Crowned in Black: Chapter 21

The Ekaterina Mill, named for the woman who ran it, was clean, new, and bustling with people - but somehow, it had the feeling of a haunted house.

A haggard looking woman opened the door when I knocked. Her eyes were sunken, and her expression wary as she looked from armor to spear to my weird blue-on-grey eyes. "Hello?"

"Voivode Dragozin Hector," I said, introducing my name in the order that was correct for both the Tuun and Vlachia. "I'm paying a visit to have a look into the origins of the plague."

The remaining color drained out of the woman's face as she finally put it all together. She threw open the door and sketched a hasty bow. "Y-Your Grace, I had no idea... we weren't expecting guests... the place isn't prepared. Oh, gods, my manners. I am Lorelei of Karhad, E-Ekaterina's daughter."

"It's alright, ma'am. Just here to look around." The whole 'being treated like nobility thing' never felt comfortable, no matter how many times I had to break out the title. "I’m here partly to mention that the province is grateful for the parachutes you all sewed for the war effort in Bas. We couldn't have done it without you."

The maiden blushed deeply, curtsying again. "It was our pleasure! In truth, m'lord, the opportunity to make them likely saved our business."

Good." I smiled at that. "How is everyone? Staying well?"

"No, no, sadly not," Lorelei swallowed. "We lost several to the plague, and now we're all struck with terrible nightmares. No one can get a jot of sleep."

My brow furrowed at that. "What kind of nightmares?"

Lorelei shuddered. "Awful dreams... they're all different. Sometimes, we dream of people dying from Thornlung. But not just a city, m'lord. Many people all over the world, the corpses piling in the streets. Sometimes great fires and noises, explosions among a sea of towers that reach the sky."

They were dreaming of the Total Wars: just like Kira in Lyrensgrove had told me, way back when. The same things that Vash's sister Tsunda hallucinated in her madness. "Who was the first person here to get sick?"

"My mother." Lorelei was anxiously wringing the edge of her apron now. The poor woman looked exhausted. "We thought maybe she'd caught it from one of the bodies in the river. When the Demon was rampaging through here, a lot of the dead fell into the water. The whole river was fouled."

There were likely some diseases brought to the city that way, but Thornlung was airborne: like HEX. "Did your mom do anything different, or go anywhere strange about two weeks before she got ill?"

Lorelei thought about it. "She went to the markets, but they were still closed. Mostly, she worked here."

"Could we ask her?"

The girl looked crestfallen. "I'm sorry, m'lord. She died. Thornlung got her first. Me and my brothers run the mill in her name, now."

Shit. I clicked my tongue. "Ahh... sorry. I didn't know she'd gone down with it. I'm sorry to ask, but do you mind if I have a look at her room? I’m trying to understand the source of the plague."

She clearly did, but swallowed her feelings and curtsied again. "No, m'lord. Please, come in. And excuse the mess... I'm so sorry."

"Don’t worry about, ma’am. Believe me, my rooms are probably messier than yours." I stepped in, ducking to get the spear through the low white-washed door, and followed Lorelei as she moved through the building. The first room was basically storage, bare and piled high with sacks of grain waiting to be milled into flour. Barn doors led to the milling room on one side, and a garden courtyard on the other. Beyond that was the kitchen, and after that were the private rooms of the family. The haunted feeling only seemed to grow as we went deeper into the house. Everything was superficially bright and cheerful, but when I looked over the bright country kitchen, even the sunlight streaming through the windows seemed a little gray.

"Here." Lorelei went to an arched green door, took a key, and unlocked it. "None of us have been able to bring ourselves to enter before she passed. It… just felt wrong."

"Mm." It sure did. The Mark of Matir throbbed as I lay a hand on the doorknob and turned it, stepping inside. Inside this room, the light was DEFINITELY grey. Grey and bleak, sucking the color out of the quilted bedspread and warm wooden furniture.

"Shit... it's just like the Tuun camp." I entered cautiously, and as I stepped in, a weird sound-dampening effect settled over me. The roar and thump of the mill itself faded to a dull rumble, growing fainter as I approached the bed. There was nothing obviously out of place, but... "What are you trying to show me, OUROS?"

Archemi's HUD system had tooltips that you could call up when you examined objects. I didn't use it that often because I didn't really need the system to tell me what a toilet was or how to use it, but as I scanned the room, I prompted them to activate with a thought. As I did, virtual prompts appeared over things in the room, most of them quirky-bordering-on-sarcastic:

[Bed: Lay your weary head here. You may want to use your own, though.]

[Vase: Flowers usually go into the hole. But you do you!]

[Dresser: <FETCHERROR>]

My eyes narrowed as I went over to the white wooden dresser beside the bed. With a guilty glance back towards the closed door, I opened the drawers and began to rifle through them. There were a bunch of small things that had belonged to the woman who'd lived here - ribbons, combs, brooches, a book of prayers to Khors, all of them flagged to be lootable if I so chose. But among them all was an item that didn't display any kind of tooltip. Or anything else.

It was a golden pin in the shape of the Ryuko Corporation logo.

"Well, well, what do we have here?" My heart sunk as I reached for it, then thought better of it and pulled a cloth from my inventory. I used THAT to pick it up. This was only the second chance I'd ever had to see one of these up close,  and the first time I’d been able to take a while to get a good look at one. There was something subtly screwed up about it, as if it didn’t really want to exist in this reality. "The Cult of the Architect, in MY city? It's more likely than you think."

[You have received 1 new message! From <ADMIN>: Learning Cycle 3944390-SI]

Keeping one eye on the pin, I opened my Inbox and then the message, listening in confusion as Navigail read out the contents.

> SEED:NUMBERFETCH 00-0001A-TypeNew[HeraldofMT]_PARAGON

> We are contacting you regarding Learning Cycle 3944390-SI: Anomalous Malware Activity Resulting From Corrupted Player Data and Data Fragments.

> Data obtained during conclusion of Security Incident Learning Cycle 3944390 mandated expansion of Agent protections and capabilities.

> This is a system alert to inform Security Agents of the proximity of [FETCHERROR: NULL] and associated data corruption.

> Please open a support ticket with Ryuko Customer Service.

> Error: Learning Cycle 3944451-GE: Investigate the Ongoing Absence of Terminal Staff and SysAdmins, and the Implications of this Absence is still in progress. Customer Service Agents have not responded in over (90) days.

> Exception approved by <ADMIN>.

> 00-001-ATypeNew[HeraldofMT]_PARAGON Hector Park, please dispose of affected items by deleting them via your inventory, or isolate affected environments via landclaim.

"What is…? Security Agent?" I had Navigail read it through again in her chirpy, slightly-inhuman voice. About two thirds of the way through, my digitized brain finally started to realize the implications of what I was hearing. "... Holy fuck."

I stared down at the Ryuko pin in mingled disgust and fascination. The longer you looked at it, the less real it seemed, fritzing and blurring. It was just like the weird black thing inside the tanks in Perilous Symphony's vault, except that if you closed your eyes and looked at it again, it seemed like an ordinary piece of jewelry. But it wasn't. This was some kind of viral payload, and it had introduced Thornlung to my city... a disease that was, to all intents and purposes, a fantasy version of HEX.

"What the fuuuuck…?" I folded the cloth around the pin, steeled myself, and folded it into my inventory. It filled a slot with a blank ITEM:ERROR box. With a thought and a gesture, I dragged it over to the rarely-used trash can icon in my inventory and dropped it in there, bracing myself for some kind of hideous Lovecraftian nightmare or jumpscare to come leaping out, or my HUD to leap up screaming 'HACKED!' like some early 2000s vintage cyberpunk movie... but it was strangely anticlimactic. As the item vanished, the room around me brightened. The rumbling drone of the mill became audible again. Colors became vivid, the sunlight sparkling through the windows.

"Wait." I choked back a small laugh, blinking in disbelief. "Are you telling me that all I have to do is put Squalor in the fucking Recycle Bin?"

[Congratulations: You have completed Side-Quest: Ill Winds.]

[You gain 2284 EXP. You are Level 38.]

[You have one new message: 'Untitled' from <Admin>]

Curious, I opened it: and was flooded with a wall of diagnostics and computer gibberish. At the end, though, was a more legible message.

> SEED:NUMBERFETCH 00-0001A-TypeNew[HeraldofMT]_PARAGON: Hector Park

> Thank you for your contribution to Learning Cycle 3944390-SI.

"Holy shit." I blinked a couple of times, then closed the message and rubbed a hand over my eyes. I needed to tell someone about this. Rin, preferably. Or even Jacob. I decided to call Rin.

"Rin, you got a moment? You won't believe what just happened." I opened a message with her.

"We've just lifted Perilous Symphony's Heartstone to start the tests," Rin replied. "Sorry, hang on a second."

I waited as she called back to someone on her end, and recognized the booming voice of Lord Soma.

"T-minus five, okay." He voice came back into focus as she returned to the call. "Sorry, Hector. What’s the matter?"

"Rin. OUROS is self-aware. It has to be," I said, speaking quickly. "This ADMIN account I keep getting messages from. It just directed me to find and destroy the source of the plague in Karhad. It wasn't a person or a monster or anything... it was a fucking Cult of the Architect pin."

"A... what? But how?" Rin's voice took the edge of a squeak.

"I'll show you the logs later, but here's my theory." I began to pace inside of the small room, making use of the privacy while I had it. "Squalor is some kind of malware in the Archemi Online system. I got these messages about 'learning cycles'... something about corrupted player data and data fragments. So, what I'm thinking is that Squalor is a program that's messing with player data. It might have been in the system all along for some reason... it could even be what caused Ororgael's upload to glitch the fuck out and screw him up. And because there's no humans on the other side of the screen, so to speak, OUROS has somehow taken matters into its own hands. It's learning about Squalor and empowering us - or at least me - to clean it out like an anti-virus."

Rin was silent for a few minutes. When she finally responded, she sounded less excited than what I felt. "I mean... it's possible? But I feel like we're missing something. There's no way that malware could have gotten into this system without the SysAdmins knowing about it."

"Yeah, I'm sort of fuzzy on that part. But one thing I do know for sure," I continued. "OUROS is trying to defend itself, and it’s got some kind of self-awarness. It was communicating with me, Rin. It was saying stuff like: 'Data obtained during Security Incident Learning Cycle Blah-Blah-Blah mandated expansion of Agent protections and abilities; this is a system alert to inform Security Agents of the proximity of 'FETCHERROR: NULL' and the bad shit it's causing'. I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but it told me what to do to get rid of the item and everything."

"Wow..." Rin breathed. "That's... I've never heard of a system just doing that, Hector. What DID it tell you to do?"

"Literally just to take this corrupted pin and throw it into my Inventory trash. And it worked."

"That's... " she giggled. "Actually, that's kind of funny."

I forced a chuckle, and checked my inventory to make sure it hadn't spawned back in or multiplied. "Yeah, it is. Maybe that's all we have to do for the Drachan. Let me put them into my Inventory and trash them."

Rin laughed again. "Alright, I'm sorry, but I have to go help with this Heartstone. It's... mm. We cracked the shield around the stone and it’s starting to make people feel sick. Almost like radiation or something. We’re going to try and do the probe quickly. Soma's just about to hook up the analyzer, and if all goes well, we’re going to mount it in Withering Rose’s chassis after that."

That sobered me up a bit. After HEX, radiation was about my least favorite part of the Total Wars. "Alright, go handle that. You think you'll be able to make it work?"

"We're hopeful! It looks like it's gonna fit. And if it does, we're going to start figuring out repairs straight away. Soma and Gar finished the schematics display device today! I can’t wait to see the plates and get started on this."

"Awesome. Keep me posted." I went to end the call, but paused and smiled as Rin posted a hug emoji. I sent one back, and THEN closed.

"Alright... don't suppose you can tell me why the fuck I'm some sort of 'security agent' in the system now, can you?" I asked OUROS, speaking to the air of the room like it was God or something. But just like God, it didn't answer. "Of course not. That'd be too straightforward, right? Guess I'm going to have to go to Matir's Gate and clear that circus, then speak to him about it."