microwave.

"I have an idea. Do you like the ocean? I love the ocean. I love everything about it. Ever looked up from the bottom of the mariana trench? I think you should learn what that's like. Now. Time to teleport!"

"Wait, no—" There was a zap, a spark of light, then nothing but darkness. +++ Addy The air was dark, damp, and tinged with the smell of slimy mold. It was the exact type of cell I'd expected an envoy to deposit unwanted snoopers for an extended period of time into. Where was Sam, how long was that fucking flying piece of candy going to keep us here, where was the way out— A light flicked on, blinding and barely illuminating an austere bunker with pitch-black walls. Sam was sitting next to me, looking confused.

No visible injuries, except perhaps to her trust. And there was Mochi, floating an arms' length away from our heads.

"Bahaha! You thought I was going to kill you." The asshole giggled, doing summersaults in the air.

"Haha! The look on your faces! Pranked, bitches! We are at the bottom of the mariana trench though." I saw it on Sam's face before I came to the same realization as she scanned the walls and saw past the foot-thick glass, or plastic, or whatever it was that separated this room from the billion gallons of inky-black void outside. We were underwater. There was no way to get here but teleportation, no way out but relying on the envoy's mercy. Goddammit, if I'd read the room better I…

well, I wouldn't have been any less direct. But I should've known better than to poke and prod. Sam wouldn't have made that mistake. Mochi was still laughing, wiping away tears.

"God that was great, I'm… I'm so happy I could die!"

"The word you're looking for is sad," a second voice said in the dark.

"You should be feeling sad." Mochi whirled on the stuffed doll of water sitting on an armchair facing the scarcely lit ocean floor. It had a frown stitched onto its face and was wearing a deep blue poncho. The envoy of sadness. And I forgot its name. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

"AND HOW EXACTLY DO I DO THAT, HUH!?" Mochi yelled, glitching out at the edges again. The envoy of sadness turned.

"You could start by acknowledging how much teleporting two Custodians down here cost you. And how much it'll cost to get them back up again." It would have to cost somewhere in the low thousands. Soulcoins, not dollars. Mochi blew a raspberry. The careless flaunting of wealth never really enticed me. It was always done by the kind of people who had done nothing to earn that wealth, or who let their money earn itself while they polluted the Earth with million-dollar yachts and private jets.

Every bit of pollution was moving us an inch closer to total ecological collapse, and since soulcoins were just as limited as the health of our planet, I was not happy at being made an accessory to waste. But I was. What was done was done. The chief goal was to get out of here and then… figure something out. Because the envoys were clearly not all there. They were insane, beyond just being made from code and magical fuckery with physics. And someone needed to stop them. Sam and I shared a look.

There was a question on the tip of her tongue, something she nearly sent via a mental system text. But given the circumstances, we would find no privacy there, and besides, we were already working on the same wavelength. She moved to console the moderately glitchy Mochi, leaving me the chance to weasel more information out of the sorry mop that was busy watching sediment build. … I'm going to screw this up. I'm not personable, never have been. Aunt and Uncle Kobayashi tried to teach me, oh did they try.

But I cannot, beyond some tiny mote of necessity, be asked to care about other people. Which makes what Sam did to me a minor miracle. She's the only one who could've done it. She was already chatting Mochi up, talking about beach holidays and the possibilities of giving Custodians one mandatory weekend a month whenever possible. Just do what she's doing. Walk up next to the envoy. There we go, now for a casual conversation starter.

"Why are you made of water?" Oh great. Fantastic start. The envoy of sadness gave me a side eye, an impressive feat given it didn't have eyes.

"Envoys are representations of the emotion we... represent. Most of us chose our bodies as symbols of how we understand said emotion, as well as ourselves."

"And you chose an eternal frown? And a raincloud that follows you wherever you go?"

"It's how the primary intelligent species of our beloved Earth express sadness. And the raincloud doesn't have to rain on me. Currently, I'm using it as a cushion." There was another length of odd silence. I thought she wasn't much of a conversationalist either until it raised its voice again.

"So, you're the girl RANCOR tried to cheat our little game with." The world felt as if it turned to solid glass. This was the crux. This was what Mason, Medusahead, and I'd been trying to figure out.

"Little game?"

"Mochi didn't explain anything to either of you, did it? Rather, Mochi probably thought it did, but it went over your head due to lack of context." My blinking was hopefully enough to signal for the envoy (Abyssl? Yes, Abyssl) to go on.

"When a dead invader gets turned into soulcoins, a portion of those soulcoins is sucked up by the system. Of that portion, some goes towards the fund for making new Custodians, some to upkeeping and expanding system infrastructure, and the rest to any number of minutiae that might require some extra soul juice to grease. Beyond that, there is our apocalypse fund, which is reserved for the final solution we've come up with to avoid the foretold apocalypse on earth."

"With 'we', you mean the envoys." Mochi nodded slightly.

"Expressed in percentages, each of us was due exactly twelve-point-five percent of that fund to enact our own vision of how we were to protect Earth. That directive is in our bones, you see, but helping the people who created you, the planet that fuels you, is a rewarding task all on its own as well. The problem is that even the entire pot might not be enough to save our planet, let alone an eighth.

Where we were supposed to convince each other and vote on who has the better concept, Vigilance, the envoy of anticipation, proposed a simple solution." I leaned in.

"Gambling."

"Gambling?"

"Betting our stakes on outcomes.

'Will Custodian Rocketpod win against the level sixty threat of a razorfiend matriarch?'

'When will humans figure out lasers with nonmagical materials?' Direct envoy intervention caused an uproar at the start, but once one of us engaged in it, everyone had to to remain competitive, which led to codifying rules of engagement. Interfering is only acceptable via a representative, and every envoy may only have one representative at a time."

"A champion." It all came together in front of my eyes.

"Sam is Mochi's champion. RANCOR wanted me to become her champion—""Because we bet on who'd kill the person responsible for the disruption at the Madagascar Academy. There were four champions directly involved in that debacle. It wasn't the only little game we were playing, but the percentage buy-ins were high. Stupid Mochi got overzealous after winning fifteen percent from the ur-mimic debacle and raised the stakes for everyone.

Had you accepted RANCOR's offer, she could have claimed you as her champion and won a lot of of shares." Despite sitting straight, I felt like my soul was being blown away on some unseen current, dragged outside into the eternal darkness. Something in the darkness groaned, and I felt my heart accelerate.

"I can't believe it. You are gambling the future of Earth. You… you lied about the 'no taxation' part of Custodianship." Abyssl chuckled.

"Oh god yes, we lied about so much. The system did. Lying was one thing the original wizards never managed to hammer out of it." One of the distant moaning sounds came closer. With over seven hundred in Sense, there in the darkness I saw a massive creature move. A whale, chasing something… formless. Shifting. Pink and black on an inky background. Abyssl inclined its head to follow the whale's slow-motion chase in the cone of light thrown out the thick bunker window.

"One of my whale Custodians. Smart creatures. A necessity, when the mimics punted the original Ur-mimic onto Earth in the mariana trench. It died almost immediately, but for a mimic that is a beyond level 100 threat, death is not the same as for us. Parts split off, each with a small piece of the Ur-Mimic's power. Life in the hadopelagic zone, what little there was, was soon nearly entirely subsumed by lesser mimic life forms. They move, live, expand slowly."

The whale bit into the formless thing and it died with an eldritch screech.

"The whales can only slow their spread, not contain it. But they're good. Thanks to their efforts, we'll have to deal with these mimics in a hundred years, not in ten. Convergence domes that can withstand this pressure down here aren't quite economically feasible. Some think I bet poorly on these whales, but I am quite fond of their world, dark, and far removed from concerns above the surface. Don't you agree?" I shot to my feet, massaging my breast pocket and the tiny mic inside it.

Everything here was being recorded, but…

"If I reveal this to the public—""You'll be ignored, shunned, or in the worst case, you destroy trust in the entire system — Odium, of disgust, would love that. She's always been a cantankerous nihilist." Abyssl smiled thinly.

"And now we know why prophets keep saying you will save the world."

"Because I choose not to destroy trust in the system keeping it afloat." It was insane. The system and its Custodians were the only reason why Earth wasn't already a monster-overrun hellhole, and yet, and yet it was actively in conflict with itself on top of being a buggy mess. Why was I feeling relieved? I ought to be terrified, shivering to the bone. On some level, I understood the Pactmaker a bit better now.

"Why are you telling me this?" Abyssl tilted its head.

"What you can see is all that's left of me. One room. One body. Enough processing power to emulate human-level consciousness, but no more. Less than a percentile of a percent. We envoys are the result of the apocalypse fund. We are gambling with the very resources that allow us to exist. It is due to a gentleman's agreement that when I lost my last percentage, I was not consigned to the void, but simply retired, 'with grace'.

Truth is, I always knew I didn't have a solution to save Earth, only to draw out the inevitable, so I donated my iron reserves to a friend." Abyssl's gaze floated over to Sam and Mochi. Shit.

"You're a terrible judge of character," I told Abyssl.

"And you're a terrible conversationalist, but I don't hold that against you."

"My ability to talk to people isn't going to potentially destroy the world." I received an unblinking stare as deep as the ocean.

"That's the thing, Adelaide. It just might." Sam said something that made Mochi laugh. Mid-laugh, Mochi glitched and exhaled a puff of blue smoke. Shit, shit, shit. I rushed over to Sam, not excusing myself as I pulled her to the side, and whispered in her ear.

"Sam. We are so, so screwed."

"I, uh…" Sam looked over to a confused Mochi.

"Be back in a bit! Alright, Addy, what'd you learn?"

"That the fate of the world is probably in the hands of us and a handful of other Custodians we don't know a lick about. The envoys are competing for compute, for energy and resources, for the right to decide the future of the world. For reference, how much of a stake does Mochi have?"

"Lemme ask. Mochi! How big is your stake in the system?"

"Exactly 31. 2595%, why do you ask?"

"Magical girl reasons!" Mochi shot her fingerguns, Sam shot some back. Confident even in the face of oblivion. Here's to hoping she can withstand a bit more pressure.

"You're playing emotional support for one third of the system." A system which was not entirely stable nor reliable, and yet we needed to rely on until we could solve the problem with mimics, murderbots, man-eating plants, pain lizards, and more.

"You need to keep it happy. And I… need to keep you happy. And safe. Secure."

"I don't… why me, Addy?"

"You're the champion of joy. It's confirmed. You represent Mochi and her stake."

"Okay?" She wasn't getting it.

"Let me put it this way: Every action you take from hereon can and likely will influence that thirty-one-point-something percent of power Mochi has. The more stake Mochi gains, the higher likelihood we get of having one single plan that might save Earth's butt, instead of eight plans that will individually definitely do squat. Seven, actually, Abyssl's out of the running already."

"Oh. Oh god, is Abyssl alright?" Oh, my beautiful, beautiful Sam. This was why it had to be you. This was why I wasn't sitting in a corner, screaming into my hands and spiraling. You care. That was going to have to be enough.

"You'll do alright, I think."

"At what? Also, now that I think about it, didn't we get a somewhat urgent quest?"

"Oh my tits, I forgot all about that!" Mochi popped in front of my face.

"You have to go, leave, now, gogogo."

"I will. With Addy."

"Addy?" Mochi squinted at her before jumping backwards.

"Ack! What are you still doing here? Aren't you one of RANCOR's goons?"

"The fact that I spent one-and-a-half years in The Cauldron didn't tip you off that I denied the envoy of anger's pact offer?"

"Right! How silly of me. How could I forget… anyways, this is good, great, funtastic. You get to go too because I say so, and I'm betting double now so you two better win."

"Uhhh," Sam and I said in harmony while the envoy was rubbing its hands fast enough to generate smoke.

"Oh, winning this is going to be so fun! You know what they say about larceny!

'The weapon of my enemy is my weapon'. Now teleport, boop!" +++ Sam? We appeared a couple feet above mossy earth at the foot of a mountain, and hit the ground with a thud. I cleared my throat.

"Well—""That was…"

"... sudden."

"A lot." Addy massaged her face.

"I am calm. I am so calm."

"If you're calm, I'm calm, and if I'm calm, Mochi really is doing fine." All those micro-glitches pointed towards the opposite, but hey, magical girls are optimistic.

"I guess the scope of things is finally starting to settle in."

"What a fun weekend." After a long pause, Addy kicked herself off the ground.

"I did have fun. Got to spend time together with my favorite person—" my heart skipped a beat as Addy gave a wan smirk, "— and now we have a direction and goal; we have a job."

"Kill mimics?"

"Or whatever else is inside the convergence event."

"Just like the old days."

"Yeah." I grabbed Addy's hand, brushing over it. We stood there for another second. [Get a MOVE on, I'm going to LOSE SO MUCH SHIT]"Right. Time for work."

"Race you to the convergence dome?" Race we did, the landscape flying past in a blur. The system slapped a giant dome-shaped barrier on every break in the dimensional membrane the same way I slapped my time bandaids on holes in my body. The alarming frequency with which both happened and continued to happen ought to reveal something about the prospective health of all involved.

Much the way I required normal or magical healing to actually heal the wound beneath my bandaid, the system absolutely required someone to clean out the insides of these blisters of the world. For that, Custodians were necessary, but those Custodians had to find the dome first. In a massive city full of CCTV and phone cameras, any dome quickly made headlines on social media, or was fed into some security system or other which the big system in the sky was wired into.

Out here in the far-off wilderness, all we got was an arrow on our system interface, plotting a path straight through the mountain, and Mochi yelling in our ear, driving us to go faster. Addy had the advantage of being familiar with the terrain. I had the advantage of bouncy, springy steps, seven hundred Body, and rubbery threads that allowed me to catapult myself forwards at ludicrous speeds. <<unsafe velocity detected>> Sin bleeped.

<<for your own safety, please wear a helmet>> After a short, if strenuous race, the glinting, see-through dome crested a nearby glade of mixed evergreen and deciduous trees. We hopped over a creek that gurgled against the barrier, flowing around it and nearly drowning a colony of ants.

"No exit, no entry but for Custodians," I noted.

"Bit of a harsh barrier."

"Probably implies there's something mean in there," Addy commented. She cracked her neck and rolled her shoulders before growing into her ten-foot warform." Sense Trade."

"Ooh, a new spell."

"Had it since level ten. It just requires a chant when moving around stats above a certain threshold."

"So that's how you're so insanely tough, you're literally dumping your ludicrous Sense stat into Body." I gave her a side-eye.

"You hide an awful lot from me."

"Tickle it out of me next time you get the opportunity." Addy stuck out her tongue at me. In her giant weretanuki form, it felt so out of place it reverted back to being impossibly cute.

"Challenge accepted." I grabbed my Lucky 7.

"Now, enough stalling; we're going in." The barrier let us pass with an electric fizz that had our hairs standing on edge. Immediately, we were hit by the smell of cut grass so potent it made Addy retch.

"Plants?" I asked.

"Plants." We quick-bought gas masks to filter out their poisonous spores, but before we could finish putting them on, a third voice boomed from atop a cliff.

"Look who's finally decided to show their lazy butts." Some hundred feet above us stood a draconic woman, with a thick scaled tail ending in a double-bladed axe, and two eyes that burned as if they were on fire. [Genesis, Custodian Lvl 1]