After we set up camp, I spent quite a while trying to interact and understand the Eternal Ice, repeatedly grasping it with Ice Magic, comparing it and its effects with Hard Ice and Liquid Moonlight and trying to come up with theories what it might be.

What I noticed was that, similarly to the Liquid Moonlight, it was able to absorb Astral Power and I thought that there might be a bit of a reflux when I connected with the Ice, using Ice Magic, but I was not certain. The contact with Ice Magic was just too painful to endure it for longer than a few seconds. Even touching it was rather problematic, the cold it radiated was that powerful, but only when directly touching it, coming close was not a problem, for some reason. What made me even more curious was that it seemed to have an automatic interaction with Ice Magic. When I tried touching it, I could, at least for a short time. Adra, on the other hand, lost a small part of her finger when she tried it, forcefully ripping it away the moment she made contact. If touched with a rock, the rock cooled rapidly down but only in a short distance from the Eternal Ice, even to the point that gases solidified on the rock. But not on the Eternal Ice and the rock did not stick to the ice, even when we made it wet beforehand. It was maddening and completely contrary to how matter normally should behave.

Lenore and I discussed for quite a while until we had a half-baked hypothesis what it might be. Our first, rather obvious, assumption was that it was a solid form of Liquid Moonlight. It did not seem like normal ice, meaning like frozen water, it was something more. What took longer was the idea that it might be due to an interaction with other concepts, I even had an idea which. The first I had in mind was the concept of Stillness, the ultimate absence of motion, down to a molecular level. But if it was only that, the atmosphere around it should liquify and even solidify on its surface, quickly building up an insulating layer, shielding the surroundings from the cold. So, there had to be another concepts involved or my inspect did not work like I believed it to work. That concept might be a type of temporal concept, freezing the matter even in time.

It made no real, physical sense but it was the best hypothesis we could come up with.

All that thinking made me develop a headache, so I told the others after dinner that I would be gone for a short time and logged out. The first thing that greeted me in my capsule-space was a deluge of messages. At first glance, I saw hundreds of requests to watch my stream, a couple of notifications about forum-posts and various messages requesting contact, all addressed at Morgana. All addresses I had maintained under my Titania-handle had quite good spam-filters so I was not bothered by the messages sent there but I had been lazy with the Morgana-handle, only setting up the basics.

“Pica, can you sort out the messages I got and display them on the computer-screen by priority?” I asked the capsule attendant, hoping that the AI was advanced enough to deal with that particular headache.

“Yes, Jade, I can do that.” my attendant answered me, right before I left the capsule to head into the shower and grab some food.

After my shower, I used the computer to display the now filtered messages, starting with the non-automatic ones.

The first was from Pantheon, apparently from a real employee telling me that they had received my ticket and were discussing possible actions.

Then came that, what could only be described with the simple expression of shitstorm. Somehow, the theory was out there that Morgana and Titania were one and the same. And, in good internet-fashion, it had jumped from an idea to an assumed fact within a couple of forums-posts. So, now my stream was getting requests by the hundreds when before, there might have been one or two a day, which I had all denied.

I sifted through a couple of gaming-journalists, all trying to get either an interview or my take on something. After those, I had to go through a couple of messages, trying to get me to join this guild or that party, all promising me the world and more. For a beta-test.

I didn’t want to deal with mass-guilds at the best of times, especially with my traveller-rejecting build, there was no way for me to ditch my current party. And no reason to. Sure, in the past having NPC-party members was often a bad idea, due to lacking AI, but now? Sigmir felt more real, more like a person, to me than all the humans I had met outside the game. It was a strange feeling, that I felt so at home with them, but I would not give it away for anything in either world. The only downside was that they would not come back from the dead - but in turn, they had information about the world and common-sense. So, I just had to keep them alive or learn how to resurrect people and I would be golden.

Next, I got to the messages that told me about forums-posts. Following the link, I found out what had happened and I instantly wanted to hit my head against a wall. They had taken a few innocuous things I had said and linked them together, added a couple more or less obvious screen-capture and hit the bulls-eye. All the signs of an internet-conspiracy but for once, the blind squirrel had hit the nail on its head. Or something like that.

The mods had split off the thread from the main-thread, the one about the three stooges and made it into a new one and it was growing, rapidly. On the other hand, in the one with the three stooges, things had been added after I had made the third stooge’s head explode, adding to the madness flooding my inbox.

I wrote a reply in the stooges-thread, just for the fun of it. It was a little annoying that they accused me of cheating, again, but that a Gamemaster chimed in, on my side, made the whole thing rather funny.

The other thread, about Titania and Morgana being the same person was simply ignored. There was no way I would give a definitive answer if I was Titania or not - maybe, just maybe, the internet-mob would calm down if the trolls were not fed. It was common knowledge to never feed the trolls, especially not after midnight, no matter how much they cried. Or they would turn from fluffy, cuddly little fluff-balls into monstrous, salviating creatures that one should instantly throw into a mixer. I would not feed them information about Titania but there was no reason not to use the sudden internet-fame Morgana had. But that was a slightly different idea.

And finally, there were the messages asking me for admission to watch my stream. Those were categorically denied, all of them. But, I did take a couple of highlights, mostly what had been shown in the highlight-reel and show it from my perspective. Not the first one, though, that seemed to be a little too brutal, going by public reaction. I added a few interesting scenes, mostly a few scenes from the fights against Tegi and against the Devourer to round it out and posted the whole thing with my Morgana-handle. If I wanted to continue playing full-time after the beta, I would need to build a brand to ensure an adequate income by creating interesting content. I was quite sure that I would not allow anyone complete access to my stream, so I would need snapshots that were captivating enough to get viewers. And the easiest way to do so, would be to establish my brand now, while Morgana was in the public’s eye anyway.

Finally, I took some time to watch the highlight-reel and it looked quite impressive. Interestingly, the part with the gigantic ship looked rather different, it did not focus on any one character, making me wonder if there was a player in the video at all or if the marketing-department had taken an NPC-only event and used it as promotional material. It wouldn’t be surprising, the footage looked quite epic, the sort of thing Hollywood might produce as an action-flick. Titanic meets Bismarck meets Jaws or something along those lines. They just needed a heroic main-cast and it could become a blockbuster. On the other hand, the huntress looked quite interesting, her playstyle seemed to be almost like a sniper, putting everything into a single, devastating shot. It might be a good idea to come up with some sort of magic that allowed me something similar, maybe dust up the frost-ray spell I had used before and use the newer runes in it to empower it. A continuous beam of Liquid Moonlight should serve as a devastating attack against everything that is not highly resistant or immune to the cold.

Shaking my head, I did my exercises and logged back into the game, wondering just what the future would bring.