At Thomas’s suggestion, Hagi and I asked the system to put us into our rest period early. Or, in other words, I took a nap. And I dreamed about being Hagi. Everything he’d seen or felt after the split, and we’d mutually agreed that he would take on the alias. Because it wasn’t really him that felt those things, it was me. It’s complicated, I’m not certain I’ll ever be able to describe it to a Traveler.
When I woke up, I was one person again, and less than thirty minutes had passed. Thomas was gone, and I sat alone in the copy of Zhesa Castle, my childhood home (or at least the copy of it that Thomas had created for me in the lobby), and I thought about what to do next.
Having tested being split into two, I came to a decision.
“<
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Abruptly, I was standing with four copies of myself, all identical.
“I’m Hail,” I said quickly, beating the others from claiming the title first.
“I’m Hagi,” said a second me.
“I’m just going to use an illusion to make myself look different,” a third said.
A fourth me took out a hat, and the fifth sighed and fast-equipped my mage’s robe.
“Okay, that’s settled,” Hagi said. “Now then. Who does what?”
“Two of us should stay and prepare for tomorrow,” I said. “Dancing and reviewing the information we have on the attendees, that sort of thing.”
“Are you volunteering?” Hat-wearer said.
“Hells no,” I said. “Rock Paper Scissors.”
That got a nod of mutual agreement from everyone. We had a round-robin tournament right there in my bedroom. Hat wearer and magically blond me both sighed when they came up with the worst records, but they went out to the courtyard to practice dancing for a while.
“So that leaves three of us,” Robed me said.
“Thomas said he’d reset our death-timer as long as we didn’t try to log in as [Warrior],” I pointed out. “So I’m free to log in as Hail. Question is, what class to I pick?”
I pulled up my class menu and scrutinized it for a moment.
“Maybe we should assign names and identities to each?” I suggested. “Can we do that? <
<> the system confirmed. <
“It’s obvious which class is Hail,” Hagi said. “He has to be [Lord]”
“He can be [Spellblade] too when we unlock it again,” I argued.
“Yeah. Two of our classes can be Hail, the others should be secret for now,” robed me said.
“The rest of them can be Hagi,” Hagi argued. “After all, almost nobody knows that name, and when it blows up on the forums we’ll just make up a new one.”
“Or keep using it and pretend to be two separate NPC’s,” I commented.
“Yeah, or that,” Robed me agreed. “Hail, go log in already. You know what to do.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, because I had planned it out between waking up and splitting into five. I just hadn’t known if it would be me doing it, or if I would be watching someone else do it instead, and then remember doing it later. But after the split, when nobody else had stepped forward, I had.
The others watched with relief as I logged in as I left for the map room to set my spawn point to Zhesa City.
I stepped out of the portal facility, tipping the attendant despite not having to because I’d noticed that being generous with gold like that gave small amounts of experience while I was a [Lord]. I pulled up my Contacts list and immediately applied [Mark of Karma] to all of my friends from the last few days. There was no limit to the range of that ability, and now that I could apply it deliberately, all I needed was to have been in contact with them long enough for the system to log them.
I got a message while I was thirty seconds into the process.
I closed the window after she gave up in trying to talk to me. I hadn’t told her all of my plans, and I didn’t intend to. But my ability to appear in multiple instances tomorrow was going to come to light sooner or later. I was just curious to see how long it would take for the Travelers to figure it out.
Daemon was all too happy – and quick – to oblige with an invite back into my old guild, and I was greeted by a Message of the Day asking members to respect my privacy, followed by a wall of text thirty pages long welcoming me back. Most of them were names that I barely remember or people I’d never met. The Mavericks was always a much bigger guild than the small group I’d interacted with.
The message of the day was updated welcoming me back, and I made a quick statement of “Thanks for the warm welcome home, but I don’t have time to talk right now. I need to get ready for tomorrow.”
Then I returned to the Guild Hall, where Larissa, Thena, and several others were waiting to show me what they purchased or had crafted for me to wear tomorrow. This turned into a thing where random members of the guild showed up and were ushered through after introducing themselves to me, many of them pausing to give me fashion advice.
I spent some time in guild chat. I wasn’t talking much, just reading what the others were saying in the general channel, and sometimes popping into the subchats. I was the main topic of conversation, and when I got tired of hearing how great it was that I’d come back I spent the rest of the day browsing the forums.
~~~~~~~~~
I am Hail, but I’d claimed the name Hagi. Thomas hadn’t actually reset my death timer like the other me said, but rather he had made it so that it only applied to my warrior class. I had four other classes that I could log in as, and the Hail version of me had already claimed Lord. Which made sense.
I don’t think I was any different from him. Before I had split, I’d thought of the different things that I needed or wanted to do with my time, and return to
I glanced at the me that had donned my wizard robe and gave him a nod. He knew what to do as well, and after he nodded back to me, he vanished, logging into Lagrea as a level 10 cleric, as we had mutually decided to use free experience to bring that class up to that level. I noted that he had chosen Valorica as his starting zone, and I hoped he got on well with the dwarves of that mountainous state. I hadn’t decided where I would go as a cleric, only that I would spend a few hours leveling it.
As for myself? My version of me that I was right now? Since I wasn’t one of the ones who had to practice dancing with myself – that was going to be an interesting experience to wake up to – and I wasn’t the cleric, then that narrowed my options down to one. I changed my appearance with [Illusion magic: Disguise], set my preferred name with the system, and logged in to the nation of Zenitha as a level four [Archer].
After asking around, and earning some funny looks from both Natives and Travelers, I found the local starting zone, where I spent the next eight hours shooting Giant Squirls and Marmots.
At the planned time, I returned to the Lobby, and asked the <
My dreams that night were strange. I was dancing, and I was pretending to be the girl, but I was the one who was leading the dance by shooting a rogue with a healing arrow while they read the names of my political enemies. I was reading the forums and watching the videos of the players complain how the goblin caves had depths and there was something there that I’d forgotten, but I never forget things so if I’d forgotten it then it must not be important. I was thinking about money and experience and if I could buy experience with money or money with experience.
I heard the music to the four-step in my dreams, but it was my mother telling me that she still loved me. Forever and ever until the gates closed and the world of Lagrea was no more.
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