Deadworld Isekai

Matt had never been good at dealing with awkward social situations. And this one had sneaked up on him without any warning. With his life on the line and weeks of talking to only himself and the system, Matt froze up. His brain was just stuck.

Matt took a deep breath and steadied himself. Finally, his mind thawed and had a second to think. This was too important of a conversation to give up so easily.

He walked to the system guardian and tried to tap her on the shoulder.

“Hey, could you turn around? I want to talk to you, and I don’t want to talk standing in the pretend fire.”

“No.”

That was about what he expected, but he still had to try.

“The thing is, I’d like to leave and be polite and unannoying. I’d like to do all those things for you. But if I do, I die. Again. And, well, I like being alive,” he sighed, “I might die anyway, but that might not be necessarily true. There are still resources here. I found some, or else I wouldn’t have made it to you. There’s some food, and a little water. And the dungeons have even more.”

The girl turned and looked at him, mildly surprised. “Wait, the dungeons are up and running?”

“Yup. I think they can take in solar power. I’m guessing they’ve had a lot of time to do that.”

“Huh,” her face became a mask again as she shrugged. “Interesting, but it hardly matters. All alone, you're choosing between dying out here predictably or dying in there unpredictably. And I’m not interested in watching that go down. Sorry.”

“Yeah, I get that, too. I get that it won't be pleasant for you to watch me die. But the thing is, this is life or death for me. It's sort of a choice between having you be a little annoyed and me suffering a much rougher time. Given the two, I'm gonna choose you being a little annoyed,” Matt pressed on.

“Well, tough nuts, stupid. Because it’s not your choice either way. Now get lost.”

Matt had been very careful not to phrase anything as a command during this leg of the conversation, and still didn’t want to. But he had to.

“Please stand up.”

“Absolutely not.”

Well, OK, he thought. I guess the system was lying. Good. I didn’t really want to force her anyway.

Ding!

In the interest of facilitating conversion between you and your guardian, casual requests and non-official commands are ignorable by the guardian. To create the desired effect, commands to the guardian must be issued with an expectation and desire that they be obeyed.

The system was swearing up and down that his commands should work. It was true that Matt hadn't really wanted the previous command to be obeyed. A small part of him hoped that it wouldn't work, actually.

In the meantime, the guardian had once again turned her back to him, and he wrestled with the temptation to try again. It was a fight between respecting her autonomy and increasing his chances of survival. After a minute, survival won.

“Stand up.” Something coursed out of Matt with those words, and he could almost feel them rushing to his target. The girl jolted like she’d been hit, but then almost immediately sprang to her feet. She looked at him in shock.

“What was… what.” Her mouth hung open for a second before she snapped it shut, shaking off her shock and trying to regain her bearings, “What in the hell was that?”

“Quiet.”

"No! Wait a second, you bast…” Her sentence was cut off midstream, like someone hitting the mute button on a TV. She looked at Matt with a mixture of terror and hatred.

“Listen, I don’t like this either. But I also don’t like dying. I didn’t want to have to choose between the two things, but you made me. I’m stuck.”

Matt sighed and went and sat down near her fire again.

“I’m not looking to force you. I’m really not. If we can do it voluntarily, great. Let’s start simple. What happened here? What killed this planet?”

The guardian just glared at him. Well, then I don't have a choice, he thought.

“Guardian, tell me what killed this planet.”

He could see her trying to fight the system, but the system won within a few seconds.

“I don’t know, exactly,” she said. Her tone was dripping with anger, but at least she was talking, “When we are generated, we know almost everything the system knows about our assigned planet. The system thought this planet was doing pretty well.”

“That doesn’t make sense – why would it send me here if there wasn’t some trouble?”

“I mean, planets have trouble all the time. Even if the bad guys win, it almost never wipes out the planet. Before you got here, the information was that they seemed to have some plant-based problem.”

“Before I got here?”

“We get dropped off before you to update on recent happenings. It’s not important,” the guardian added quickly. Something about how the guardian said this seemed shifty, like when Matt's mom said it wasn’t a big deal when he forgot her birthday. Matt didn’t want to prolong this conversation more than he had to, so he filed away his suspicion for later. The guardian continued, “So, yeah, some kind of plant problem they called ‘the scourge’. That’s what I picked up, reading old signs that hadn’t decomposed and stuff like that. But I can’t interact with physical, non-system objects like you can, so all I got was ‘this way for scourge shelter!’ and stuff like that.”

Matt had been hoping she’d know more than this, but her explanations did make some sense. Whatever was left of this planet was mostly buried under years of dirt, to the extent that even the small amount of information he had on the scourge was something he had to literally dig up.

“So what would have happened if I had beat this scourge thing? There aren’t any returned reincarnators back on earth as far as I know, so I’m assuming I wouldn’t get to go back.”

“Nope, no going home, sadly. The system gives you an adventure and the means to deal with it. Once you win, you get a few more perks and settle down on the planet to live out your life. That’s why the damn thing talks so much about selecting the right planet for you; the reward is supposed to be that planet.”

Once the guardian got going, she reverted to her talkative self. Words starting coming out of her like bullets, “But here, you got screwed. Even if you win, there’s nothing to enjoy. You’d have to wait for life to evolve from nothing again. The system could speed that up, but not enough that it would matter to you. It doesn’t get involved like that anyway.”

Matt was beginning to panic, a little. He had been harboring some hope that the guardian would be able to fix all this, somehow. That it might be able to phone up the system, let it know what was going on, and get him reassigned, or something. But, compelled to tell the truth, the guardian didn’t have any more solutions than he did.

She finished with a heavy sentence, “Anyway, we're both screwed here. There's no way out of this.”

“You can stop explaining for a second. I’m thinking,” said Matt. As soon as he said that, the guardian stopped talking and stood there for a moment, dazed. Then she rushed him, her little fists balled up and swinging.

“You fuck! You bastard!” She screamed, trying to hit him with her tiny holographic fists that wouldn’t connect, “How dare you! How dare you force me!”

Even though the guardian couldn’t land her hits, the overall experience of a small female child trying to beat the hell out of him was still weirdly intimidating. Matt backed up, pushed back by the pretend onslaught.

“Listen, I’m sorry, but…”

“Sorry! You force me into this long stupid conversation, and I just HAVE TO do it? Do you have any idea how freaking weird that was, Matthew? Just to have to say stuff even though you don’t want to?” The onslaught continued. Matt tried to calm her down without any success, eventually just opting to see if it was even possible for her to wear herself out.

It turned out it was. Matt wasn’t sure how guardians that had no mass worked, but it turned out that however they were built, guardians behaved a surprising amount like an actual human. After trying to beat on him for a while, it ran out of breath and retreated back to the fire, frustrated and pouting.

“So, listen,” Matt spoke, trying his best to sound soothing, “I get that you are pissed. And that there might not be a great solution to this. But I’m going to try anyway.”

The hologram kept its back to him, pretending not to listen. He figured it could hear him and kept on anyway, “My plan is to find some more dungeons. And I want you to help me with that. Is that something you can do?”

“Nope, can’t help. Sorry.”

Matt was being careful not to activate the “command your guardian” function of his voice, and he wasn't sure when it was working and when it didn't. His best guess was that she was lying, but he didn't want to intentionally use his authority to confirm if she could help.

“Listen, I get that you don’t want to help. And it looks like it’s not pleasant for you when I force you to do things.”

“Understatement of the year, asshole.”

“Yeah. Fine. I get it. But I don’t have much choice. I don’t want to force you to help me every step of the way, but I will if I have to. It's my life. It’s your call.”

She appeared to consider this. “And how long does this go for? If I help you with this, you let me go?”

“I can’t promise that. I have no idea what’s going to happen after this. Maybe if I get enough tools and knowledge that I don’t need you anymore, yeah. But until then, no promises.”

She huffed and glared at him again. “Fine. But I don’t get why you don’t do this yourself. Your map should help you find them.”

“It shows me them after I find them. It’s not like it has GPS instructions on how to get to them, and I don’t have a quest for it.”

She sighed. “You dumb, stupid lamb. Open your minimap. Use your dumb head and think real hard about that one dungeon you know about.”

He did. The map panned back over his entire route of the past few days and settled over the dungeon icon.

“OK, got it? Now try to expand the dungeon like you would the description for something.”

He did. Son of a bitch, He thought. It works.

Sarthia Lake Forest Dungeon

This pleasant forest is under attack by a nasty invasive species. Help restore the balance!

Status: Completed

Track nearby dungeons? Y/N

Matt willed “yes” at the screen, and his interface suddenly closed. Nothing had changed. He looked at the guardian questioningly.

“I don’t know where the dungeons are. Spin around,” she scoffed.

“What?”

“Just spin around if you don’t see any right away.”

Matt shrugged and started spinning in place. His new dexterity points made this oddly easy to do - he had never spun so fast. After just a few revolutions, he felt the dizziness kick in and stopped, only to see the system guardian staring at him like he was insane.

“Are you serious?”

“You said to spin!”

“I meant… Listen, you absolute dumb pearl of a stupid idiot. Spin. Slowly. So you can see if your system compass has any new icons. Not, and I repeat not, like a demented trench coat ballerina.”

Matt reddened a bit.

“Ah. Yeah. I can do that.”

“Are you going to be this stupid the whole time?”

“No promises.”