Rebirth and Second Chances

Chapter 232: Interlude - Huntsmen Call part 2

The world I found myself in after answering the call was strange. Towering buildings soaring so high that each building was large enough to house all the citizens of Talahm. Great behemoths of metal and glass destroyed any remnants of nature. There were no trees, not a blade of grass anywhere to be found, yet somehow this world survived.

Part of the magic that allowed the Hunt to act supplied us with enough knowledge about the world we found ourselves acting judiciously and within the bounds of Law. We knew instantly the kind of magic or technology that existed, and how the person that had called us into action was connected to the Sidhe.

This world had almost no magic, no System, and no Sidhe. It was a technologically advanced society run by advanced machine AI. The great preponderance of the hundreds of trillions of people that were spread across the planet existed in pod-like housing, barely large enough to hold a single occupant.

They spent almost their entire life living in virtual reality. Their bodies nourished and sustained within full-body virtual pods. The planet's technology had advanced far enough that sustenance for people was automatic. Most people lived and died within a virtual world where their actions and success translated into reproduction rights.

Conception and the process of creating progeny could be purchased from coin and items they garnered in virtual worlds. Most people lived their lives fulfilling Guild quota's or quest that funneled the real wealth to the leaders of those organizations.

Wars raged between worlds and civilization in the protection of those virtual worlds. Most people volunteered or were conscripted into Warfare Simulations. In these environments, they were encouraged to level up and gain proficiency with weapons systems. The talented gaining access to an advanced spaceship and promoted to leadership positions. The most popular game featured a war that had been raging for eons. A senseless unending conflict that as far as I could tell served no real purpose beyond bragging rights.

Every person in this world was human, the richest adapted and modified, Those adaptations focused on intellect and increasing synchronicity with the virtual worlds. Because there was no Sidhe on this planet, or in this Universe, the Hunt should not have answered the call.

Even if someone had called, Gwyn ap Nudd should have been constrained from answering that call. The rules that bound the Wild Hunt were clear, only those of Sidhe descent could seek justice, their calls carried by the Wild Magic until Gwyn ap Nudd responded.

I was able to easily figure out how this rule was circumvented and understood why I had been summoned to answer the Huntsman's horn. The knowledge I had gained from Teigh about Earth, games, and virtual reality made me uniquely suited to understand exactly what had happened.

Someone had created a virtual world that allowed users to create Sidhe characters. And that had been enough. Summerlands touched upon all Universes, it was what set it apart, what made other Pantheons covet and hope to claim it. I wasn't sure what rules if any bound the Summerlands, but it became clear that the virtual world that had been created was included and intersected with the Summerlands as effectively as Talahm did.

It made sense to me. The Summerlands and Fairy at their roots were formed from the stuff of dreams. The mid-summer night revels that poets had penned was fact, a bastardized characterization of events that happened somewhere and somewhen across space and time.

The virtual world that had been created here made use of a technological advance to recreate a mythological representation of that dream. It was no surprise that Fairy and the Summerlands considered this fictional world part of their demesnes. These people had reproduced myths and dreams writ large.

What I found strange as Gwyn and I investigate the call that had gone out was that only I had answered the call. He was the leader of the Hunt, there was no story, no myth where he did not lead his people. The reason for that became clear once I understood what had happened.

A young woman had created a virtual character steeped in Tuatha de Danaan lore. The game world she had built that character implemented aspects of stories and mythology that had never existed in this planet's past. But Fairy was hard to contain, it whispered stories about the Sidhe into the dreams, evoking literature and poetry that gave birth to living myth.

It came as no surprise that the Sidhe would be enshrined in literature in a Universe devoid of magic and System. The Tuatha de Danaan ruled supreme in the world of dreams, and the Shakespeare's of this world had been inspired by that same muse that had inspired Earth's bard. That same muse danced within the minds of any who slept and dreamed and yearned for that spark of magic.

It was the ability of intelligent beings to dream that was the true test of sentience and humanity. The shared stories and folklore of the Sidhe, in fact, of all the mythological and historical events for all Pantheons, were disseminated across the multiverse on the wings of possibilities, each having their own coterie of muse to draw upon.

The Tuatha de Danaan were simply better at regaling the stuff of dream and legend to those that were not only thirsty for such stories but able to recreate those dreams into works of words and pictures that could be shared with others.

The game creator was one such individual. A person that had been touched in a dream, inspired by Sidhe's muse to create a world that he thought he had dreamed. In fact, the virtual world that had evolved out of those foggy memories that remained the morning after he left psychedelic dreamscape, had enough symmetry to the truth of Fairy that the young woman who was desperate for help, who took the chance to summon the Wild Hunt, was considered Sidhe.

And because the Wild Magic's considered her Sidhe, her plea for justice was answered.

I watched in awe as Gwyn ap Nudd created illusion, exact holograms of the events that had transpired. I already understand why it was that I had been selected for this Hunt, the events that he recreated called for someone that had to understand how myriad worlds could be interconnected.

The events that I was shown, existed in multiple realities. Layers of Universes that were stacked and interconnected, but to someone not well versed in technology or virtual reality, connections that made no sense.

My connection with Teigh, the memories I had shared of his previous life, helped me to understand the context of what I was seeing. System had softened those memories for Teigh, allowing them to fade until he barely gave him pause. Until they had become nothing but fleeting thoughts, thoughts that considered that path life nothing but a dream.

For me, they remained and immediate.

The woman Gwyn ap Nudd was showing with his illusion and the events that she had experienced were taking place in a three-dimensional construct that had grown so that we could walk among those involved.

Events in the virtual world where she lived life as a Sidhe were tied to her physical body that was monitored and nourished while she 'slept' within her pod. There was a real link between the physical and virtual realm, programmers unaware that the esoteric energies of her soul connected the real and the virtual.

As the event's played out, we found that Power was in play; a group of people interfering in what should be. The game the woman was playing was becoming too popular, too many people were leaving the war simulation games in droves to play within this world of fantasy and magic. And that was affecting the income for those that held real power among the citizenry of this universe.

It was affecting the war effort, as virtual conscripts and soldiers failed to log in and complete mission assignments. Those that would see the war prosper, had decided to act. This young woman wasn't the only victim of their conspiracy, but she was the only one that had the wherewithal to invoke the Hunt.

Her soul was trapped between, no longer able to log out, her physical body had been destroyed. A cocktail of potent poisons killing her when she should have been the safest. Somehow her soul had retained enough substance to keep the virtual persona alive.

She was an anomaly, both dead and alive, and this state was what confused Gwyn ap Nudd. His was a primal power, once he understood the target, he was inevitable. But the woman had summoned the Hunt within the framework of a game, to seek justice against a consortium of power brokers that existed in reality.

Gwyn as the Huntsmen was fully aware of my thoughts as I analyzed the illusion he had created. Once I understood what was going on, so did he. And with understanding came action. The girl existed only as her Sidhe avatar by this point. Her physical body dead and beyond resurrection, but her soul was still crying out for justice, and justice was Gwyn ap Nudd's bailiwick.