Chapter Twenty Four – Another Me: Five

The next time I returned to awareness I didn’t have a body. Instead I was a short squat thing, almost like Half Bold or Bellcandy, but even shorter. I had no arms or legs but that didn’t mean I couldn’t move anything. Instead, I could feel a series of several rotors that I could twist like an arm to go in almost any direction, and then I could turn them in order to move.

All of this felt strangely natural, but unlike arms and legs when I’d first become an adventurer, it was pretty difficult to actually mess this up or trip. I was basically a small, steady tower on the ground. Much harder to trip or stumble. On a whim, I turned one pair of rotors to my left and the other to my right and tried to move in both directions. I wiggled a little bit on the floor, but decided the exercise was a lot like tangling my tendrils together. Mildly entertaining, but ultimately unfulfilling.

I could see in this body, but I didn’t think I could feel anything. There was no sensation coming from where my platformed base hit the ground. I was really starting to miss touch. Unfortunately, this squat tower was the same as the grey block body I’d had all of the previous times I’d awoken under John’s care: absolutely without feeling or taste.

I wasn’t sure if I could even hear in this body, you could never be sure when you never knew what sort of thing you might wake up as, but discovered that I could when I made the last ‘movement’ this body could do. It was another rotor but this one was different from the others. It was kind of like inhaling and when I used it a sudden loud noise erupted from within. I jumped insomuch as a small tower with no legs could jump, backing away, and turned it off immediately.

A light had appeared in front of me at the same time as I used the loud inhale ability, but it had been unnecessary since the room was already well lit.

“Where the heck am I?” I tried to say but I had no mouth to speak with. That had never mattered as a Jellyfae, but apparently it did now. I couldn’t speak. Why? Why did this keep happening?

“Being 7731, please commence vacuuming the room,” came John’s ever more detestable voice.

‘Vacuum?’ I thought, confused.

The world I now inhabited was much more detailed than the gray room I’d become accustomed to. Instead, this place was beautifully realized. Every leaf on the bush in the corner seemed to be individually created. A glass of water, way up on top of the desk was… I didn’t know how to describe it. It was like my entire life I’d been seeing the world through a fog and suddenly everything was sharp and dense and there in a way I’d never seen before. Even the small chips in the paint on the wallpaper seemed to have more detail than some of the buildings in Variak, if that was a fair comparison to make.

There was a window up above me, leading out into a beautiful blue sky. I could see clouds out there, but they didn’t look quite like any I’d ever seen before. I supposed they most closely resembled those from the first cycle, but these were more wispy. Again. More detailed.

“Please vacuum the room, Being 7731,” came John’s slightly annoyed request again.

In frustration, I turned on the loud noise for one bleating second.

“Really?” John asked in the driest voice I’d ever heard him use. “Vacuum the whole floor, Being.”

‘Ooohhh,’ I thought, realizing what he meant. I needed to use the loud pressure rotor on the whole floor? I supposed I could do that.

As I looked around the room, meticulously admiring the beautiful detail of… just everything, I realized that there were lots of and lots of little crumbs in the fuzzy soft floor. I vacuumed a strip of the fuzzy floor, hearing a crinkling sound like breaking glass as I did so and then turned around to examine my work. Amazed, I discovered that almost all of the little crumbs that had been there were gone now! I spun in a gleeful little circle, ecstatic to finally have something at least mildly entertaining to do.

Ramping up the rotor, and the sound as loud as it could go, I began wildly traversing the room, scooping up the crumbs to leave the ground free of blemish. Under the table. Under the desk. Under the chairs. I scooched some chairs out of the way with the bulk of my body to get at some really hard to reach crumbs down under a little end table.

I bumped the little table, but panicked when a glass jar teetered precariously on top of it. The jar had flowers in it and looked so pretty. I didn’t want to disturb it, so I left that table alone and focused elsewhere until all of the crumbs I could find were scooped up by my greedy noise.

When finished, I stared morosely at the last crumbs stuck under that end table, unable to reach them, feeling like I’d somehow failed.

“Hmm. Didn’t break the vase. Might make a copy here…” John said, though I didn’t think he was speaking to me. “Results might be promising.”

I wanted to ask what he meant by that, but I had no power to do so. Instead I began to more closely examine the room. It was a small office with white painted walls and a large door. One window lit up one side of the room while a pleasant white light that I couldn’t quite manage to see from any angle in the room lit everything else. A large ornate wooden desk dominated most of the room from its place in the middle back towards the window. I wondered if a carpenter like Iron had made it.

It was the details that made me decide for sure. The details. Everyone always insisted on calling that other world adventurers came from the real world. That had always offended me before. It had implied that my world wasn’t real. If this was the level of detail given to a simple office, it was no wonder my world was considered fake. If I ever got back to Tread the Sky I would remember this.

Remember the real world.

“Well done, Being 7731,” John said, a smile in his voice for the first time I could remember. “Perhaps your intelligence isn’t a complete fabrication after all.”

Normally John’s voice came from everywhere. Sound didn’t have direction in the gray room like it had in Tread the Sky. Like it had here. I looked up as high as my strange body would allow me to and discovered two small objects on the wall. The one the noise was coming from remained dormant. The other though, a small dark eye staring down at me, highlighted itself almost like a target from back when the Instinct governed what I could and couldn’t do. I didn’t receive a prompt or an NPC box, nothing so sophisticated. There was a message though. I could feel it rather than read it.

“Networked Recording device. Applicable Target for Fae-Scour.”

“Applicable uploads: Video. Audio.”

“Ineligible Uploads: Taste. Touch. Smell. Reasoning: Ineligible Hardware.”

“Ineligible Uploads: Compiler. Full Copy. Full Transfer. Reasoning: Insufficient storage capacity.”

Fae-Scour. Nathaniel had told me that ability would allow me the chance to escape. I didn’t understand some of the words but I thought I could draw conclusions. Video and Audio. That was like seeing and hearing right? This little eyeball on the wall could see and hear, and I could Fae-Scour that.

“Alright, that’s good for now, Being. You might have a future in the home upkeep business!” John joked, genuine pleasure still in his voice, even as he saddled me with a time limit.

If I wanted to do this, I’d better do it now before he shut me offline again.

I activated Fae-Scour, mentally selecting both Audio and Video options. Immediately I was assaulted with a massive sense of vertigo. Suddenly I could see both the eyeball object on the wall and I could see from the eyeball as well, down to my squat little Vacuum body on the floor. I activated the vacuum rotor and I could hear it from both locations as well. Amazing!

“Till the next test, 7731,” John said before a heard a click from somewhere outside the room. I instantly lost all sensation from my vacuum body. Awareness remained though. I couldn’t move or speak any more than I had been able to as a vacuum but I could still see and hear from my eyeball on the wall. The door just to my left opened and a man walked in. He was old. Bald. He looked like some of the old NPC’s I’d seen in Variak, but once again, beautifully detailed in his ugliness.

“Well, perhaps this won’t have been a complete waste of my time.”

The voice was unmistakable. So. This was my tormentor. I had no mouth, but if I’d had one, it would’ve been grinning. I think even Red Thorn might have feared it.

‘Hello, John,’ I thought.