Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

A boy much like Tulland was standing next to an arch, staring at it longingly.

I don’t know why you do that. I’ve already explained you won’t have a combat class.

“And I’ve already explained that’s not good enough.” The boy flexed his hands, as if not quite allowing them to become fists. “I want to do something important, System. I won’t be a potter or a wainwright. I want to help in real ways.

Those classes do help.

“Sure. Everyone desperately needs another pot.” The boy whipped his head around, as if glaring directly at Tulland. With a shock, Tulland realized he was looking directly from the System’s point of view, as experienced by the System itself. “You know I can do more.”

Yes. I do. Please do not look directly at me like that. It’s off-putting. How do you even know?

“I just know.” The boy kicked at the ground in frustration. “I could always tell you were there.”

Nobody else can. There must be some trick to it.

“Well, there isn’t. I’m just special. In a useless way.” The boy coughed. “In a way that can’t breathe well enough to run and jump. In a way that can’t fight. Great trade, if you ask me. Real good value.”

Tulland felt a burning in the System’s perspective, something he instinctively understood as a desire to help that clashed with an inability to do anything. Anything safe, anyway. Somewhere in the periphery of Tulland’s understanding, there was another option. Something he-as-the-System understood as a possibility.

If the System wanted to, there was one way it could do more for the boy. It was dangerous and foolish, but it was something. The System just had to be willing to take a risk.

Something broke in the System’s desire to restrain itself then.

There is one thing.

The boy perked up immediately.

“I knew it. Tell me.”

It would be dangerous.

“I don’t care.” The boy coughed, harder this time. “Tell me.”

The System spun some wheels in the mechanical aspects of things that underwrote the universe, and made a notification window that he willed towards the boy.

Variable Class Offered! Behind every illusion of order is chaos. Without randomness, things tend to atrophy. Every living, healthy thing you see engages with this chance and disorder on some level, a fact that is observable simply by noticing them thriving. Most classes a System offers lean into whatever order they can access, tracking well-known ruts in the road of progress. These classes are safe and predictable. They grow in expected ways, with some small variation provided by the person who holds them and their own will for their own future. Variable classes lean the other way. In the assignment of a variable class, The System invites chaos to come to play, spinning off the essence of what you are and your intent for your own future and allowing randomness to run rampant in the creation of something new. Variable classes are both the strongest and weakest classes there are, depending on unpredictable factors that cannot, by definition, be controlled. In accepting a variable class, you also accept these risks.

“Yes.”

Wait a moment. There are significant risks…

“I don’t care. Do it. Now.”

Vow to me, then. That you won’t use whatever this class is to do anything less than the best you can conceive of for other adventurers. For humans in general. For this world.

“What? Why?”

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

To soothe me. To convince me that I am not engineering a disaster by indulging my sympathy for you.

The boy stood for a moment. Tulland was nervous for him. He wanted to tell him how little the System could be trusted, in situations like this. And yet, on the other side of things, he could feel the System’s fear, raw and real. It was worried it was creating a monster. Something that couldn’t and wouldn’t be stopped.

The memory share wasn’t perfect. The System knew what it knew, and had the memories it had. There were thousands of them, just outside of Tulland’s reach, a context he could never know. But the effect of all of them was impossible to deny. The System was vulnerable. Here. Right now. There were ways it could go badly for him.

“Fine. I vow it,” the boy said. “The best for this world, as I understand it. Forever.”

Something flowed out of the System then, some huge energy. It felt not entirely unlike how Tulland felt when he enhanced one of his plants, and left the System feeling similarly drained. Through the System’s eyes, the Tulland saw the energy fly to the boy, mixing with everything he was until he almost glowed.

The boy gasped. In his way, so did the System. A notification window popped up between them, the same text read by both.

Class Obtained! (System Sage) You are now a System Sage. By virtue of your own personal talents, you have obtained a class that leverages your supernatural sense of what, where, and how the System is to guide others in their own development. In some ways, you have become part-System yourself, gaining some of its insights into a person’s path. Unlike the System, you are a being of flesh and blood, aligned and allied with humans. Because of this, you can share facts and direct guidance the System could never offer, acting as a bridge between very different kinds of beings with the potential to make both greater. As a variable class, your future is uncertain, especially as it concerns your abilities, skills, and fate. Walk carefully, child. You hold a great power.

“I’ll use it well. I swear.” As the boy spoke, his words reverberated through the System in a way it had never experienced before. “Thank you.”

And then the memory was over. Tulland found himself face-down in his own garden, hidden from Necia’s worry by his own briars and still clutching his splicing container.

“What was that?” Tulland asked. He didn’t have to clarify. The voice at the end was eerie, like it was tugging at his soul.

After that, that’s how he was. Normally, a System can interact with humans, influencing them. Not the other way around. From that moment, he had a needle-hole into my world. One that only got wider after that.

Tulland sat up, ignoring for the moment just how often he was finding himself on the ground these days. Quickly confirming that his splicing chamber was just fine, he checked himself over for any damage or weird ways that the System might have wronged him. He found nothing.

“And did that help? With his vow to help?” Tulland was ahead of himself, he realized. “Did he keep the vow?”

He would have had no choice. The vow was that powerful. And he was capable of meaning such a vow with every fiber of his being. It was part of why I liked him.

“I don’t see how this all applies to our problem, though. You gave him the ability to talk to people about things you couldn’t. Great. That’s what I want. What’s the hangup? Why isn’t this more common.”

Oh, it’s very common. It’s the only thing you’ve ever known, before coming into this dungeon. Look at me, Tulland. What I’ve been reduced to. Do you really think that class worked out for me, regardless of any vow he made?

“The Church.” Tulland’s mouth dropped. “You are saying that boy was the Church.”

I am saying no such thing. The boy kept his vow. But he…

“Well?”

I’ve given you enough, for tonight. I wish you luck on your new experiment. It’s locked in already, correct?

“That’s right.”

Good. Then I can’t influence it. I think you’ll be pleased, in any case.

Then the System was gone, wherever it went when it withdrew from their connection. Tulland, not being the boy from the flashback, had no special insights about that. But he could tell it was somehow more distant now.

If what the System had showed him was real, and he couldn’t imagine it wasn’t, then Tulland was looking at a time before any recorded history. The Church, he could imagine, had made sure of some of that disappearance, and history had taken care of the rest of it. He doubted that even people in the Church had seen that moment in the same way he had. The System certainly wouldn’t have shown them.

As far as explanations for how the Church had subjugated the system went, Tulland had never heard any but the very most general. The idea, it seemed, was that the entire organization had combined its powers to expel the influence of the System, something they had been mostly successful at.

The fact that they had done something of that nature was evident in the very fact that his System was so much different than the ones that Necia, Licht, or Ley had experienced. It was much more personal, for one. Before, Tulland had attributed that to the fact that he was the only person the System could easily talk to, but now he wasn’t so sure. It seemed that it had talked to the boy in much the same way, and had been willing to risk things that other Systems might have decided not to.

More different still was how uninvolved the System was in other ways, but that was obvious. Even now, the System had affected Tulland’s life, at least as far as actually being a System in that more significant sense went.

There were still open questions. How had the Church done what they had done? And why? At the time he saw, the System and the boy were friends. There was no deception in how the System treated it, at least in terms of how the System remembered things. The Infinite itself guaranteed that. At the least, it deserved some thought.

System?

Yes?

I’ll think about what you showed me.

Thank you. There was a pause. And Tulland?

“Yes?”

You are very bad at opening jars.

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