Epiphanies of Shadow and Light

    It's a stormy night, with a rising wind and thunder rumbling in the distance. It suits the Baroness well enough. She's sheltering in a dry cave in the foothills, not far from the resting place of a long gone village. This is the beginning of the road to Castle Eas, which lies in orc hands up in the mountains that loom to the west.

    The Baroness is calling on her friends. Not at all once. She has no interest in drawing too much attention. Not until she's ready for it. Besides, she's got enough of that already. Tonight, the Right Clothes are all midnight blue in color, almost black in the flickering light of a fire that is sheltered just enough in the cave to be safe from rain and not fill the confined space with smoke.

    A humble Spriggan wanderer, making her way towards the location with only her staff as her visible possession. Still wearing a newbie outfit under her rainproof coat after all these months, there would be nothing exceptional about Uta, were it not for her unexceptionality: given how much time it has taken Wake to simply find it, it probably is not the kind of area where newbies are likely to hang out.

    The fire is spotted, but her expression does not change. She holds tighter onto her coverings as she pushes against the wind, eventually reaching the opening.

    "Good Evening, Lady Bombast," greets Uta, shaking her coat a bit to drain some water. "I see we have gone for a Platonic Allegory setting today. We have the cave and the fire and all." She says so with the barest hint of amusement, as if for possibly lightening up a tense situation, but also serving as a serious comment in case the situation so demands. Somehow, there seems to be none of her usual distraction or absent-mindedness in her voice. Even if quiet and relaxed, she sounds focused, collected.

    There is a marked difference in how Wake greets Uta this evening. She does rise to embrace Uta, but the curtsey is missing, and she says only, "Thank you for coming on short notice." There's a rigidity to Wake's posture that manages to be even more pronounced than normal. She doesn't look like a Lady in a Court. She carries herself more like a soldier. There's a tightness around her eyes, as well, the skin there pulled so that crow's feet can be seen.

    There are a few small, simple stools set around the fire. Comfortable enough, but far from fancy. The work of good, honest hands. Wake gestures to one, but does not sit herself.

    She looks away, out into the darkness of the gathering storm outside. Several long, breathless seconds pass before she finally speaks.

    "In the past few days I have learned that the enemies in this world can take over our bodies, can subject us to the full agony of physical damage outside the limits the game was supposed to impose, and that it is possible for the enemies to slay us and cause what I would considering lasting damage. The words used were to have 'something missing'."

    This entire thing is delivered in a tone unlike anything Wake has ever used. It barely sounds like her. The usual inflection and pitch of her voice are replaced by something almost alien and sterile.

    "In short, I have learned that this place is at least as dangerous as the real lives we think we remember. In here, we can be enslaved and tortured."

    Uta nods and shakes her coat again, before removing it. No shocked reaction, no gasps, no widening eyes. "I see," she simply says, in a very Japanese fashion, as she turns around and looks for a place to hang it on. Her eyes settle on a protruding bit of rock hat looks suitable, and the coat is hung there to dry a moment later.

    Uta turns towards wake again, and sits on the indicated stool. "This information is very worrying," she says, serious. Now that she isn't turned the other way, an expert psychologist like Wake can see hints at genuine worry showing through a Japanese form of countenance and self-restraint that is common in the general population, but not, until now, in Uta. Worry, not surprise.

    "Rumors has it that the dreaded Tri-Edge can permanently kill an Adventurer, and even cause memory loss in people, so the mechanics must be in place. We were lucky that nobody else had apparently found them up to now, but it seems that this might be changing." Her words are very matter-of-fact, but not blunt or logic. Despite the subject, warmth and humanity still underpin them. "I will be pretty honest: I had never heard of anyone inflicting full pain before, but I had been fearing it was well within the realm of possibility. Along with... other things." She leans forward and scoots over, closer to the fire, closer to Wake, pulling her stool with her. "I am interested in what you mean by 'taking over our bodies' though. Are you talking about Ichiya apparently having been turned undead, or..." she trails off.

    "Yes. I have come face to face with the creature that was seen doing this," says Wake, picking things up right from the last question. The rumors of Tri-Edge are filed away, but it is just further ammunition supporting her conclusions. Another fact leading to the same conclusion.

    "The.. let's say Binder, was a raid level fight. Shiruba and I came upon it during a scouting mission against the undead. As if it wasn't ridiculous enough to see mundane patrols at the red level, we had to meet that thing. It nearly killed Shiruba in a single attack. We only made it out because it stopped pursuing us."

    She focuses on Uta's face carefully. The study she is making is overt. "I'm glad I called you first. I'm curious if you have anything else you can add. It's clear you had already suspected some of this, or you'd be reacting quite differently. Do you have further information? Are there other threats of this level we should be aware of when shaping our plans?"

    The Baroness wrenches her gaze from Uta to stare once more out into the darkness. There's a tension as she watches, and she moves to her tipetoes, as if she expected to have to spring at any moment.

    "I am honored you called me here first. I have no idea of why you would do that, but I am sure you have a good reason. I trust you."

    Uta keeps silent for a moment, hands clasped in front of her, index fingers steepled, touching her lips. "It's the little things, the ones we consider too small and insignificant, or too odd and weird. The ones most people decide they're not worth being thought about." She looks back at Wake, and follows her movements. She does not seem bothered at being studied.

    She looks down again, picks up a stick and rekindles the fire. "Fact is, we never were in control of our own 'bodies'." She turns to look at Wake, the light of the flame dancing on her cheek and partly damp pixie-bob. "Seriously, Sword Artes? Start a movement and your body does the rest by itself? If the system supports /that/..." She gazes down at the fire, poking at it again. "If this is a game, there is no limit to what sensorial information the system can create. Taking over our bodies is as easy as simply ignoring our thoughts, and doing whatever the system decides to do. Like a computer that stops responding to your keyboard and mouse, and takes orders from the network, or something. I would have assumed everyone had deduced this by now, but maybe I have the advantage of being a newbie, and so having less preconceptions about how things are /supposed/ to work. Red enemies... inspecton... bosses... undead... we're looking at the stage magician waving his hands, and completely miss the subtle movements that are at the heart of the trick. If the programmers decide to make us into rubber duckies, we will look, smell, and feel like rubber duckies. End of story. And if this isn't a game, but we're really into a new world..." She shrugs. "All bets are off. Magic is real. Expect the unexpected."

    She looks up for a moment, in the distance. A bare hint of her usual distractedness surfaces, but it's a speck compared to the usual mountain. "Luckily, one might argue, at least our thoughts, inside our heads, are safe, right?" She turns to Wake, with a look of... sorrow? As if she was apologizing? "As you might know, I've been studying 'strange moods'. People suddenly hyper-focus, stop thinking about their self-preservation, they don't eat, they don't drink, they neglect their health, they walk until their shoes are destroyed and their feet bleed, they run into monsters and stop caring... Surprising? I actually feared something like that. I knew the game /could/ mess with our heads."

    She returns to look at the fire and poke at it. "Have you ever had alcohol in game, Baroness? I thought people were faking their inhebriation, but then I experimented it on myself, and oh boy. Was the thing real." She sighs, and closes her eyes, her hand still. "Getting drunk was a sobering experience."

    "There are many reasons to call you first. Your words tonight have just proven all of those reasons to be correct, if, admittedly, secondary to the point you just raised outshining them all."

    Wake lets out a sigh. "Our perception has always been a simulation. They are merely past tense simplifications of what we imagine to be real. For instance, we see red, which is truly just a light with a frequency around 430 terahertz. But to us, it's a color. That color is an abstraction, which we couldn't perceive as an abstraction until our species became aware of that which our minds had no handy abstraction built for. It wasn't because radio waves didn't exist, it was simply because we had no instrument to share their presence with our brains. Red, also, doesn't exist as such. It's just how our brains make sense of its presence."

    It's perhaps more than Uta might expect her to say, but the need to be specific is everything now. "Which is why I admit that I'm no longer confident that this is any less or more real than the memories of the world we hold. Memories that we believe to be true because others like us hold them. But shared belief does not a fact make."

    This is going a bit afield from the point she needs to make. Wake settles onto a stool and leans towards Uta. "There's something outside of this I want to share, though. Our minds, too, can be shaped. If I have someone's body at my mercy and given enough time and proper expertise, I can make that person into whatever I want. I could, by adjusting the data flowing into their eyeballs shape their very decisions. And they wouldn't even know. I have seen it done."

    Uta seems to follow the first part of the discussion with ease. No sign of confusion, or puzzlement. But at the second part, oh boy. She keeps her Japanese countenance, but the slighest pulling back of her neck betrays a hint of 'oh my goodness what have I gotten myself into'.

    Seconds pass, and she slowly, carefully leans over towards wake, the fire between them casting the brightest lights and darkest shadows on their faces.

    "It's time to let the elephant in the room out of the bag," Uta states. "Just... what /are/ you, Baroness?"

    Wake very conciously does not pull back. She is weighing very carefully how to reply to that question. There's a calculous she's been doing ever since she got into this damn trap. It's just a matter of trust. But not trust of Uta. Trust of reality itself. Or the perception of it.

    For a time, the Baroness works on her final answer to the problem. How many times has she comforted others by removing the complexity of their inner conflicts? It doesn't matter if we are real or not. Act as you believe is right, aim beyond the best of what you think you can be. To back down from this question now would make all of that a lie, wouldn't it?

    "I work for an intelligence agency," she says at last. She at last leans back, sitting upright as she goes on. "I have a prominent position in the Tokyo Office, directing assets responsible for intelligence and counter-intelligence throughout Southeast Asia."

    Her hands are folded together, her elbows then resting on her knees. "And what are you, Nurse Uta?"

    Uta's eyebrows shoot upwards. An American would probably whistle at this point, but our Spriggan does no such thing. She bursts into a quiet, subdued laughter at Wake's final question. "...a nobody. I'm just a nobody... and it's not because I don't want to say. That's literally what I am.", answers Uta, her amusement so earnest to leave no doubt about her sincerirty. "Michaelangelo once said that 'The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.' Well, I'm someone who set their aim too low, and fell short." She looks down at the fire again, and keeps poking. "Signed up for a cheap online college. Literature, of all things. As I was about done, Pluto's Kiss wiped all records and made the college bankrupt. Since then, I've been waiting tables by day and reading books in the evening." She looks up at Wake and still chuckles. A tiny bit of bitterness has snuck its way in, but it's mostly a genuinely amused reaction by Uta at thinking that Wake saw more than failure in her pre-ETO life.

    The Baroness turns the full weight of her attention upon Uta. The girl is probably used to it by now, that intense feeling one gets when confronted with such complete focus. If there is a rest of the world, Wake shows no sign. She reaches out with her left hand, seeking to take hold of Uta's right.

    "You are somebody, Uta. And you will remain someone of importance as long as you intend to keep it that way." The Baroness, or spy, or whatever she is, lets the silence come and thicken for a time, pierced by the pops and crackling of the fire, the rumble of thunder growing louder as it comes near, and the wind whistling past the mouth of the cave. After some time, Wake speaks again.

    "We have a chance now, to adjust our aim, as you might say. It is clear to me that we need a safe place. A strong place. There are real threats now. We also need to spread the truth about what we know. As long as we do this in reasonable groups and not massive audiences that should prove no trouble. People are smarter, far less likely to panic when they aren't in herds. I'd ask you to share as much of our conversation-by which I mean /everything/ we've discussed-as you feel is useful in preparing people for what is to come. They deserve to know what the stakes are before they throw themselves against the next nest of monsters."

    Uta looks at Wake. Her laughter tones down into a smile at being reassured, more out of trust than actual belief, but at least it's a start.

    "I have always made it a point to share everything I know. I have relayed all I know about the undead-turning of Ichiya for that tri-alliance meeting. Reported the failure of Ichiya to respawn. in real time. I trust this bit to be widely known by now, but I'll make sure to educate anyone who might still be unaware of it. I will start spreading the news about what little we know about death," she confirms. "I am putting the final touches on my laboratory within the Quick-Feather Peko Ranch. There's a good turnout of people. Could be a good chance to start disseminating this information..."

    She casts a glance out of the cave. "And when you say 'a safe place', you mean..." It's not like one can see much in the darkness, with this terrible weather, but it's obvious what Uta is trying to hint at with her eyes.

    Castle Eas.

    The Baroness nods thoughtfully to Uta's response. "I'm glad that your work is paying off. I am very much looking forward to what you learn." She strongly suspects there will be value there. People who love things tend to achieve greatness in her experience.

    The weight of the unspoken words hang in the air for a time. Wake's expression twists into a smile.

    "The Castle is only a few hours march from where we shelter. I am going to rally hunters to deal with the orcs that hold it. When that is done, we'll make a final attack against the tower and it will be free from those beasts forever."

    A pause for thought before she goes on, "Diplomatically, I am going to present to the Dukes that the castle should remain in my care and belong to none of the noble families. We will be a buffer zone, a fortification to take on many of the Ezzo Refugees and made powerful by adventurers and our gifts. I will speak with Plant Hwyaden about all we might do to achieve this. Make no mistake, I will not rest until it is the most powerful place in the world. It must be a threat against any enemy that might arise and a deterrent against any nation going to war with another. We have enough problems as it is."

    "Si vis pacem, para bellum," Uta quotes. "If we want to be a buffer zone, we must indeed be able to take on both armies invading at once, and monsters on top of that. Without resorting to adventurer resurrection. Simply being removed from the battlefield means we might not be let through enemy territory." She scratches her head. "You don't do easy, do you?" And smirks. "I mean, I guess you wouldn't have been where you were if you did. I suppose it's good we have someone like you to help us..."

    She leans back and stretches, her dark wings, which were hanging flat against her back, straightening and fluttering. "I'm grateful you're thinking of the refugees. Those poor souls... well, I've been a Spriggan for five months only, and let me tell you a thing. Even with the Adventurer Privilege, it's..." The implication of racism hangs heavy in the silence. "...not easy being Dark." She once again stares off into the distance, out of the cave. "...and those poor Ezzoans are Landers /and/ refugees from their land being destroyed and their nation being dissolved. It must be terrible for them..."

    "Some of us didn't have to enter a game to face discrimination," Wake explains gently. "I also had to work in a many situations where refugees were involved.. or created. They are desperate, homeless, and trying to just stay alive in a very dangerous world. I hope they will come to view this place as a sanctuary. And their hands will have a chance to shape it, to make it their home in truth."

    The Baroness returns to an earlier point and laughs, "Oh, I think we can handle the Dukes, in time. In the immediate sense, once we claim this they will have to chew on the fact that we squashed the orcs and they did not. They also can't move against us without opening themselves to a knife in the back. The very balance of power that held Eas out of reach will keep it that way."

    Her face grows more stern before she continues, "And if they do act in an unreasonable fashion, there are many who have already offered their Guild Assistance in directly changing minds. Let us hope none are stupid enough to put us to that test. I'm not as reluctant to unleash this as I was a week ago."

    "Oh," Uta says, lowering her eyes. "...I'm sorry, Baroness."

    Of course, thinks Uta. An American. In Tokyo. That's bound to draw a lot of racism. The same racism Spriggans attract in-game. And being an important, high-ranking American from a large, famous agency, well... is probably kind of like still being a Spriggan, but with the Adventurer privilege?

    Fidgeting with her fingers, she starts again, mortified, at loss for words. Seems like her serious and collected demeanour has broken down, and now her sentences get messier and ramblier. "I should have realized that... I mean..." she gestures toward her interlocutor. "I that I had all the elements to piece the whole picture together, and it was entierely possible for me to deduce what was going on with you." She slaps her face in annoyed realization. "Especially after the random avatar generator put me in exactly the same situation as you faced on Earth, and yet, I failed to see my own plight in others." She shakes her head and laughs again. "See? No matter how hard life tries to teach us a lesson. We never learn." Another apologetic bow. "I'm so sorry."

    The Baroness laughs softly, her demeanor of dire seriousness off like a cloak. "I do appreciate your sympathy, but one day I think I owe you a full explanation. Though.. what then shall you think of me, I wonder?" She shakes it off. "I hope that since you know who I truly am, the particularities of my body and the nature of my origin will matter little."

    She is then, a moment later, the Baroness Wake once more. Posture, poise, and on her feet, sliding into a curtsey. "The storm is passing, and I think we had best be on our way. Trust your judgment, dear, and be true to yourself. All will be well. As for me, there are miles to cover yet this evening, but first we will get you back to civilized lands."