After spotting Elody, I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to interrupt her. Both she and Mel were in front of the cloudwood, eyes closed, and surprisingly for Elody, floating. Mel’s colors were slowly shifting, in sync with different color clouds, that a gentle breeze was moving around the tree. He looked more and more at peace the longer the tree was here. I was glad to see something had finally settled his mind. After hearing what he was willing to tell us about his kid, he certainly deserved something of his own.

  “Any idea if we should bother them?” I asked, debating instead if bugging Cecile and Elicec, who were busy working a field might be a better idea. Corey still needed rest, after all.

  “Why don’t we take a walk and talk about whatever new thing is on your mind,” Pryte said. It was a good idea, considering I hadn’t seen much of my own property, it was probably long past time I did.

  “Yeah, sure, any idea where they found that abandoned property? Wouldn’t mind checking it out,” I said.

  “I believe so,” Pryte said, pointing. “Should be this way.”

  I waited until the house was out of sight before bringing up my earlier conversation in the simulator. “So any idea what that was about?”

  “No, and frankly, it’s one of the few things I’ve learned since meeting you that I honestly have never heard about. They really hijacked your System session like that?” Pryte asked, looking possibly bewildered. I wasn’t sure, but it was an expression I had yet to see on his face.

  “As far as I could tell, yeah. So what do you think I should do?” I asked.

  “I know what I’d do, but as you’re the leader of the faction, I can’t say that that’s the best idea,” Pryte answered, stopping to examine a mushroom on the ground after he finished.

  “You’d go just for the experience, I assume?” I replied, looking down at the mushroom he had found. I didn’t recognize it, but I wasn’t much of a mushroom hunter other than a few outings with my father in search of some morels.

  “I would, and if we can find a way for me to accompany you, I’d like to go, but barring a dungeon core partnership, that doesn’t sound likely. And as much as I like new experiences, I’m not sure I’m ready for that kind just yet, even if you had a willing core,” Pryte explained, standing back up.

  “Fair enough. I do think I’m going to go to the first meeting at least. The fact that you have never heard of anything like this before makes both it deeply worrying but also potentially incredibly valuable,” I said, spotting the ruins of an old house ahead.

  “That’s usually the way things go; the incredibly dangerous unknown things have the most possibilities. And don’t let it be a shock that I don’t know something, just to be clear. We’ve put together a surprisingly informed group of people, but the Spiral is more or less infinite, so what we know is basically nothing,” Pryte replied.

  “Where do we compare in what we know versus the big guys?” I asked. I knew it was a hard question to answer as the nature of infinity is an odd concept at the best of times.

  “Hard to say. Elody might give most small to medium factions a run for their money on just what she knows alone, but once you hit the big guys, the ones whose reach is so large it’s hard to fathom, they have secrets buried in secrets. I know for a fact that the Undying Shadows of Tomorrow have entire star systems dedicated to private archives that only their most connected princelings are allowed near. Korl, as scary as he is for us right now, is only a drop in an infinitely large bucket of things to come. None of the big guys really have us on their radar. Just some parts of some bigger factions are upset that Sanquar still exists. At least, that’s my guess, but I can’t be that far off because if any of the top ten wanted us dead, we wouldn’t even know it. We’d just be gone,” Pryte explained. His answer touched on a lot of my own curiosities and confirmed I had made the right choice in making Pryte my information man.

  “So let’s say everything goes great. The Empire of Dave works, and we start truly integrating into the Spiral. Where does this all go?” I asked. I knew what people wanted out of me, but I didn’t really know what I was capable of in the reality of all of this.

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  “Yeah, may as well get more of the big talk out of the way then. So don’t think of the Spiral as any one concrete place with a single agenda. It’s best not even to think of any faction that’s grown beyond a single planet as that. The Spiral exists in a constant state of cold war broken up between small periods of hot wars. It hasn’t always been like this, but this cycle has firmly taken over. As you know, this isn’t the first Spiral either, so I question if that’s just the natural state toward the end of one. But that isn’t really the question you asked,” Pyte said.

  “No, it’s not; what happens to us? Do we get swallowed up into this cold war? Does Sanquar make it a hot war?” I asked.

  “I don’t think Sanquar will make it a hot war for the reasons I already said. Now the whole System and Sanquar does add a layer of complexity there, but as we don’t know what really happened once he hit the higher levels of his climb, I can’t say for sure who would be involved. What does that mean for our entry into this giant mess of a cold war? Hopefully, nothing initially. What does it mean as we start to accomplish some of what our members want us to? That’s where I start to get worried,” Pryte answered without really answering.

  “So what you are saying is we are safest as long as we don’t start making noise, but that we are also doomed to start making noise,” I said starting to understand the issue.

  “Mel isn’t wrong when he says this all has to change. He wasn’t even wrong when he realized how connected you are to that possibility. Rabyn and his whole view on fate has a point, too. Look, I don’t want to scare you here. This isn’t all doom and gloom. The problem is our information is limited, but here is my current rudimentary plan. And understand this makes some assumptions about how I think things will play out, but I can’t know that they will go that way. Are you following so far?” Pryte stopped as he asked, looking at me intently.

  “I think so. Basically, you are trying to plan a future for us in a situation where it’s impossible to know, let alone understand all the moving parts,” I said. What would some of my math teachers say about these infinities?

  “Pretty much, but also the fact that at any point, if we really piss off a big faction, somehow we just get swatted out of existence. But as that is basically out of our control, we can ignore it for now. Step one is going to be meeting your world leaders, or whatever is left of them, and figuring out how to get this world working again. That is going to be the biggest hurdle in what will come next. Following that, we need to increase the worldwide mana flow as quickly as we can. We will need to start collecting the scientists of your world and experimenting with mana and your technology. That will be important because I promise some factions are sitting on their own secrets there, so we need to understand that as best we can before it bites us in the ass. During all of this, we will need to shore up some alliances. There are a lot of smaller factions and displaced peoples out there that we can reach out to to build our strength initially. Likely, by this point, the matter of Cecile and Elicec’s homeworld will have come to a head, and shortly after that, we can expect Rabyn’s issues to start affecting us. If we get lucky, we won’t have made any new enemies and only built up our allies by this point. I haven’t made any real plans past that point because it depends on far too much to guess,” Pryte explained, somehow managing to get it all out in one long-winded explanation.

  “So something I haven’t really considered, that just hit me. We talk a lot about only Earth in these plans. What about the greater universe?” I asked. I doubted we were alone out there, and the existence of magic tended to change the concept of traveling those distances pretty fast.

  “Yeah, that’s going to be one of our long-term bargaining chips, I think. Unlike most universes entering the Spiral, this one will belong to a new faction with its resources intact. So yes, as the mana flow builds, hopefully sometime in the next decade or so, we can begin real deep space exploration and start contacting others,” Pryte answered.

  “I wonder how they will take it,” I said. I doubted we’d be the first species in the universe doing any sort of interstellar exploration, but we’d likely be the most powerful thanks to being the connection point to the Spiral integration.

  “Well, that’s going to be complicated. The moment integration finishes, every single species within the range of the mana flow will instantly get a message about its completion and the Spiral. As the flow spreads outward, every new sapient it hits will get the same message. The System has certain protocols in place for these types of contact. You went through some of it, but as a faction, we will be expected to shoulder a lot of the burden of that, too. This is why most places tend to choose brutal slavery over true integration these days when they capture universes,” Pryte explained.

  “Great, well, I guess we can figure that out in a decade, it really isn’t the biggest of my worries,” I said, now picturing the idea of having to somehow train a bunch of angry aliens.

  “The good news at least, is with the mana flow comes universal language, so that won’t be an issue, unlike chaotic space,” Pryte said.

  “I still don’t fully understand how this language translation works-,” I started to say before a loud scream from the house interrupted our conversation.

  My name is Ytln. I exist. I do not require a purpose for that existence. It is no one else’s right to to demand I have a purpose.

  Ytln’s Treatise on Sapience

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