Story New Game New Life

[Sepokku]

• Tutorial Mission
• Orientation
• The Main Office
• A Faustian Bargain

• Shortly after having been built Ech0 found herself deployed on her first mission. She woke up in what she could only describe as a coffin, wires, and needles piercing her skin at infrequent intervals. Worse, she was intubated. Even worse than that, it didn't hurt. During her brief stint in college, studying to be a nurse, she had learned that intubation hurt like hell, even days after they removed the tube; she felt nothing. The notion of which caused her to thrash violently in her tomb, or at least, she wanted to. Instead, her body was eerily still, which made her panic further. She started to hyperventilate and thanked God that she was able to do so because if she hadn't been able to, she might have cried.
  
  After what felt like a thousand shallow breaths later, there was a sensation of movement as her coffin tumbled through the air. It landed with a thud and then opened, her movement suddenly restored by whatever demon had snaked it from her while she slept. Clawing her way out of whatever gel had filled the chrome-colored receptacle, Ech0 stood up and tore the tube out of her throat. Her vision lit up with an overlaid Heads-Up Display. It had a message.
  
  'Good morning, please eliminate the target.'
  
  She shook her head in confusion, 'Target?' A blue marker appeared in the distance and the surrounding hills suddenly disappeared, replaced by wireframe copies she could see through. Some sort of site had been set up ten kilometers or so in the distance, it was filled with people. Various options lit up on her HUD, displaying recommended routes, various sets of data about the people in the encampment, detailed psychological profiles on the target; the whole nine yards. She looked up at the sky, the light flashed harshly before immediately being dimmed down to a more acceptable level.
  
  It felt eerily similar to her favorite game. In fact, it felt exactly like her favorite game. She recalled the thousands of hours spent streaming her exploits to her fifty loyal fans. There had to be a way to know if it was the same interface. 'The ping! It was the V button in Gun Game EX.' Not that there was a keyboard in front of her. She tried to think of what the ping did in-game. A port opened up on her scapula and emitted a sound. The area around her was suddenly mapped out, in frightening detail, local wildlife included.
  
  She laughed. It was a nightmare. What a relief. She must have fallen asleep streaming, or watching some shitty horror movie on The Witching Hour. Regardless of what happened next, she'd wake up eventually, and the nightmare would be over.
  
  'Mission starts in one minute.'
  
  Echo looked around, there were other coffins scattered about behind her. In her horror, she hadn't noticed them or the people currently going through the same fucked up tutorial she was. At least, she assumed they were people, like her, all she could see were varying shades of chromatic metals in humanoid shapes. She tried to call out to them, and her vision was flooded with information about her vitals. Her throat was... Missing?!
  
  That rising feeling of panic returned. Something hurt at the back of her mind. What was she doing here? Why couldn't she remember falling asleep? Then it hit her. Falling to her knees, she recalled the last moments of her life. Some wretched plebian screeched out his social media handle before slashing her throat. There was a visceral spray of dark red arterial blood, it colored the sky, as she wondered how life might have been different if she had just stayed in college and got her nursing degree. Then everything went black.
  
  There was a sound like a klaxon alarm and the chromatic shapes around her tore forward, her HUD highlighting their paths as they made their way to the target. Tears began to stream down her face as she made sense of her surroundings. She had been Isekai'd into a game she wasn't even sure she still liked and was having a fucking panic attack during her first match. Classic Echo. She coughed several times and lost whatever paste that tube had pumped down her throat.
  
• A few hours passed and the rest of her squad had successfully wiped out the encampment, without any assistance from Echo. An evacuation team picked them up and returned the squad to an apartment complex in Upper Neo-City. Upon landing, a drone walked her to her new living quarters and explained that she was to stay in the complex when not on assignment. With nothing else to do, she started acquainting herself with her new life. For the most part, it was just like being alive again, a vast majority of her human senses had been, not only retained but enhanced. Her nerve damage was gone, and despite the terrifying ordeal she had gone through upon waking up, she seemed to be in full control of her actions. It was almost humane.
  
  Out of boredom more than anything, she tried to log into her old social media accounts, only to find out that the password had been changed. All of her accounts were still active, in fact, like she had never died. None of the recent posts actually had her in them, but the blurbs attached to them and responses to her followers all seemed like things she'd say. After half a day of investigating she found out that the accounts were all posting Omnitech-sponsored content.
  
  Outraged she stormed out of her room and demanded an explanation of the nearest drone. Of course, he had none, but he recommended she use the mailing application to file a complaint. It guided her through a painful ten minutes of filling out the forms that were required to officially hire her onto Omnitech Industrial Solutions, and then showed her the mailing application. She immediately started filling out Human Resource complaints, accusing the company of theft of intellectual property. For months they went largely ignored until she was returning from a successful coup in the Maltese jungle and noticed her inbox had an urgent letter, directly from the big boss herself, Miss Anderbilt.
  
  'Greetings Ech0 Unit-4272,
  
  Your complaint has been processed and summarily recognized. I too would be very upset if my brand was stolen and monetized while I was forced to watch with woeful impotence. As such I have attached a debt form for the procedures that you were forced to endure after the event of your death. In a proposal that I think you will find mutually beneficial, I am offering you the chance to work off the amount that you owe and earn your account back. If you have any further questions, feel free to see me at the main office.
  
  Your friend,
  Lilian Anderbilt PhD'
  
  There were indeed several files attached to the letter. She opened the debt amount first, it was screwing her over to the tune of half a billion credits, and it was actively counting up. She had the sudden realization that she was never going to be able to pay the debt back and her heart skipped a beat. The debt number stopped rising for a fraction of a second, then in tune with her heartbeat, it ticked up again. Lilian was charging her for every beat of her heart. "That perfidious little b-"
• The floor plan of Omnitech headquarters was a nightmare; Echo marveled how someone so good at inventing could have such shit taste in architecture. After being led around the building for what seemed like forever, she was forced to wait while "Miss Anderbilt finished a meeting." You would think the greatest inventor in Neo-City could've figured out a way to make sure her schedule didn't clash. Thankfully her secretary had been some sort of French Naval Officer turned singer before he was brought under company employ, and the eye candy made her more than eager to lounge around the admittedly posh interior. The French hunk looked up from whatever paperwork he had been filling out and smiled at her causing her cheeks to flush red. She had to admit, being brought back from the dead by a madwoman who seemed to be taking over the city had its perks.
  
  "I'm not sure if it's a fashion statement, but Miss Anderbilt would like me to ask you to take your helmet off when indoors."
  
  Of course, she had forgotten to retract the blast shielding that had been, only two hours earlier, keeping her alive while an eco-terrorist was fleeing a failed bank robbery. You get led through a labyrinth so that you can demand your account back and all thought goes out the window. That would be the start of this day. She sent the signal to her spinal cord and the moment her helmet retracted, she got a notification, 'Miss Anderbilt will see you now.'
  
  The secretary hunk who had rudely not introduced himself gave her a grin, "Good luck."
  
  She rolled her eyes, "Thanks. What did you say your name was again?"
  
  "I didn't."
  
  "Cool, so go fuck yourself." She stood up and made her way to the double doors that led into the Chief Executive Officer's office. Her feet stopped before she went in, 'Why am I like this?' Turning around, she donned a honey-sweet smile, "Sorry, it's been a long day."
  
  He barked out a laugh, "Don't worry about it, I can imagine." He ran a hand through his sandy blonde hair, "You can relax about the boss though, she looks scary, but she's a big sweetheart. If things feel like they're going south, just be honest with her."
  
  She was dumbfounded, someone was actually being nice to her, like, for no reason? "T-thanks. I'm Echo, my mom was big on Hellenistic bullcrap. And you are..?"
  That was the moment that changed everything, he locked those sea-green eyes onto hers and smiled, "Integra Amantem. Give the name a Google. I think you'll like what you find."
  
• Ech0 looked up at the ceiling, her ankles crossed as she lay on the chaise lounge wondering how her life had gotten to this, truly absurd point. There was a brief moment of contemplation as to exactly why Miss Anderbilt insisted on conducting their meeting like this, before she decided there was no reason questioning things out of her control.
  
  

 

[Sepokku]

"You better not be midflight in there"
Me:

 

[Sepokku]

Conformal Cyclical Cosmology​

(Figure 2: Cartoon of conformal cyclic cosmology: each aeon's big bang arises from the conformally compressed remote future of its preceding aeon)

 

[Sepokku]

"At the smaller end, the place where quantum mechanics and general relativity meet is the smallest possible object - an instanton.

"This plot suggests the universe may have started as an instanton, which has a specific size and mass, rather than a singularity, which is a hypothetical point of infinite density and temperature."
-Vihan Patel

Fig. 1. (Color online) Masses, sizes, and relative densities of objects in our Universe. Time-dependent background densities are color-coded as in Fig. 1. Thediagonal white dashed isodensity lines correspond to the intersections in Fig. 1 of the vertical isochron lines with the black density line. Gravity and quantumuncertainty prevent objects of a given mass from being smaller than their corresponding Schwarzschild radius [Eq. (6)] or Compton wavelength [Eq. (7)].Schwarzschild black holes lie on the black m / r diagonal line which is the lower boundary of the “forbidden by gravity” region. The masses and Compton wavelengths of the top quark (t), Higgs boson (Ho), proton (p), electron (e), and neutrinos () are plotted along the Compton (m / r1) diagonal line. Among these, the top quark has the smallest Compton wavelength, because it has the largest mass: 173GeVc2. The smallest possible object is a Planck-mass blackhole indicated by the white dot labeled “instanton” (Ref. 20). Its mass and size are ðm;rÞ¼ðmp; lpÞ. The smallest observable (not yet evaporated) primordial black hole (PBH) that could have survived until today has approximately the same size as a proton (Ref. 21). The large low-mass black dot in the SMBH (supermassive black hole) range is the 4 106 solar mass black hole at the center of our galaxy (Ref. 22), while the more massive large black dot is Ton 618. The dashed horizontal line at m ¼ mp emphasizes the orthogonal symmetry of black holes (m / r) and particles (m / r1). Our Universe is represented by the “Hubble radius” and has a mass and size that places it on the black hole line, seemingly suggesting that our Universe is a massive, low-density black hole (Sec.III A). The black rectangle containing neutron stars (“NS”), white dwarfs (“WD”), and brown dwarfs (“BD”) indicates the size of the parameter space plotted in Fig. 3

Fig. 2. (Color online) Top panel: The decreasing average temperature and density of the Universe as a function of time (and on the upper x-axis as a function of scale factor a). The solid black line is the energy density of radiation and matter (qr þ qm). The dashed black line is the energy density of the vacuum. The red line is the average temperature of the Universe. The background is color-coded to show the densities that dominate the Universe as a function of time. From left to right starting at the Planck time, the dominant densities are: pink (radiation, Xr), grey (false vacuum energy of inflation, XKi), pink (radiation, Xr), blue (matter, Xm), and light grey (vacuum energy or dark energy, XK). The transition from the matter domination to the current dark energy domination occurred at t 2:4 1017s after the big bang (about 6.1 109 years ago). Because of the logarithmic time axis, this transition is barely distinguishable to the left of the vertical “now” line(4:4 1017 s). This plot assumes a KCDM Universe withXm ¼ 0:30 6 0:02; XK ¼ 0:7060:02; Ho ¼ 7062 km s1Mpc1. “GUT” is the energy scale of grand unified theories, “EW” is the electroweak energy scale, “QGP” is the epoch of quark-gluon plasma while “BBN” is the epoch of big bang nucleosynthesis. Bottom panel: The effective number of relativistic degrees of freedom g as a function of time. Estimates of g for timest 1010 s are from Refs. 1 and 6–9. At t 1010 s, the particles of the standard model are relativistic and produce 106.75 degrees of freedom. The large uncertainty in g for t1010 s is the notional range taken from Ref. 6.At these earlier times and higher energies, the values of g are poorly constrained and depend on the model of high energy particle physics (Refs. 1and 10). The values of g in the bottom panel, when inserted into Eqs. (2)and (5) produce the temperatures and energy densities in the top panel. Tobe explicit and simple, we have assumed gðt < 1032sÞ ¼ gðt ¼ 1032sÞ.Times before the Planck time are labelled “sub-Planckian unknown.” Onany log(time) axis, t ¼ 0 is infinitely far to the left. This choice precludes allmodels in which time has no beginning

 

[Sepokku]

A Black-Hearted Epitaph

While we were still dating, i put out a large amount of gold for anyone who had a cure for vampirism. Most of them were overly convoluted. ‘A Toreador of power such as hers? beyond saving’ A cleric of Iomedae once told me. It was then that i lost my faith in the gods. I could not help you with your curse no matter how it hurt us. I was only mortal and you were nigh a goddess. The obvious answer was to join you in vampirism, but i feared for my humanity far too dearly. I even contemplated killing you, having a high priestess bring you back as a mortal woman. The priestess told me your soul would be damned to a higher power immediately. A consort of filth she screamed at me. I lost my temper, and am no longer allowed in the Church of Absalom. I stood before the door that Abdul Alhazred had described the night before his death. A madman raving fever dreams before insanity took his mind. Truly, most people found him a fool and only one human has ever ventured to this “Nameless City” and returned to speak of it. The consensus being what he found there brought him to madness. I met various people on my way here who speculated on what he found in the Nameless City. Their ideas varied from a being akin to angels or demon, an Apple of Eden, the lord of darkness himself, a living old god, all the way down to absolutely nothing. As a young beggar girl told me while I passed through the Holy City “It is the vast expanse of nothingness that drove Abdul to madness, his expectations filled up the empty mausoleum and he could not leave with his sanity.” I found myself liking the young girl’s words best. She could not have been over fourteen years of age, something that made her words all the more ominous.
I bumbled my way to the Nameless City, tracing what footsteps I could unearth of Abdul. My traveling companion Soma left me only three weeks prior, and I have eaten all the weight bearing animals he did not leave with. A small bag of holding filled with rations and essentials is to sustain me for the few nights I remain here. In hushed voices across the Multiverse, it is spoken of that there is an ancient artifact that Abdul Alhazred authored himself, while under the influence of the Old Gods or perhaps even the Dark Tapestry itself. Such an artifact gives its controller dominion over life and death, absolute control of the undead, and the key to bringing about Golarion’s true destiny. I had never been much of a historian growing up, but recent events and a plethora of time on my hands had led me here. The whole of my reasoning behind coming to this plane would fill the entirety of a novel and I fear I havent the time to write another book. So for now I shall end this letter with a flourish and a challenge. Enjoy your undeath, for soon will come a time when i will return your life myself. So that we may be together until death may us part.

-Your once and forever love,
Blackheart

 

[Sepokku]

My father used to say that ‘every man lives his life his own, and it is the very fragility and fleeting reality of life that makes it so valuable.’ He also used to say that you could never trust the Fey. I oft thought the two went hand in hand, though at the time I could never of known how correct I was. He put great emphasis on values and fighting for you beliefs. He often used to talk about living a full life and closing his eyes to sleep for the last time in the Captain’s chair of his ship, surrounded by riches he’d acquired and hidden away from prying eyes. I think he paraphrased the last bit from an old pirate novella he was exceedingly fond of, but the seedling of an ideal was planted. When mother and father left for the Shackles, I felt abandoned. Certainly deep down I understood a child my age could never survive in the harsh Shackles, my sister and myself certainly might have gotten our parents killed, it was better for them and us this way. However, that did not stop the resentment I felt when I was left with Auntie Allison in SpiritGrove. My sister was too young to remember much of either of our parents, she understood the abandonment, but grew up without attachment or the feeling of betrayal.

In many ways Allison was a better mother AND father than either of our parents could have been. She instilled my sense of justice in me. When my sister Elle and I refused to learn archery she taught us swordplay. When we didnt fit in with the others, she took us to the Kitsune’s sacred ancestral home, it was there that I found myself. Father had always taught me to fight for what I believed in, but it was my aunt who taught me what to believe in. The only dying memory I had of my father was that my life was my own, and when it was time for my life to end, it is on myself to assure it ends on a note I could be proud of. That is, of course until the bastard groveled on his hands and knees, renouncing everything he had once held dear; and begged the two-faced bitch of the Summer Court for more time. However that’s a much too long story for a much later time. As I stood in the forest of perpetual dawn, and the fox fire wisped to and fro, I suddenly had a revelation, ‘Home is where the Heart is’

It did not take long for Allison to pick up on my feelings of wistfulness, the people here werent my people, and though I had come to love Allison, wanderlust surged through my veins. When the time finally came that I asked her to leave, Allison merely smiled. With tears in her eyes she gave me a sword my father had left me. She said it was his own, and he wanted me to have it. My sister Dani was given a curved sword, made to be used two-handed which was unusual for our particular style, but though I dont know what Allison told her, Elle seemed to treasure it even more than I treasured Father’s sword.

Elle and I made a name for ourselves as “Blackhearts” We slaughtered entire crews of people. Mostly slavers, though we did not always have the luxury of asking. We sold every ship, saving money for the day when we parted ways. My sister had always wanted to find our parents, but I couldn’t help but think she would come up disappointed if she ever did. She left for Absalom, to inquire about the Sea of Black Tears. I took another job, to stop a shipment of slaves in transit from the Shackles to Katapesh. Easy work, a job like any other. The only exception is that this time; I wouldnt be paid, the slaves would die a bloody and fiery death, I would lose in a duel for the first time in my life, a girl named Valentine would best me at swordplay and I would fall in love with the monster behind it all.


The smooth doors felt like obsidian under my fingers, though it could not have been for the door itself was far too black, and didnt reflect light. Like staring into a starless night up at the dark Tapestry. I had read of doors that opened to demi-planes of pure darkness. Terror crept up my spine and for a morose second i did not have what it took to open the door. My hand felt cold, the door seemed to thrum almost with a deep guttural vibration like the entirety of the world were quivering with anticipation. I drew my hand back and the shaking did not stop. Quite the opposite, everything seemed to crescendo until my ears began to bleed. I still cannot recall exactly why or when but somewhere in my fevered confusion, I must have pushed open the door. Strange that I should not remember forcing it open, I remember thinking it must have been ungodly heavy.

Then, without warning or pause, I was simply inside the door. It must have shut behind me, or perhaps the door simply did not exist wherever in the multiverse it let out. I could not see, but could hear things in the darkness. I tried to summon up Fox-fire but nothing came, only the endlessly chittering blackness. I found myself suddenly aware of movement, like the sensation of walking. I could not feel my body though, my legs did not move and I could not bring myself to action. Perhaps my body was not my own here, as if the entirety of the realm I had stepped into belonged to another being and my appearing here was forcing it to use some of its own bodily mass to give me shape. I will never no how long this went on, perhaps it never ended and even now as I write this I am in the black infernal void, tithing away my time in feverdreams of calligraphy. For what was both only a single instance and all of eternity, I was one with the Dark Tapestry. I was ever-flowing and eternal. I could hear the olds one chitter and whisper promises of power and darkness to me. The eldritch calling in my veins begged me to stay, lie silently and wait. I remember feeling calm, at peace, like I belonged. Regardless of birth, circumstance, creed, or even physiology, the elder ones accepted me.
“That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.” No voice spoke the words, perhaps I only imagined them. However I might have never left, had they not come up. A beautiful Ivory Goddess appeared before me, the darkness seemed to melt away from her. The tangible inky blackness seemed to recoil from her perfect pale skin. In a voice, only something inhumanly beautiful could muster, she whispered “Till Death Do Us Part” My peace turned to anxiety. I can’t stay here with that Goddess beckoning to me. The calmness turned to panic. What if I can never leave here and I never see her again. Defiance burned in my heart. My father’s words burned in my head. “Every man lives his life his own.” My voice spoke the words, though my body did not move. I thought that I saw you there, Ms. Valentine, though when I awoke you were gone.

A lady in black stood in my vision as I awoke. She was definitely feminine though I would never be able to make out definitive features on her. Sometimes her eyes would smolder a fiery red, though more often than not they sat as small ruby pinpricks, tiny like two drops of blood on her whirling face.