Chapter 41: Jeff-the-false

Sean didn’t exactly wake up. Waking up was something you could feel happen, something that was at least gradual-enough that there were in between zones, timings where you weren’t-quite-conscious yet. This was something different. He had blacked out and then seamlessly found himself fully conscious and looking at an old friend behind a metal table. It wasn’t even disorienting.

“So, I’m guessing you aren’t actually Jeff.”

“Nope, afraid not. I’m pretty close, though. Maybe as close as you can get without actually talking to the real thing.” Sitting across the metal table from Sean, the Jeff analogue scratched its substantial stomach absent-mindedly. “Which, you probably know, isn’t an easy thing for you to do right now.”

The transition was so quick, Sean hadn’t even looked around the room before he talked to Jeff. Looking now, he found he was in something like the pre-time-jump version of the room he had fought the lizards in. The only difference was that it was mostly emptied out. All that was left were the steel table, a few chairs, and a couple cups of what looked to be hot coffee.

“Yeah, that’s coffee, and it’s pretty good. Better than what you can get nowadays, anyway, unless you get a good from a system space. Safe, too.”

“I believe you, which is a problem. I shouldn’t be believing you. I should be trying to stab you.”

Fake-Jeff picked up his coffee and slurped a bit of it up. “Yup. That’ll be the non-aggression tweaks to your brain, plus some other weird stuff. Fucking strange stuff, sorry about that.” Jeff waved his hand broadly at the room. “But all this is designed to get you as comfortable as possible, so I can explain some important things. Nothing you can do about it.”

Sean found there really wasn’t. He wasn’t restrained, and he knew he couldn’t trust whatever this bullshit was. But somehow he couldn’t bring himself to actually want to lunge at Jeff, or to leave, or really anything at all except sit there and listen. About the most aggressive thing he could do was ask a question.

“Who are you? What is this?”

“Good, got to the questions already. That will save some time. Ask the third one, and I’ll answer them all at once.”

Sean rebelled at the idea that not-Jeff knew he had a third question, then broke down and asked it anyway.

“Am I dead?”

“Nope. Not dead. And this is an explainer vision of sorts, something that’s too long and important for a system window, something you have a right to not only be told but to be forced to accept as true.” He took a longer slurp of the coffee. “Not that you would have ignored any system window. But some people don’t even read the damn things. It’s a standardized policy at this point.”

“You skipped the part about who you are.”

“Goddam, Sean. I didn’t skip it, I’m just not to it yet. Blame it on your brain. The only two people you feel like taking advice from in your entire timeline are a dragon that doesn’t like to talk and a fat man who likes to ramble. Blame yourself.”

Not-Jeff raised is hand and pointed at a far wall. There was a TV there. That was weird. Sean distinctly remembered the wall being empty on his first survey of the room. It looked real enough, though, and on it were some full-color clips of Sean and Jeff working together, getting beers, and shooting the shit. He smiled.

Fucking old man. Wish you were here.

“See that? That smile? That’s who I am. The system isn’t a person. Sometimes it seems like one, especially the apocalypse system. But it’s not. So when the system needs to tell you something that you’d hear better from a person? It finds me, or someone like me, someone it can use to deliver the news. It’s a fucking dirty trick, honestly. But it works.”

Sean knew enough about himself to know he would be royally, absolutely pissed about this later. At the moment, he was too emotionally sedated to care much, so he just nodded.

“Anyway, on to the fun part.” Not-Jeff snapped his fingers, and the image on the TV changed to an obviously alien world populated by what appeared to be purple, humanoid lions. The image shifted a bit, showing some towns, settlements, and camps before settling on one especially big, imposing lion wielding some kind of huge spiked mace.

“So this planet. Obviously, it's not Earth, but it’s in the middle stages of its apocalypse. And that lion’s a big deal. He was a warlord hero king before the apocalypse hit his planet, did very well, and about an hour ago he cut down a Grunth, which is a kind of mountain range that tries to eat you. Very popular in their stories.”

As the giant lion walked, the ground around him suddenly started shaking, and the TV volume kicked in so Sean could hear the general rumbling sound effects.

“This is the good part. Pay attention.”

A gigantic, smoking crack opened up in the ground in front of the lion. It was loud, but somehow not as loud as it should have been, given the event. It was a gigantic canyon suddenly springing into existence, and it was violent, but it was like a fantasy movie’s violence. Which, given the system’s tastes, made sense.

If there was one part of the image that wasn’t understated, it was the sheer depth of the thing. A TV screen shouldn’t have been able to give the impression of impossible deepness this thing gave off. But it did. From across the room and outside of the screen, the crack in the planet was triggering a fear of heights Sean hadn’t even known he had, giving him vertigo and generally ruining his day.

“So, yeah, big scary crack. It’s supposed to be that way. Keep people from taking it lightly. In reality, the crack doesn’t even exist. I can tell you that because no matter how convincing I am, your brain is going to overwrite my words when you see one for real.”

“So if he falls in, what happens?”

“He can’t fall in just yet. The crack wouldn’t let him. And shhh, Sean. The good part is still coming.”

All of a sudden, monsters of various kinds started streaming out of the crack. Big crabs. Swarms of tiny but vicious-looking insects. There were also various monsters that were fucked up in a not-quite-biological way Sean guessed had to do with the Apocalypse System messing around with the mythology of the planet. He had absolutely no clue what stories these people told around their weird lion campfires.

As if he had been expecting it, the purple warrior roared and got to work. The mace swung with impossible force to and fro, pumping out glowing light, shockwaves, and even destructive lion-shaped illusions.

He fought, and the threats grew in both size and danger until the battlefield around the crack was littered with hundreds and hundreds of corpses, and the lion himself was soaked with both his blood and the blood of his enemies.

And then, after he destroyed one last particularly large and nasty creature, the flow of beasts stopped. The lion was healed, either by a perk he carried or the system himself. He roared in triumph, holding his mace high, delirious in his victory.

And then, with barely any additional fuss, he hopped in the crack. Gently and in a way that was very nearly boring, the crack closed up like it had never been there at all.

“The fuck?” Sean could imagine jumping into that hole in the same way he could imagine chewing off his arm. It was possible, sure. But there was no way he could imagine he could bring himself to do it. “I’m assuming there’s a good reason he jumped into the death-hole, but I’m not getting it.”

“It’s a final test of skill and courage, tailored to each individual competitor. The person you just saw considered his a bonus, just some free experience points he could pick up on his way to the main show. Not everyone is as brave.”

The system snapped his fingers again, this time removing the TV from the wall entirely, as if it had never been there.

“I bet you still don’t get any of this,” Jeff-the-false said. He was right. The only reason Sean’s mind wasn’t reeling was because it literally couldn’t at the moment, that having been one of the many functions the system had temporarily robbed him of. “That’s okay. Now’s the part where I let you see one of your notification screens. Don’t worry, you will be able to see it after you wake up, too.”

All of a sudden, Sean remembered one notification screen he could call up. He pulled it up, immediately shocked by the length of it.

Achievement Unlocked: Late-Start Long-Shot

Apocalypses represent the destruction of endless potential. Your planet might have gone on for another thousand generations, every day much the same as the one before it. Billions would have been born, would have lived, and would have died. Now they won’t.

The system can’t do anything to stop the apocalypse, but it can guide it. And for better or worse, the system hates waste. Those monsters you see outside aren’t just to punish the inhabitants of this planet. They are the crystallized, realized form of potential lives, of animals that might have lived and of people that won’t ever be born. They are an opportunity for the people of this planet so that those able to flee can take a share of the power of this planet’s future with them.

But as much as the system might want to use every drop of that potential energy, it can’t. If it spawned as many beasts as it could, they’d effortlessly wipe out the entire human population. It wouldn’t be productive or fair, which means that there’s still a lot of energy that would otherwise go to waste.

That’s where the competition comes into play. Denizens of this planet who perform well are rewarded with a choice. They can enter into an environment even more chaotic, one so dangerous that it makes what you’ve faced so far look like a box of kittens. Most of them will die, but for those that don’t, they come away endlessly stronger, better equipped, and prepared for literally anything.

And the strongest of them? The one who delves the furthest and deepest into the planet, reaching the living core of the sphere? He or she will absorb a chunk of raw power strong enough to fundamentally change them, to make them a heavy hitter on par with some of the strongest elite the entire universe has to offer.

And that’s where you come in. Sort of. Kind of. Maybe.

It shouldn’t have been possible for you to start late, but you did. The Apocalypse System actually conferred with the System on the matter, and the decision they came to at the end of things was to give you a free ticket out of here, to somewhere safe where you could grow.

Then you attained a rare, chaotic class, outperformed what you were supposed to, killed things you shouldn’t have been able to handle, and made a mess of those plans.

Rewards: A choice between safe passage off-planet and a customized, high-difficulty challenge that, if completed, offers entry into the inner-earth Apocalypse System space. If no decision is made within 24 hours, you will be transported to a safe location off planet automatically and the option to select the challenge will disappear.