"What next?" Jon asked the voice

  “Getting out of this room seems like an excellent choice,” answered the voice.

  “Sounds good to me. What should I call you? I don’t feel like thinking of you as ‘the voice’ forever.”

  “Hmm. I don’t know, it has as certain ring to it,” said the voice.

  “There was a reality T.V. program by that name where I came from. It doesn’t feel like it would be to your tastes. Not nearly refined enough for someone like you.”

  Another brief scratching feeling, and then an answer,

  “Well, I suppose you are correct, can’t let those peasants think they can sing their way out of poverty. If you must have a name for me, what do you suggest? You struggle enough in your native tongue. I’m not subjecting myself to you learning a new set of phonemes just to pronounce my name properly. If we’re using something from your tongue, you choose it. I’m not taking the time to cross-reference against your popular culture.”

  “How about Louis?” Jon answered immediately.

  Suspicion entered the tone of the voice,

  “That was rather quick: why that name?”

  “You have a royal feel to you. We had a lot of kings known by that name. I think it even means famous warrior or something like that.”

  “Hmm. That does sound accurate. Accepted.”

  “Louis it is. We’ll go with Loo for short.”

  “Fine. I suppose expecting two syllables from you on a regular basis would be a lot.”

  Jon experienced some self-satisfaction at pulling one over on the hat. Beyond the puerile joke, it was a test of its limitations in interpreting his memories and language. It certainly hadn’t gotten everything.

  “So how do we go about leaving?” Jon asked.

  “It will be easier for me to just open the doors than to explain it to you. Give me control for a minute.”

  Jon felt a mental prompt, not a system window but a feeling like someone tapping you on the shoulder. There was a power pressing in all around his body. He felt like he could let it in, or kick it out, at any time. Jon felt a little paranoid after his total loss of control earlier, but something made him certain he was in charge of this process. He decided to test it once, allowing momentary control to go to the creature, then immediately taking it back.

  “Do you want to leave? Or would you rather stay until that rat dies of hunger?” Loo asked testily.

  The prompt returned, and this time Jon gave over control without reservation. It seemed the system contract really did give him back control, which was a relief.

  He felt Loo taking stock of the sensory input for a few moments. It was like someone getting into your car and adjusting the side mirrors and the seat to their preference. The process was over very quickly.

  Loo walked forward gracefully, and Jon felt a moment of envy. When he had spawned back on the path he had barely been able to walk. Honestly, Jon still didn’t move this well yet. He had days of practice, but Loo had surpassed his control in seconds.

  Oregano scurried up and jumped into his carrier as they approached the door.

  “Oh good, I’m a rat rickshaw. What indignity will be next?” Loo said.

  Jon noted he made no move to remove the rat.

  Loo tapped into the energy circulating in Jon’s body; not the mental energy Jon had been using to fight with, but the other stuff that needed to be filtered before Jon used it. Loo grabbed this energy and began shaping it into complex patterns.

  As Loo began manipulating the energy, it was like a new sight overlay on Jon’s vision. He saw crisscrossing rows of energy on the door, with a large, oddly shaped hole in the center of the structure.

  The pattern Loo was making began to take form. It was a purple polyhedron which rapidly rotated in front of the door. As it hit the correct angle, Loo moved it forward into a gap in the door’s magical makeup.

  Jon had a moment of insight: he was looking at a portcullis with a keyhole. The purple structure slid in easily, and the portcullis began to gradually lift as the doors opened.

  As they left the room, the portcullis descended again and the doors shut.

  “Well, I can see what you meant about the mana signature. Is that what that portcullis-looking thing is?” Jon asked.

  “….Yes.” answered Loo.

  “Did you really manage to use psionics without utilizing mana senses?” Loo followed up a second later.

  “I have this organ I call a psionic pulse generator, and it resembles something from human brains called the superior olivary - “

  “Never mind, didn’t really care, don’t know why I asked. Besides, we have to move, staying here is a bad idea.”

  Jon took back control and worked his way back up the steps. As they reached the top of the stairs, they found themselves in the closed room they had started in. To his relief, Jon still felt he could open the door again with the ability given to him by the I.O.U.*

  “Not quite yet,” Loo said, sensing Jon’s intentions. He continued,

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to sit here all day, but I did want to take a quick glance at the memories from your time in the character selection suite. Once we’re out of danger we’re going to have a lot to discuss, and we’re going to need to get you up to speed on some of the basics you’ve missed.”

  Jon considered denying the request, but felt the pressure of the system enforced contract bearing down on his mind immediately.

  He felt like he would be in for a very bad time if he tried to go back on his word. He had promised those memories, and there was no going back now. Having performed his little test, Jon sent Loo his recollections of the character-selection suite. He felt Loo latch onto the memory and take it from there.

  As Loo began his review, Jon felt the same sense of someone thumbing through his memories. Loo paused almost immediately,

  “Is that Herman?”

  “Yes,” Jon answered.

  “Not good. He sent you this way? Gave you that mapping key?”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “Yes again.”

  “The rest of this can wait. Time to go,” Loo said.

  Loo continued,

  “You need to open us back out to the birthing-suite, but don’t open that door completely yet. I want you to visualize the space where the door was as a one-way mirror from your world. Focus on the concept of seeing out, but not being seen. The magic of this place will sense your intent and do the rest.“

  Jon did as was requested, thinking of the one-way mirrors present in every police procedural show he could think of, the cops discussing strategy for the interrogation only to fall back on ‘good cop bad cop’ every time.

  “Focus damn it,” Loo chided.

  He shifted his thoughts back to the one-way mirror. Only the one-way mirror. The ability to see another without being seen.

  The door changed, turning to a dark glassy surface like a tinted car window. As they took in the scene, Oregano chirped from below in alarm.

  There were three bunnies on watch, all alphas, and at least a dozen laying around. These were a variety of sizes, with two of the small bunnies, eight or so regular ones, and at least one more alpha.

  As Jon looked through, a lumbering giant walked past the doorway towards the river. It was a bunny, but at least five times the size of any of the alphas.

  Its profile was roughly comparable to an elephant, and the earth trembled beneath its feet. Jon couldn’t feel any other vibrations while it passed. It was like a jet drowning out forest noises as it passed overhead. The quills hanging off the giant’s back looked like blackened spears dipped in blood, and the coloration of its fur was more violet than blue.

  As though none of this was enough, Jon could also see at least a dozen cherubs still circling the area, ignored by the bunnies for now. There were no salamanders in sight, but the river was nearby. Jon had little doubt they were watching from beneath the water.

  “Well, that confirms it. These things have an active quest to kill you,” Loo said.

  “Are you sure? I ate nine of them. I figured they were mad about that.”

  “I doubt they’ve even noticed. Maybe the alphas are missed, but definitely not the others. Lower level creatures like this reproduce at ludicrous speed, especially in this environment. There’s a good chance the ones you killed have already been replaced twice over.”

  “How do you know it's a quest?”

  “Risk and reward, as well as opportunity cost. Those things would not sit and wait around for you all day if it was just your energy they were after. You aren’t a bad meal for a level one, but for those level threes, and especially the level five den-mother, there’s no chance you’re worth it on your own. They would move on to better prey.”

  “How do you know their levels or what to call the level 5?”

  “Mostly inference from my prior experiences, but also some very minor divination magic for confirmation. Anything too detailed would cost me more than its worth, but I can see the basics. I would bet the rat can confirm the details.”

  Oregano was seething, his usual mood around the bunnies. However, he did acknowledge Loo’s information was accurate. As Jon continued his conversation with the rat, he felt a mental tendril extend from Loo to the link between him and Oregano. He heard Loo’s voice again,

  “Might as well make it a party interface with the carrion-feeder, assuming we’re going to keep hauling him around.”

  “So what’s the plan?” Jon asked. “You implied earlier you had a way out of all of this. Do you know another way out of the column?”

  “Well, no. My plan is to sneak past them without being noticed. If they do notice us, then we slaughter them all. Then we can feast on their remains while the remainder of our enemies flee before us,” Loo said. His tone was matter-of-fact.

  “That does not sound like a plan. It sounds like the wishful thinking of a teenage edgelord,” Jon answered.

  “For you, maybe it would be. I can do it. Give me the reigns, and I can show you how to actually drive this thing. It will be much easier to instruct you after an object lesson. You are dramatically under-utilizing the capabilities of this form. You’ve been so focused on the psionic attacks you’ve missed out on how deadly you are without them.”

  Jon thought about it for a few moments, before coming to a decision. If they did nothing, they were fucked. He had no real reason to believe Loo, but he also had no reason to doubt him. Even if he did doubt him, the nature of their contract prohibited lies.

  Loo could probably do something tricky, like omit key information, but Jon felt like even that would be very difficult with the specific type of contract they signed. Something about the friendly nature seemed to close loopholes by focusing on your intent rather than the actual verbiage.

  Oregano seemed ambivalent. He sent an image of a spider with a hat, and a spider without a hat. In both images, Oregano had his teeth in a bunny and was covered in blood. Oregano just wanted to kill bunnies, with or without Loo’s help.

  “You know, he is starting to grow on me. But if we can avoid this fight, it’s still a good idea. There will be some consequences if I have to go full out. Now, open the entrance, give me the controls, and let's get started,” Loo said.

  Oregano reluctantly acknowledged Loo, sending back an image of himself waiting in the carrier as the bunnies faded into the distance. He agreed to hold off on attacking if they could get by unscathed.

  Jon focused on the door, and the black glassy appearance faded away to nothing. There was no fanfare. Just here one moment, gone the next. Simultaneously, he let Loo take over. There was something truly odd about feeling yourself do something you didn’t plan. It was like a waking dream.

  Jon felt Loo reach through his mental sense, and then saw a dozen mana constructs flying in all directions. The constructs looked like fishing line being woven through the air. As the lines of mana hit the bunnies, Jon saw something peculiar. The three alphas on watch had started forward when the entrance appeared, but now they were looking around, puzzled. They then seemed to grow bored. They sat back on their haunches. Jon felt himself advance, and Oregano stayed fixed in his little carrier.

  Jon could feel his energy reserves, and the strings seemed to be drawing from his psionic pools. These lines Loo made took significantly less energy than anything Jon had done so far. Even the illusions he had used to distract the bunnies earlier had used far more energy.

  Yet, the effect was so much more dramatic.

  The alphas weren’t even keeping watch anymore. There was a pulse of energy from all the lines Loo wove, and then Jon felt a dizzying sense of his perspective shifting. Jon began to see through all the bunny eyes, hear through their ears, and feel through their bodies.

  Trying to process all the sensory information at once made him want to vomit, but Jon also felt a simple joy as the information filtered in.

  The bunnies’ hearing was excellent, and it felt like lifting his head above water after days beneath the surface. For the first time, he could really, truly hear the new world around him, and he took in all the things he had been missing: the water in the river lapping against the rocks, the rush of the waterfall in the distance, the shrill cries of various creatures in the forest.

  It wasn’t that his spider body couldn’t hear at all, but it felt completely different and only really caught the lower frequencies. Even then the sense was more a feeling than true hearing.

  This was like receiving a cochlear implant.

  Loo let him have his moment, but after a few seconds Jon felt a tugging from the mental presence. Jon found himself paying less attention to the bunnies’ hearing and more attention to other aspects of their consciousness. It was like Loo had allowed him to flick on a television screen; the screen gave him Loo’s perspective, and Loo was filtering out all the extraneous information for him.

  Jon had a general sense of what the bunnies were seeing, feeling and hearing, as well as how Loo was manipulating that information. Loo was directing their attention to various other stimuli while somehow downplaying the importance of the spider, adding a friendly sense to his own body similar to how they regarded one another. Loo gave the opening in the column a sense of age, like it had been there for hours and had already been investigated. The opening was boring, not worth their time. Loo simultaneously played up the bunnies’ hunger, and their envy of the warren members back at the waterfall feasting on the cherub corpses.

  In addition, Loo had woven threads for each of the cherubs while Jon was distracted by the bunnies senses. Jon noticed he wasn’t getting any input from the cherubs. His new companion had filtered them out completely.

  Jon tried to focus on one of the cherubs, but the mind was too alien and he returned to the filtered information Loo had given him.

  Jon and Oregano had gradually made their way out of the column. They were walking towards the forest in the direction of the tunnels Jon had entered the cavern from, circling around the bunnies. Then one of the alphas in the back decided the cherubs were circling too close.

  It opened its mouth with ears straight back in a now familiar pose, then unleashed a sonic blast at the offending cherub. As the blast left its mouth, Jon felt half a dozen of the delicate threads between him and the rabbits collapse.

  When the threads severed, there was a momentary backlash as the bunnies recognized a foreign influence on their attention. Jon heard a deep rumbling from the startled and extremely pissed-off den mother, whose eyes had locked onto him across the bunny encampment.

  “Looks like its time for plan B,” Loo said.