Chapter 5: A Magical Place

  I considered the updated interface. Making my Sanctuary more comfortable seemed like an easy choice, but as I thought about it, I realized I wasn’t really tired. I’d jumped straight from death into working on this project without even sitting down. Logically, I knew my body wasn’t a real body, so it made sense that it wouldn’t get tired. But if that were the case, why have a 'sanctuary' at all?

  I frowned, then looked back at Orpheus, the hovering little golden fairy watching me with a neutral expression.

  “Orpheus,” I called out to get her attention. “This is my Sanctuary, right? And I just opened a new menu that can alter it and make it more comfortable. But I’m not tired, and I don’t really have a body. I don’t mind making it more homey, but it seems like it would be a low priority for most worldbuilders.”

  The fairy blinked, then bobbed up and down in what I now recognized as a kind of affirmation.

  “You’re only partially right,” she replied. “It’s true that you don’t get physically tired, but eventually your mind will need something else to focus on. Without the restrictions of biology, this happens far less often than before, but mental drift does happen. This is because your current state is meant to mimic your biological state. In many ways, we find that makes people more creative.”

  She traced a lazy circle in the air, then continued.

  “Also, once you have an avatar available, having a comfortable Sanctuary to retreat to without fully abandoning your avatar is something that many administrators desire. If you do not currently feel the need to decorate your Sanctuary, then by all means, continue working on your world project. Avatars generally do not become available until the Fourth Epoch, so until then, you can operate with minimal furnishings.”

  I nodded and silently wondered if that circle she drifted in had meant anything. Orpheus hadn’t been a very chatty roommate since I arrived. That initial introduction had been pretty glitzy, but now she seemed only half there. The fact that she’d moved at all was a little strange compared to how she’d been acting.

  I put that thought aside for now. While I hadn’t been given any particular deadline, I did want to get this whole setup ready while I was thinking of it… strike while the iron was hot, as the saying went.

  For now, I ignored the Sanctuary tab and instead opened the Matter and Energy section. I would have to think about this a little more carefully if I wanted to do what I planned.

  I took a breath and looked over the options. A lot of the specifics of how things worked were defined in the Universe tab, but here I wanted to see if I could make new materials or energies.

  It didn’t take long for me to find what I wanted. There was, in fact, an Energy Creation portion. It was pretty extensive, but fortunately, the interface was automated enough to handle some of the details I’d already decided.

  I wanted a magical world, so I created magical energy. I knew it was the in-thing for stories in my era to call magical energy something special, but I didn’t see the point and just named it Mana. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

  Unfortunately, I seemed to have outsmarted myself. Once I created a new energy, I had to drill down into a number of menus and submenus to define how it interacted with other kinds of energy and various kinds of matter.

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  It was a good thing the system was still using my previous world as a basis, because that way I didn’t have to define elements like iron from scratch. I glanced back at Orpheus.

  “Do most worlds use chemistry like the periodic table,” I asked, “or are there worlds that use what we’d call classical elemental design… composition by fire, earth, air, and so on?”

  The fairy-light sputtered briefly – another response I hadn’t seen before – but she answered with a surprisingly human-looking shrug.

  “I cannot give you precise numbers,” she said, “but your world is not the only one to use that complex chemical system. Other worlds sometimes use completely different systems, or even overhaul from one to another partway through various epochs. Building an entirely new system of matter and energy from scratch is a much more involved undertaking than what you are attempting. While I can’t give specific numbers, I can say that almost all new Administrators who attempt to create their entire matter and energy system from scratch suffer early failures.”

  That didn’t surprise me, and I nodded before asking, “What about what I’m doing – adding one or two types of energy or matter?”

  Orpheus shrugged again.

  “While this can be destabilizing,” she said. “It is a much easier task, and very common, to either add some new elements or energies or to swap out or change the functionality of others. Your interface should guide you through doing so with minimal impact on the rest of the system.”

  I nodded again before turning back to my interface.

  It took quite a while to define everything I wanted in this new energy type. I’d figured it would be a little complicated, but I’d really underestimated it. I’m not sure how long I spent tweaking various values, but I was starting to understand what Orpheus had meant when she referenced mental fatigue.

  I was definitely relieved to find out that I didn’t need to define everything the energy could do, yet. I tagged a lot of things as undefined, which the interface told me meant “impossible for now,” but potentially changeable later at less cost than altering a fully defined effect.

  That worked for me. I didn’t expect anyone to be using magic until I at least had life on the planet.

  It would've been nice if I’d had some sort of example to go off—maybe a world that already had magic. Then again, I still had no idea what other worlds actually looked like.

  Sure, we had stories of magic and fantastical realms, but that didn’t mean alternate worlds resembled anything from our fiction. I guess in this case, maybe I was getting a little too ahead of myself. But if I was going to make a world, I wanted it to be one that I thought would make good stories.

  I glanced back at Orpheus.

  “So you said more soul energy comes from people doing something significant. Just to clarify… does that mean people who do something heroic or particularly villainous, something that affects the world, generate more energy?”

  The glimmering fairy bobbed up and down again.

  “The exact mechanisms are more complex than that,” she replied, “but in general, you are correct. The effect on the world is a good baseline for how much soul energy a single being will create. There are many cases where their actions will not have any particular effect on the world, yet still generate a large amount of energy. These exceptions are much more complicated to explain.”

  I flipped back to the Universe tab and looked it over. While reviewing it, I continued to interrogate the High Administrator… or whatever part of her was floating there.

  “So basically, it would be a good idea to give people plenty of opportunities to do something extraordinary – challenges to surmount and all that. I’m guessing an example of an action that doesn’t have a direct effect on the world but might still generate energy would be, say, the first person to scale the highest mountain in the world. Am I right?”

  I wasn’t looking at her, but Orpheus’s voice held the same neutral quality it had for a long while, and that bothered me.

  “Very likely, yes,” she answered. “Exactly how much that would generate would depend on the true difficulty of it, how widespread the knowledge became, the reasons for doing so, and what sort of hardships they had before achieving this.”

  “Right, right…” I mumbled, still looking through the menus.

  I attempted to select an option that would have any energy going out of bounds converted to Mana and reflected instead of destroyed, hopefully preventing the problems a closed universe would have. It wasn’t as expensive as destroying it, but it was still depressingly costly as a maintenance plan.

  Well, there goes that idea.

  And that’s when I realized I might not need to solve this problem at all.