SYSTEM BOOT INITIATED → OK
ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL → LAUNCHING
Nar: A clean system interface blinked into existence, the kind one would find in video games.
"Mmm... Rose, lower the volume, I'm trying to sleep," Roswald muttered in irritation.
"Rose?"
A beat.
"But Rose is dead."
Along with that, his most recent memories hit him. All of them. At once. He would have liked to sit down with that for a moment, but looking around there was nothing. Just an empty void in every direction. No floor he could see, no walls, no ceiling. And what was worse, he couldn't decide which was more alarming. The fact that he was completely naked, or the fact that based on the voice he had just heard, someone was watching him.
He decided to deal with both of those things later because something was floating in front of his face.
A screen. Hovering, almost transparent, pale blue and clean. He stared at it. The characters on it were foreign, shifting slightly, rearranging themselves. His eyes moved across them the way eyes move across something unfamiliar, and yet his mouth formed the shape of the words like it had always known them.
-==-
"If you are able to read this, the language translation pack has been successfully installed. Please tap the circle icon below to proceed further."
-==-
Nar: The letters were of another tongue, unfamiliar yet almost second nature to ■■■.
"Hey. Who is that? Where am I?" He looked around slowly. "Don't tell me I'm getting probed or something." A pause. "Of course aliens were real. Of course."
Nar: Growing weary of the unfamiliar voice, ■■■ began losing sense of reason. Understandable, truly. The void, the nudity, the floating screen, the disembodied voice. A perfectly reasonable set of circumstances to completely fall apart over.
Ding-!
Beside the main interface a shorter rectangular one appeared.
-==-
"Deactivate narration, tap the circle icon."
-==-
'..?'
Nar: ■■■ seemed to catch on quickly, realising the voice was a sort of narration, but began questioning to whom. And whether, if it could read his thoughts, it could also answer the rather pressing questions of where he was and what was hap—
"Seems like you only narrate the thoughts I don't say out loud. So are you going to answer my questions or not."
Three beats passed with no reply.
"I guess that's a no then." His gaze shifted to the smaller screen.
Nar: Deciding that if the narrator was going to be useless, there was no poi—
tap.
"...no point in hearing your annoying voice."
Roswald, savoring the peace and quiet, took his sweet time trying to get an understanding of his situation. But nothing he came up with could answer whatever was happening to him, so he came to a single conclusion. Nothing made sense, and things don't make sense unless explained, and what came after death was something that was definitely unknown.
The feeling of the sudden heart attack was still a vivid memory.
"I definitely died..."
His attention fell back onto his screen.
"Then where am I?"
-==-
"If you are able to read this, proceed further."
-==-
tap.
-==-
"Knight #20, please choose your name. Please select from the available options."
[ Note: Your name is equivalent to choosing your character. Please take your time and choose with caution. A single choice can sometimes be a life-or-death decision in the long game. Good luck is also a deciding factor. ]
1. Vance ◀ [Male]
2. Soren ◀ [Male]
3. Oryn ◀ [Male]
4. Lirien ◀ [Female]
....
....
135. Mirael ◀ [Female]
136. Caelith ◀ [Female]
137. Dawnelle ◀ [Female]
138. Evander ◀ [Male]
-==-
-break-
"How long can one survive in isolation? A question that changes with several factors, and the more the factors, the harder the difficulty and the shorter the time period. The internet was a gold mine of information, sometimes an entire subject compressed into a minute. Whether what I knew was accurate or completely made up was a separate question entirely, though in my experience the things that sound too specific to be fabricated usually aren't.
Case 1: Access to the internet but no real human contact. The average person begins showing significant psychological deterioration around six to twelve months. Therefore, it was technically deemed survivable for years, but with a compromise of mental health. Researchers named the product of this lifestyle 'lonely in a crowd' syndrome.
Case 2: Isolated but able to communicate with someone. This over case one has a higher survivability rate since research proved that a person with even little and genuine human communication can help in maintaining psychological stability for several years, that is if the communication is consistent and not at very short frequencies, like every three months or so.
You get the gist of it. The case that best fits me cuts off several factors like not having the problem of not being able sleep or going hungery. I have a semi-interactive being. All in all, pretty good conditions."
Nar: "But that's where the problem lies." ■■■ thought, having spent almost 192 hours in the lobby. ■■■ had yet to make a decision on a name, and continued to ponder.
"Yeah, the narrator was annoying, but it was the closest thing to a living being for communication, hence the reason to activate it again. In the eight days I've spent here I've come to understand several things about my situation.
One was the simple truth that I was, am? dead. Second was that my assumption of the narrator only narrating my thoughts was false. It's more so the narration of my life. The fact that it said it had been eight days was information I had no way of knowing on my own. But if the narration wasn't supposed to give any information, why did it? Simple. It was never giving information to me. Narration can give information that sometimes the characters in the script themselves don't know, and why? Because it's for the viewers. Narration can be found in several places, movies, screenplays, novels, theatre, documentaries, and so on, but all of that needs an audience.
And the third and final point, my reason for not taking this lightly and choosing a random name. There was an actual audience watching a dead human. Something like the Truman Show, only the audience was most definitely not human. Having seen my fair share of sci-fi movies with death game afterlives, something tells me choosing the proper option is really going to matter.
Now, coming to the reason why the good conditions were a downside. It had to do with one of three conclusions.
First → pure luck and I'm overthinking it. The worst of the three, since in twenty-four years of life I know for a fact my luck is just terrible.
Second → a test of endurance, which is the reason I've been staying. If this was just a waiting lobby, wouldn't there be a selection timer? Nobody wants to watch a person wait. Nobody wants to watch a person wait, but a test of endurance would explain the suitable conditions.
Third → a possibility that seems far fetched. Plausible, but far fetched."
Nar: ■■■ questioned why there were three black filled squares every time ■■■ was spoken. Was this a hint of sorts?
"Just like always, three black squares. Is it a hint that the best name has three letters? Or the third option? Just too many assumptions."
-break-
Roswald stayed firm with his assumption of it being an endurance game.
Several hours passed.
Hours counted into days.
Days counted into months.
"Forty three," he said, to no one. He had started counting things. Not because there was anything to count but because the alternative was not counting things and he had tried that and it was worse. "Forty three times I have read the name list. Forty three. Mirael. Caelith. Dawnelle. Evander." He paused. "Forty four."
He was floating. He was always floating. He had gotten used to the floating the way you get used to a sound that never stops, not because it becomes pleasant but because at some point the brain simply files it under existing conditions and moves on.
At some point he couldn't handle the narrator's comments and turned it off. Now having no one to talk to, he had started giving the names on the list their own different personalities. Not out of boredom. Out of necessity.
Vance was the kind of person who had never lost a fight and knew it. Confident without trying to be. The name of someone who walked into a room and the room adjusted.
Soren was quiet. Methodical. The type who said very little and meant all of it. Probably had a plan for everything including situations that hadn't happened yet.
Oryn he hadn't figured out yet. Oryn kept changing depending on the day.
Lirien was someone who had been underestimated her entire life and had stopped correcting people about it because it was more useful that way.
Mirael was the smartest person in any given room and was very tired of it.
Caelith had survived something. You could tell just from the name somehow. Something had happened to Caelith and Caelith had come out the other side of it different.
Dawnelle was the one everyone trusted without knowing exactly why.
Evander, he decided, was trouble. The pleasant kind. The kind that smiled at you right before everything went sideways.
"I'm not crazy," he said, to the list, on what he estimated was somewhere around month four. "This is just resource management."
He floated in silence for a moment.
Then it occurred to him, quietly and without drama, that he had just spent four months in a void holding one sided conversations with himself and his 138 made up characters, givin each a full personality, a backstory, and in Oryn's case an ongoing character arc that changed daily, and had just referred to all of it as resource management.
He looked at the list.
"ughh? you were the best name anyway."
He reached forward and tapped the screen.
- break -
The private study was quiet save for the soft taps of Mrs. Kate's pointer against the chart. A chart that outlined the borders of the Kingdom of Aurial, its five provinces colour coded in different ink, each one labeled in the careful script of whoever had drawn it.
"The northern province," Mrs. Kate continued, tapping the upper region, "was the last to be formally added under the third king's reign, which is why its administrative structure differs from the remaining four." Kate turned to the little girl with purple hair. She had chubby cheeks and the kind of face that would require genuine tolerance not to walk over and hug. "Now, Lady Zadia, can you tell me which province holds the highest concentration of the kingdom's grain production?"
Zadia sat with her hands folded neatly on the desk, her posture the kind that had been corrected enough times to become habit. She was thirteen, slight, with the kind of attentive expression that tutors liked and trusted completely.
Then her right eye twitched.
"Mrs. Kate," she said, her voice carrying the particular softness of a well raised noble daughter. "If it isn't too much trouble, might I have a brief recess? I do apologise for the interruption."
Mrs. Kate lowered her pointer and looked at her with small surprise.
"Is something the matter, Lady Zadia? By chance are you feeling ill?"
Zadia smiled, small and a little sheepish, the way a child smiles when caught admitting to something almost embarrassing. She let out a quiet laugh.
"That is precisely because Mrs. Kate's lessons are genuinely wonderful to sit through," she said warmly. "But I'm afraid nature has its own schedule and it is rather less polite about it. Please forgive me."
Mrs. Kate laughed softly and waved a hand. "Twenty minutes. I expect you back promptly."
"Of course." Zadia rose from her chair with a small bow of her head and slipped out of the study.
The hallway was cool and still. Her footsteps were light on the marble floor, one hand trailing briefly along the wall as she walked. The light from the bright sun poured through the mullioned windows, casting long divided shadows across the hallway floor, and beyond those windows lay the Duchy of Solon in full afternoon light, its grounds rolling out unhurried in every direction.
The world really is beautiful, she thought with a wry smile.
Then she turned the corner and put two full lengths of corridor between herself and the door, and the polished expression she had worn in the study dropped from her face like she had taken off a coat.
She exhaled through her nose.
Rolled her neck once.
"Still though, acting like a kid is exhausting," she muttered, her voice entirely different now. Flat. Dry. The voice of someone considerably older than thirteen, but inside a body that still had all its milk teeth.
She thought about the sudden notification she had heard during the lecture. "Did the market update its items?"
She raised her hand, fingers moving through the air with the practiced ease of someone navigating a menu nobody else could see. Two taps. A scroll. Another tap.
Coming to a complete stop, her eyes dilated for just a moment, pupils widening and then settling, and a wide grin spread across her face slowly, the kind of grin that had nothing childlike about it whatsoever.
"Finally," she said quietly. "Took you long enough."