Chapter 70: Meeting the Administration

As the golden light faded, Lexi found herself clutching the pulsing warmth of the Starseed in her remaining hand. Danica stood to her left, and Samantha — gently carrying Gretel’s remains — on her right. No longer did they stand in the gore splattered room set high in the ruined tower. Through some enchantment possessed by the stone, they had all ben transported back to the very point where this quest began, the high priestess’ chamber set within the Temple of Xoth in Astyanax. Moreover, they were joined here by the high priestess herself.

“Welcome, my brave adv—”

The smile which had lit Anya’s face, illuminating the older woman’s large green eyes as they glowed from behind her loosely curled shock of pastel blue hair, disappeared as soon as her eyes took in the entirety of the scene before her. A deep and abiding sorrow filled those eyes, transforming them from sparkling mirrors of radiant joy into deep pools of warm compassion. Despite the obvious and manifest sincerity of Anya’s reaction to the fact of Gretel’s death, Lexi found that rather than serving to pacify her simmering rage, something about this whole scenario served rather to amplify it — bringing her fury from a slow simmer to a roaring boil in the flash of an instant.

“Cut the shit!” Lexi snapped, her eyes narrowed in a baleful glare. Physically shaking with barely suppressed hysteria, Lexi unloaded on the high priestess. “We got back your fucking stone, all because you were too fucking incompetent of a priestess to get rid of a goddamned goblin curse! So yeah, we finished the fucking quest, but Gretel died in the p-process! Sh-she’s dead because of your stupid quest ... a-all to help me ... a-and ... I’m just so fucking sick of this goddamned dumbass game! I wish I’d never gotten sucked into this fucking RPG in the first place!”

As soon as the word “game” left Lexi’s lips, a sudden and incredible change came over both the high priestess and the entire room.

Anya’s eyes first began to glow, each one looking like a radiant star somehow set within the soft confines of an aged human’s face. Her lean and compact body went completely rigid, arms locked out straight at her sides in a “T” shape. Slowly, the glow emanating from her eyes became so bright, that her entire body began to radiate the same soft glow, making the woman look like a human night-light. As the glow intensified, the illuminated figure lifted gently off the ground, hovering several inches above the chamber floor.

Naturally, Lexi gaped at the woman. She did not exactly know what kind of response she had expected her emotional outburst to elicit, but this was certainly not it. The paladin looked left and right to see how her two surviving companions were taking the change, and was doubly shocked to see that they appeared to have been completely and utterly frozen in place. As still as statues, each girl stood completely unmoving — not a breath was drawn, nor eye blinked, nor nose twitched even slightly. It was almost as if time itself had stopped within the room, and that Lexi and Anya had somehow been exempted from its usual flux.

“What the fu—”

Lexi’s question was cut off midstream when the glowing high priestess’ mouth opened. What issued forth was not her — or any other human — voice. Rather, it sounded far more like what Lexi imagined a computer would sound like. There was a timber and cadence to it that was wholly inhuman. And, instead of coming solely from the apparent speaker, it filled the entirety of the space around Lexi, coming from everywhere and nowhere at all at once.

“Greetings from the Administration.”

This gave Lexi a pause, not in any way erasing her storm of emotions, but temporarily pushing “pause” on the swirling currents of rage. This was her first encounter with any representatives of the system administration since her original orientation session with Felicity on the very first day. If an administrator was appearing now — in such a dramatic fashion no less — then this must mean that something important was about to happen. The paladin closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying to re-center herself so that she could have something resembling a conversation.

“So what gives?” Lexi finally asked.

“The Administration has taken control of this NPC and temporarily paused the game due to the extraordinary situation developing here,” the nameless administrator said.

“You mean by fest friend fucking dying!?” Lexi asked, the barely sublimated rage and pain rising to the surface almost as soon as the specter of Gretel reared its head in her mind.

“No,” the administrator responded, its digital voice completely devoid of emotion. “This intervention was triggered by your discussion of the true nature of this world with a specific NPC, the high priestess of Xoth.”

“...”

“Normally,” the digital voice continued. “Any NPC hearing certain keywords, or combinations of non-keywords, which directly or indirectly make reference to the game itself, your status as a player character, or their status as a non-player character will be simply ignored — with the NPC in question acting as if they did not hear the comment. If, however, an NPC is directly and repeatedly questioned along these lines, certain genera of system errors tend to be introduced which can be disruptive to both the specific situation’s gameplay as well as the broader game logic itself.”

“Let me get this straight,” Lexi cut in, her words as cold as ice. “You don’t give a fuck about what happened to the most important person in my life. I don’t even fucking care if she was an NPC or not. She was real to me. Our relationship was real — our love was true.”

“Be that as it may,” the administrator replied. “The death of an NPC central to only a single story-line is not an event which would disrupt the fabric of the game itself, and is thus not something which will ever typically trigger intercession from the system administration. However, given your highly emotional and erratic state, the concern arose that you might act rashly and kill the high priestess were she to respond in typical fashion to your statements regarding the true nature of this world.”

“If Gretel’s death apparently doesn’t fucking matter to you, then why the fuck would Anya’s?”

“The difference is that this particular NPC is a special class, not her character class as a high priestess, but rather her subsystem class as a Quest Giver. As a central figure within the capital’s hierarchy and the initiator of significant numbers of active quests, Anya is currently integral to a great many storylines — not just yours. As such, killing her would have proved extraordinarily disruptive to the game as a whole.”