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Chapter 22: On the Outside

  Celeste groaned with pain as she was pulled from the virtual world. The pods that they had installed in the office were definitely much more comfortable than the old couches they had used before, and they helped prevent muscle atrophy, but going from a world with no pain at all to a world where she could feel every ache and pain in her body was almost overwhelming.

  She tried to stretch, but her leg started to cramp up, and with a quick movement, she sat up, ready to try and massage her calf, only to hammer her face into the glass panel that made up the pod lid.

  The stream of curses and expletives that poured from her pod was enough for Jasper to come over to open it up. He looked down at her, tall, dorky and cute. "Are you okay?"

  "No." Was Celeste's only answer.

  "Neither am I... thank you for asking." Martin's voice came from the pod beside Celeste's.

  Jasper gave a grunt of amusement and helped Celeste out of her pod, knowing better than to try and help up the mountain of a man that was his co-worker.

  They spent some time getting caught up. Jasper and Martin were looking at the logs, while Celeste took a shower just to feel a little normal again.

  She came back to Martin and her husband, talking about what was going on. Martin was holding his face in his hands.

  "You punched a hole in the world itself?" The exasperation in Martin's voice was palpable.

  "That is correct. I was actually considering diving back in, but seeing as the two of you are out here, I think that I might as well call it for now. It is very premature, but for our first session, I think it was important to set up the world right."

  Martin gave Jasper a look, as if the comment about diving back in was making the hulking programmer unreasonably furious. "You know how hard it is to patch a world hole with the generative AI? It will fill it in with whatever it wants if you don't use world edit tools and do some rollbacks. And those are only meant for phase one of the system initiation. The AI will quite literally think of the area as a small pocket dimension thanks to what you have done." The former farmer ranted.

  Jasper gave that awkward smile that he always gave when he had done something dumb. "Can't I just copy paste the areas around it?" He asked, clearly having expected that to be the case.

  "Yes... Yes, you can, but that will give it the same tags and IDs as the ones around, and there is a high likelihood that the areas will duplicate each other over and over again, meaning that it will not be able to progress properly. Unless you go down and actually fix the meta-level data."

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  "I mean... it sounds like you know just how to do that..." Jasper tried, "Maybe-"

  "No. You are doing this one yourself." Martin said with a quite firm voice.

  Jasper sighed and nodded. "Fine, but why are you two out?"

  Celeste decided to chime in. "We made a new god."

  "Again? You made a new god again?" He said, but the cheek in his voice was fairly obvious.

  "Well, we don't know if it worked yet. I was just checking through the logs to see if it had worked." Martin added.

  "Oh, good idea. I was honestly gambling a bit at the end there. I mean, the last time we got Orlek, and honestly, I am not sure if Lasandra could even be elevated, which is sorta why I renamed her to Morwen."

  Jasper gave her a look. "Morwen? Like your old cat? You named a deity after a cat? You might as well name it after a piece of pastry!"

  Celeste smiled at her husband's fake outrage and nodded sagely. "Yeah... I did, be happy that I didn't go with some pop culture reference."

  Martin cleared his throat and pointed at the screen. It was all lines on a console that didn't make much sense to Celeste, but some of the lines were red, some were blue, and some were green. There were a lot of red lines.

  Jasper gave Martin a look. "You two got lucky"

  Martin grunted, "Wasn't luck, it was skill."

  "Someone wanna explain the hieroglyphs?" Celeste asked.

  "Sure. So, you infused... Morwen... the goddess, not the cat, with three Domains, one from each of you. Wealth, Death and Time." Jasper said, pointing at a line that definitely didn't explain it so plainly, as he made it sound.

  "Since she now had divine powers, and she was supposedly a dead god, it made the system freak out. I am talking, it was looking at doing an automatic rollback." He continued.

  "It wasn't that bad", Martin interjected. "It would have booted us from the system. Everything would be fine."

  Jasper gave his colleague a look. "As I was saying, you got lucky, since you also applied a dogma and a new name, the system scanned for a previous god named Morwen, and did not find one. Since it couldn't find anything, after all, she used to be named Lasandra, it failed to find the previous god and decided that Morwen's status as Archdemon must have been a bug."

  Martin pointed at another line of code. "It sure did. When it realised that a god was treading the world without any constraints, it booted her back to her sphere. That is what most of that red means. It is checking and failing to see any reason why the god should be able to walk on the mortal sphere."

  Celeste nodded slowly. "So it worked?"

  Jasper rolled his eyes. "Barely, I mean that fact that the two of you died as well, and trying to generate a new Archdemon based on your personalities is disturbing. It seems to be funnelling your power into that Archdemon of the Light, which is supposedly based on my first death. You know, since we are all technically named Armandos in the game. Not quite sure if that will be a problem later, but that thing has the strength of three of us combined... and then multiplied by some Archdemon stats. I mean, the power alone is-"

  "Didn't you have a hole to fix?" Martin said with a smirk on his otherwise stoic face, as he clearly enjoyed cutting Jasper off from trying to shift the blame onto Celeste and himself.

  "Yeah... but Riez is still in there, so at best I can contain it for now. Live editing is not a good idea." Jasper said with a shrug, walking over to the fridge to grab some post-work snacks they had been storing up.

  Jasper looked over at the others. "Wanna watch her play?"

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