A Sky Full of Tropes [Reincarnated Psychic Child LitRPG]

"Leaving already?" Mint Westminster asks.

I nod. "The [Hush Warlock] is about to reach the Underside and I'd like to intercept her before she leaves Gleam."

"Be sure to visit again once we have the school back up and running," Peace says.

"I'll have to see what I can do," I say. "I'm starting Wizardry prep school next year."

"Don't you have the wisdom of the ages in your head?" Peace asks.

"Sure, but the system doesn't care," I say. "My Knowledge skills are lagging behind because it doesn't think I've sufficiently proven that I know the things I know."

After another round of well-wishing, we unfurl the sails, activate the sigils and take the tiller. The Celestial Duck rises gracefully into the air with only a couple of brief stutters and barely any lingering rotten egg smell.

A small crowd watches us go in awe, many of them children who have never seen a skyship before, even one as rickety as mine. I wonder how many kids will dream of flying tonight because of us.

I try not to wonder about Barnet and Sutton's fascination with my knowledge of fictional criminal organizations and where it may lead. At least I've made clear the extent I'm willing to play along. Stupid bleeding randomly generated quests. Cores do a good enough job running on automation, but they need sanity checks from time to time.

As we fly across Gleam Topside, I have to wonder how many other people are watching from windows and balconies. I could probably count if I actually cared. I would rather not know. I plan to research illusion sigils so that we might attract a tad less attention next time. [Illusory Mask] is great but would benefit from control sigils. I have a lot I want to experiment with once we're done with this adventure.

Around the entire edge of Gleam stands a massive white wall a hundred meters tall, making the entire domain resemble a giant shallow bowl from a distance. I'm not sure what the point of it is, although it does a good job of blocking accidentally looking into the Void from the Topside. There is no corresponding wall around the Underside.

There's no impediment to anyone that can fly, so we pull away from the surface and circle around the edge of the domain, doing a barrel roll as we reach the Underside to right ourselves relative to the "ground". We make a million adjustments along the way to compensate for the shifting flow of aether from Tiganna and the domain cores.

"I am never going to get used to that," Rowan says with a groan. "I eagerly await the day we have a ship with cabins."

I bring us in to park at a docking tower close to the halfling's position, and leave Anise and Amethyst with the boat to set off on foot to intercept her.

[So are we really killing this halfling lady?] Basalt asks.

[If I must have a recurring villain, I would like one that is taller than me,] I reply. [Anyway, you weren't there to hear her hammy villain monologue. She's an adult and she knew what she was doing, and people died because of her.]

[Fair enough.]

Unfortunately, the Warlock doesn't come out to the surface. She made for an inn that likely has a basement connecting to the underground. Of course she planned her escape route in advance. Still, we head in.

The common area is largely empty at the moment, but the meter-tall Warlock with fuzzy bare feet immediately draws my eyes. She's wearing black robes and a necklace with dangling symbols and Hush Owl feathers. A black pointed hat hangs on the back of the chair next to her, and a gnarled wooden staff with a skull on the end has been propped up against it.

The Warlock looks over her cup of coffee at us and says, "Before you do anything stupid, you should be aware that this guest house is run by a Legendary Innkeeper who takes hospitality very seriously."

She gestures to a man with a bushy white beard behind the bar who looks a bit like Santa Claus in green dragonscale armor.

"In that case, I would like a drink and a chat," I say, not asking if he gives presents to children too. I'm just glad he wasn't named 'Reindeer'.

I look over the menu and notice that chocolate milk is listed in the kid's section, and order a glass immediately. I haven't seen a lot of chocolate in this life and have to wonder where he gets it, but I'm sure an [Ineffable Innkeeper] has his sources.

As my party moves to order their own drinks, I take a seat at the Warlock's table. I scan her quest log to see if her core gave her any directions, to see where she might go from here and what she might do. To my surprise, it's mostly empty. Ordinary things like Tiganna's usual offer of a class change upon reaching the next age milestone.

"You knew exactly where I'd be, so one of you must have a supernatural tracking skill of some sort because you certainly didn't come through the caves," the Warlock says.

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"Mm," I say. "I was expecting a boss fight, you know. It would have been tense and dramatic. I really prefer chocolate milk, though."

"Well, I'm not going back to Westminster," the Warlock says. "I'm staying right here until you've left, and then I'm leaving Gleam and never coming back."

"Got big plans out there?" I ask.

"No, but I'm open for opportunities."

"How about you come work for us?" I say. "Hide away in Tempest for several years until everyone in Gleam doesn't want you dead."

"What, you're not worried about me being an evil Warlock?"

"I'm a Necromancer," I say.

The Warlock raises an eyebrow. "And who are you, and why do you think I'd be interested in your offer?"

"I'm Drake Corwen Tempest Tiganna, and we're the Defiant Seekers," I say. "So named because we defy the cores. I've noticed that you're light on quests. That makes you seem like a kindred spirit next to these sheep who only do what a core tells them to."

The Warlock's eyes light up at that. "Is that so? So you don't have a quest to kill me, then?"

"I do not," I say. "Westminster gave me a quest to 'stop' you, probably because it knows that if it ordered me to kill you, I might refuse just on principle. But I'm not terribly fussed about 'stopping' you. You're a Heroic-rank adventurer and a promising Warlock. What you did with the dungeon was clever. And after all was said and done and I'd fixed the mess you left behind, Westminster let me keep control of their dungeon."

"Really? Westminster didn't send someone to reclaim it immediately?"

I shake my head. "They ate up my every suggestion as though it were a command from an authority. It frankly weirded me out a bit to have old people treating me like that when I look like a freaking nine-year-old. In any case, you made a mess and broke something that needed to be broken so that it could be fixed. Maybe that wasn't your intention, but Gleam is probably better off now than it was before. I might not have tried to change it had I visited and there not been an ongoing crisis in which I could be a respected foreign expert consultant. You did this because you wanted to and not because a core told you to."

"Wouldn't that make it worse, not better, that I'm not a core's little thrall?" the Warlock asks. "That I don't have a quest log and do things of my own free will?"

"I've seen their quest logs," I say. "The world needs more people who can think for themselves. I just got left in charge of their school, so I'm going to try to make sure their next generation is less…"

"Stupid?" the Warlock suggests.

"I was trying to think of a more charitable word as it's not so much that they're stupid but that ignorant and misled. Automated quests gave the cores too much control. I had to convince Barnet and Sutton to stop giving randomly generated assassination quests targeting children. You understand that people should control the cores, and the cores shouldn't control people."

"So, what, are you suggesting we do it again?" the Warlock asks with a laugh.

"This exact thing? No. This was annoying and I doubt the circumstances can be repeated."

"Well, regardless of what you say, I have no reason to trust you and I'm not leaving Blackwall's hospitality until after you're long gone. Maybe I will visit Tempest at some point. Who knows? Either way, run along home, kids. I'll think about it."

I return to the docking tower and explain to Anise what happened with the halfling. We decide stay the night in Harrow to rest up for the long flight back to Tempest, so we leave Blackwall behind and return to Misty's home.

"So, Misty, Melody, are you staying home or going with us?" I ask.

"I'm going," Misty says.

"Staying," Melody says. "I'll head back to Westminster by lift. Now that this adventure is over for now, I want to convince my family to send me to Crux Academy. That I have a quest for Crux will help, but I plan to butter them up and help out with getting the Temple of Light up and running again in the meantime."

Before we leave the City, I buy a clock from Harrow. It's made of shiny brass and has a cool steampunk sort of design that makes me slightly lament the fact that I'm just going to sacrifice it to my spawner. That does make it worth a good chunk of essence, at least.

I'm thinking I ought to spawn someone to send to the Temple of Light. Another gnome, perhaps. Someone familiar with clocks and willing to do dungeon management. They do a decent enough job when left on automatic, but they are not that smart sometimes. They don't think like humans, at any rate. They've got very different priorities.

While messing around with Hebron, I came to understand that to the cores, the generation of essence is all-important. The currency system dungeons spawn is directly based on essence. A gold coin isn't worth 10,000 essence because it's made of gold, but because dungeons shove 10,000 essence into every gold coin.

We set off that evening to spend the night in flight in the interest of not missing the Summer Festival. The Great Orb shifts from yellow to orange overnight, marking the date as August 15th and the middle of what counts as "summer" in the Crystalline Heavens.

The force of the aether current flowing away from Tiganna increases our speed beyond our base maximum, but it's still going to be several hours before we're back home.

Over the long flight back to Tempest, I trawl through my astral tree to see if I can find a past life willing to take the job and having the necessary skills. At this point, I realize that I'm doing this work too much the hard way when I should just be letting my system take care of this. That's what it's for, after all. A skill probably already exists for this. I have time and a skymote to stare at, so I see about trying to unlock it.

Minions? I guess this was meant for Necromancers and that's exactly what I'm using it for, but I'm still amused. A new icon that looks a little like three ghosts has appeared in my third eye HUD.

Ah, that's much better. Why do manually something that I have a computer for? So Celestial is what's past Divine, I take it?

I select 'search' and enter parameters for the skill Mechanics (Clockwork). And then wait. And wait. A list of names starts building up, one name every few minutes sorting itself into position by skill level. I let that run in a fractal and return my attention to flying and watching the sky.