Frank couldn’t help but chuckle at that. The moment he started laying things out on the table, putting himself out there, even behind a veneer of self-assured rationality, he felt a change.

“As far as I’m aware, no. My status says human.” Frank responded.

Bill eyed him suspiciously but provisionally accepted Frank’s humanity. There were more questions though, from others. Greg went first, already implicitly accepted as the leader of the group.

“What exactly do you mean by non-humans, and changing into something other than human?” His first thought was unsurprisingly about external threats. He had hard power, that’s what he knew how to use. Frank wondered a bit if he was in control due to desire or conscience. Nothing that he was likely to figure out.

“When I faced my tutorial, I fought against an Orc. It was not like the goblins. I defeated it, but it acted in a way that only something with both intellect and culture could. When it disappeared, its blood remained behind, whereas all the other enemies I fought disappeared completely. Furthermore, the goblin chief that we fought, it gave up and said something before I killed it. It was obviously language.”

Ghulam interjected. “Obviously language?”

“Yes. It was obviously a sentence. It also didn’t look the other goblins. The other ones were like degenerate forms of it. That combined with the presence of a species in my status leads me to believe that there are others under the same conditions we are. The only other logical reason for including that would be if we could change it somehow. Perhaps both could be true.”

Others asked for clarifications, and Frank answered patiently for a short while. Then he decided to share one more bit of helpful information.

“Also, experience is shared by contribution. I think Greg, Sasha, and Jim all saw that already. Bill too. But it’s not just helping fight that can give you contribution. If you make someone a spear, and that spear is better than what they had, you’ll receive a fraction of the experience they get from defeating an opponent proportionate to the degree to which having that spear contributed to their success. This also applies to giving someone something you have found or previously possessed, even if you didn’t make it. Before you ask, I can’t prove it right now, but you can probably figure out a way to test it.”

He’d given the information he had that was immediately helpful. Unfortunately, he had no deep understanding of the events of the first few years in the area. Without proper lines of communication everything spread by random chance as groups intersected and moved back and forth from certain areas.

“I have a question for all of you, though. If you had the ability to either gain knowledge about the existence or non-existence of a potential enemy, or knowledge of something that would improve your ability to deal with such a hypothetical enemy, which would you choose?”

Everyone except Bill and Sasha looked confused.

“Is that what the Oracle you received does? Gives you information?” Asked Sasha.

“More specifically, I can ask a single yes or no question. The message when I think about it specifically says ‘Recieve a yes or no answer to a single question, provided the answer is within the knowledge of the system.’ Which incidentally indicates either that the system refers to itself as such, or that someone else wrote that message, and there is a higher authority controlling it.”

“Why are you choosing between those two things, specifically?” Sasha asked.

“I’ve been thinking about it.” Frank didn’t fully explain.

Laura butted in. “First, we need to get blankets and food and other necessities. Frank, you’ve said a lot, but we can come back after we deal with that.”

“That’s fine, anyone has thoughts on the subject feel free to tell me. I’m going to decide what question to ask tonight before I sleep.” Frank replied. Everyone was looking at him now, a mixture of wariness, confusion, and in a few cases, yearning.

Laura then started directing people this way and that. Four groups peeled out, one to Maria’s dad’s store, which as it turned out, was hunting and outdoor shop. They were grabbing sleeping bags. Another to grab firewood. One of the gas stations sold it. Frank hadn’t seen it, it was further down the highway, leading out of town the opposite way Frank had come in. Jim had, as it turned out, procured a gas grill, and went with a few others to the local grocery store to grab a bunch of meat. Fresh stuff wouldn’t keep long without power, but if it was in a closed fridge or freezer rather than a supermarket display it’d be good still.

That was one of the biggest mysteries. Gas still worked fine for simple things like burning for warmth or cooking. It was only when you tried to use it to generate energy for a turbine or engine that it failed.

Frank, for his part, went and looked through the pamphlets sitting by the empty reception office on the first floor. He was still pondering the question he’d posed.

With a yes or no question, he was limited in the specificity of the information he could find out about. He could not, directly, ask for the location of something specific. He could only ask whether or not there was something there. Thus, he would have to be as general as possible to increase the odds of him finding useful information. Though he had been to Washington before, he hadn’t been to the Southeastern corner where Redstone apparently was, and it’s status as a backwater when things were normal meant he hadn’t met anyone from here. They likely would have headed East, to Lewiston, if they chose to move. He put down the pamphlet with a map and considered.

If he was to ask for the whereabouts of something useful, he’d have to phrase it in a way that broadly informed him of where, if at all, he should travel to. Whereas if he asked about time travellers, he would receive useful information either way. The system would either reject the question, in which case it couldn’t tell whether there were and that would say a bunch of things, or it would give him an answer.

A negative answer would basically mean that Frank was in a position to be a major difference-maker, at least regionally. Though the hopeless plight of humanity had been such that large forces of humans never coalesced for long anywhere that he or someone he knew had been able to learn of, and thus the amount of information he had available was limited, he still had an understanding of the system itself.

He idly considered that the fact non-field dungeons and other system challenges were randomized in an unpredictable way might be a safeguard the system set against knowledge of the future. There wouldn’t even be a dungeon he could clear with his past knowledge, due to their shifting nature. He’d at best be able to prepare properly for the threats it had displayed previously. They changed in layout and minor details every time you left them without destroying them. If other things were seeded randomly in a way his actions affected, knowledge of past events could be irrelevant.

But ultimately, he figured there were two useful questions he could ask. ‘Will carefully searching the area around Redstone for a month lead me to something useful for my survival that is more beneficial than what I would find simply travelling towards Seattle.’

There might be a better way to phrase it, but it did two things. It asked whether he would find something useful in a constrained context, and contrasted that with where he was thinking of going next.

The other question would be, ‘Are there time travellers other than myself who are not part of humanity that I could plausibly interact with, even indirectly?’

He silently thanked David for showing him the basics of logical thought. He no longer remembered most of it, but he intuitively thought more clearly. The thought of David made him wonder if he should try and find the man. Ultimately, he decided against it. For all Frank knew, the same change from last time that sent him somewhere different could have rejiggered everything.

He was leaning towards the second question. It was potentially useful, no matter what the response was, whereas the first probably was more valuable overall but could be useless.

People started coming back after a few minutes. Sleeping bags were brought inside, firewood was piled outside. Jim returned with food and started preparing it with the help of Margarite. Soon the smell of freshly cooking, high-quality meat permeated Frank’s nostrils. Another thing he hadn’t had the pleasure of more than a few times in the past decade.

He walked over to Jim. “Hey, could you do me a steak, rare?” Something about a rare steak just seemed so appealing. He had been more of a medium guy in the beginning, but every bit of meat he’d had had been cooked all the way through for safety after the system came. When you eat weird and unnatural monsters it comes with the territory. The opposite of that seemed right. It seemed to indicate that things were not as they were.

Jim nodded. “Of course, all this stuff was in a closed cooler, so it’s still safe. I think I’m gonna do the same for myself. Won’t be long before everything has to be cooked well, at least for now. Might not get to have one the good way for a while.”

It felt less awkward than he had thought it would, talking to people after dropping a bunch of knowledge which it was odd for him to have. Maybe it was just that he felt better having stopped hiding the fact that he was in the know. Maybe things were already super awkward before and it hadn’t changed anything except for his own attitude. Frank shrugged at his thoughts, leaving Jim to his grilling.

Soon, everyone had returned and congregated around the grill. Frank went and got a piece of paper. No one had come to proffer suggestions. A good portion were probably intimidated by him. He suspected what would happen when he asked his question would do nothing to quell that.

The functioning of an oracle oddly versatile. You could ask it privately in your head and receive the answer thusly. You could also, however, say it out loud and receive an answer out loud. The system provided a fair number of options like that, that seemed to reward cooperation. It would be helpful in this case.

He carefully wrote down the exact question he wanted, phrasing it to get the answer he needed but also in such a way that it implied something to everyone who heard him ask it and the answer he received. Then, wording agreeable, Frank walked back outside.

“I’ve decided what I want to ask this Oracle. My understanding is that if I ask it out loud the reply is out loud, so here goes.” Frank took a breath, staring at his piece of paper, illuminated only by moonlight and the glow of the grill Jim worked at.

“Are there time travellers, belonging to a group that I would not consider part of humanity, that it is possible for me to interact with, even indirectly, in such a way that it could have a significant bearing on either mine or humanity as a whole’s long term survival?”

Frank felt proud of the question. The system answered out loud immediately, in a voice that was both feminine and masculine, calm and excited, sad and happy. It was always disconcertingly beautiful to hear the voice of the system out loud because it was impossible. Like a colour that did not match any wave of light or energy.

“YES” it boomed.