Finding the exact center of the Sarthian capital district took some time. One reason for this was that neither Matt nor Lucy had ever been there consciously. Another was that the long, flat expanse that Matt had walked across at the beginning of his time on Gaia had been part of the Sarthian capital district. Except for a spot of dirt that was a bit wetter, and another spot that had dumped Matt down a hole, he couldn’t remember a single recognizable feature in the whole place.

“And you are sure we’ll know when we get there? Because I’m not exactly seeing any ‘Welcome to Sarthia’ signs lying around.”

“Yes, Matt, for the love of everything. For the ninth time, I can’t take you directly there because that’s the system compass’s job. And the system really doesn’t like us right now.” Lucy smiled when she mentioned the system. “But a different part of my job is having answers when your dumb ass goes, ‘Lucy, what the hell is that?’ I have all sorts of tools for all your stupid questions. One of them is knowing the name of where you are. If we step foot inside the castle grounds, I’ll know. I promise.”

“And the castle isn’t just called the Sarthian district? You’re sure it’ll have a name?”

“Matt, even police stations have names. This was the center of power for what was a continental empire. I’m pretty sure the castle had a name.”

It took them the better part of a week of pacing back and forth across endless, same-everywhere desert landscape before finding the edges of the castle grounds. If only the leaders of Sarthia had much more ostentatious taste in palaces, their journey could have been easier.

Once they found the edges, they then had to find the throne room or get as close to it as they could. Even Lucy didn’t know if throne rooms fit the specification that her system used to create official system-screen names.

Eventually, they decided to wing it. The castle grounds were small enough that marking the exact borders with tentpoles was feasible, so they did. Using the tentpoles as a proxy, Matt stood in the dead center of the castle. He reached into his pack and found the token, holding it carefully as if it were a loaded weapon.

“Are you sure you want to do this, Matt? The system clearly doesn’t want you messing around with authority,” Lucy asked.

Matt glanced down at her, surprised. “Can you even talk about this? I don’t want you glitching out again.”

“It’s not a problem. The system is a creature of rules, Matt. It can ding me pretty good for telling you about your authority, or encouraging you to use it. But I’m warning you not to.” She grinned. “It’s a loophole. And I don’t think it would work if I didn’t mean it. This is a step beyond what you’ve done before, Matt. The system is going to take this as a declaration of war.”

Matt knelt down to Lucy’s eye level and saw that she was serious.

“I understand what you’re trying to say, and I appreciate that. But I have a story for you.” Matt waited for the system guardian to nod before continuing. “When I was a bit younger, I had this job. I don’t know how much you know about Earth jobs, but it wasn’t a great job by normal standards. Nobody who had it wanted to have it. Part of why it wasn’t great was this manager. Her name was Janice.”

Matt thought back to the job. It had pretty poor pay and no advancement prospects. The work itself also wasn’t fun. Mind-numbing, repetitive, soulless. But he knew plenty of other people with jobs like that, to the point where for a long time he thought that’s just what jobs were like. The reason this one stood out as his worst Earth job was, without question, because of Janice.

“She was really bad at her job. She’d forget things. She’d mess stuff up and pretend like the rest of the team had messed it up. She told us to do our work in ways that set us up for failure, and then was surprised when we failed. Half the work at that job was cleaning up her messes while she pretended that she wasn’t the one who made them.”

“She sounds evil,” Lucy volunteered.

“That’s the thing, though. She wasn’t evil. Nobody thought that. Really. We all put up with it because, as far as we could tell, it wasn’t a great job for her, either. It couldn’t have been her dream job. She was in over her head and making mistakes, but we all figured that was because she was sort of calling it in like the rest of us.”

Matt flipped the token absentmindedly in his hand before continuing. “The other thing was that none of us really needed the job. We could go find other shitty jobs. There was one exception—this older lady. Older than us, anyway. For her, it was probably the best job she could get. She needed it to pay for her shitty apartment and feed her kids.”

Matt stood up again, walking back to the position they thought would have the best chance of working. “And then one day Janice messed up. I don’t even remember what it was, but she decided that the best way to get out of trouble would be to fire this lady. I think she figured none of us would care. Maybe Janice had it in for the older lady for some other reason. But she wasn’t just firing one of our coworkers. She was tossing our hopes, needs, and dignity into the trash. It shattered any illusions we had about the place. A week later, corporate got a big folder filled with everyone’s worst stories about Janice, and we all quit at once.”

“Did that work?”

“I’m not sure. We all quit at once, no one stayed to observe the fallout. But the point is, there’s a difference between being shitty and being evil. I don’t know if our folder did anything, but I know that I didn’t turn evil for some job. And that’s when I decided that I never would.”

Lucy looked thoughtful, and appeared to have nothing to say about that. Matt wasn’t sure if she really understood, but it felt good to let his past see the Gaian suns. Satisfied, Matt activated the coin and dropped it to the ground.

The repair stones had always been disappointing. In Matt’s mind, they should have glowed. They should have made the stuff they were repairing shimmer. After all, this was a magic world and he was using a magic item. He expected some level of flair.

Where the repair stones failed, the property token delivered. As the token fell, it became a ball of glowing, pulsating white light. It slowed down, settling onto the ground before sitting motionless for half a beat.

Oh, please, token. Make a ‘fwoom’ sound. I know you can do it.

To Matt’s surprise, the token heard his prayer and fulfilled his expectations. With a mighty fwoom, the ball of light turned into a rapidly expanding ring of light that raced off into the distance. Another followed behind the first ring, and another. Finally, the whole landscape was awash in these rings, like a giant glowing target.

“Here it comes, Matt!”

But nothing happened. The rings all stopped, then flickered, glitching in the same way Lucy had when she had tried to tell Matt about system authority. Something was going wrong.

“Shit, shit, oh shit.”

“Lucy? What’s happening?”

“The system is fighting this. It’s trying to stop this.”

“What? Can it do that?”

“It shouldn’t be able to, but I don’t know. It might be trying out another loophole.”

Matt watched as the flickering got worse, like everything was short-circuiting. The rings started to fade, rapidly shedding their brightness until they were so faint that he could hardly see them at all. And then they were gone.

“Oh damn. No. Shit. Dammit, Matt. It shouldn’t have been able to do that.”

Matt blinked and sighed, “It’s okay, I guess. Easy come, easy—”

And then the whole world exploded in light. The rings surged back into existence, and exploded into thousand-foot-tall columns of light. The first ring to transform was the outermost ring Matt could see, and the columns worked their way in until he and Lucy were blinded in a solid block of light. He couldn’t see anything, but there wasn’t really anything to see.

Matt wasn’t sure what to expect next, but the dull purple of dungeon system notifications wasn’t even in his mind.

Dungeon System Event Notification

The dungeon system does not normally use the event notification in this way. However, since it is one of its few ways of communicating with the outside world, the system has deemed an unconventional use of the event notification system appropriate.

As an authority-installed feature of the Gaian planet, the dungeon system has few roles. It produces dungeons. It maintains them. It populates them with foes to assist in the growth of the planet’s heroes.

But foremost among those responsibilities is the one it has always enjoyed fulfilling the most. That is rewarding adventurers for successfully facing danger by providing them with appropriate, helpful rewards. The dungeon system could explain in great detail why it likes this, or the care that goes into the selection of loot offered to successful adventurers.

For the sake of concision, however, it will abstain from doing so in favor of offering one simple statement.

Nobody messes with my loot.

The lights all disappeared at once, like they had been turned off by a switch. The landscape was once again perfectly quiet. Matt and Lucy stood shocked in the dirt, saying nothing, until suddenly Lucy’s mind caught up with her mouth.

“What in the fuck was THAT?”

It was only then that Matt heard a cascade of ding sounds followed by a standard, blue system notification.

Estate Assignment Complete

By claiming property on the ruins of a defeated leadership site, Matt Perison has been awarded ownership and limited authority over the following areas:

Sarthian Castle Grounds

Sarthian Capitol District

The Kingdom of Sarthia

The Sarthian Continent

Further information may be requested from your system guardian.

Rewards: N/A

“Well, that was interesting.”

“No shit, Matt.”

“Did you know the dungeon system could talk like that?”

“Nope. But we owe it one. Who knew it was such a decent dude? Actually, is it even a person in that sense?”

Matt and Lucy looked out at his new domain. Matt had sort of hoped the token would suddenly revitalize the landscape, regrowing trees and returning buildings to their former glory. But he hadn’t really expected such a great outcome. True to that expectation, everything was still just dust and rocks. The only minor difference was that they were now his dust and rocks.

Suddenly, Lucy started laughing. She didn’t stop, either. She laughed until she was in tears, rolling on the ground, firmly stuck in the grasp of the giggles and unable to escape.

“What, what? What is it?”

She gasped for air, squeezing out words through the laughter, “It’s just … the system is always so wordy. It makes little quips. But did you see that message? How short it was? That means it didn’t want to send that message, Matt.”

“So why did it?”

“It didn’t have a choice! It’s a rule. You made it explain how you were successful at kicking its ass.”

Matt sat down next to Lucy, who was still rolling with laughter.

“Really?” He smiled. “That asshole must be so pissed.”