The Games We Play

DISCLAIMER: This story is NOT MINE IN ANY WAY. That honor has gone to the beautiful bastard Ryuugi. This has been pulled from his Spacebattles publishment at threads/rwby-the-gamer-the-games-we-play-disk-five.341621/. Anyway on with the show...err read.

Time Limit

"A…" I began before trailing off, blinking rapidly. "A thousand years? Literally?"

"Yes," Keter confirmed without so much as a change in his tone. "One thousand thirty-nine years, to be exact."

"Then I…I'm?" I asked lamely, thrown off kilter yet again. It took only a moment for the Gamer's Mind kicked in and grounded me, but even then, the mere idea of it…of what it implied.

"Yes," Keter said again in the exact same way. "While I cannot confirm that we are immune to the rigors of time, having lived only slightly more than a thousand years, in that time we did not age past our prime. As near as we could determine, we will not die of natural cause—and certainly, despite the circumstances surround his situation, Malkuth is still alive."

"The other Archangels were immortal too, then?" I asked.

"Immortal?" He mused, looking back at me as he pondered the question. "No—we all can die. But time alone could not bring us to our ends. Our power was enough to sustain us through the ages."

I looked down at the floor and thought about it logically, pushing everything else aside. I suppose it wasn't too hard to believe. Hunters, on the off chance that nothing killed them, were known to live long lives. My grandmother had been old enough to fight in the War eighty years ago—hell, she'd been old enough to meet my great-great-grandfather—and Ozpin was older than her by at least a fair bit. And while my grandmother looked like she was in her fifties or sixties, Ozpin looked like he was in his late-thirties at most. My mother and father, Raven, and several of the teachers I'd seen here at Haven…longevity was an accepted fact amongst Hunters. If we Archangels had the power we seemed to, living a few thousand years wasn't that odd. If the healing abilities all Hunters possessed grew strong enough…I could buy it.

But that didn't make it any easier to imagine. In a technical sense, I wasn't even seventeen years old yet, and even taking into account all of my Acceleration, I was eighteen or so at most. A few more weeks would change that, but still; even if I was twenty years old, that was nothing compared to a thousand years. That was a truly enormous amount of time by the standards of any normal human—and, if anything, even more so from mine. Some people my age probably have at least a rough idea of the future or at least where they wanted to be in a year. Most of my class probably just wanted to make it through the school year and become sophomores while the older students like Albus and Finn wanted to graduate and become Hunters. Those were vague plans and rough ideas at most, but they were still plans.

But me? Truthfully, if someone asked me where I wanted to be a year from now, the only real answer would be 'alive.' My current plans didn't go much past the next four or five months and they mainly revolved around watching my enemies, making sure they didn't ruin my life, and training like a motherfucker day and night. Eventually, I wanted to defeat Malkuth , preferably without dying in the process. Assuming I somehow managed that miracle—succeeding where my past life had failed with a thousand fucking years behind him—I guess I'd need to clean up the Grimm. Ideally, they'd all spontaneously die the moment Malkuth fell, but realistically, that was probably too much to hope for. Really, I'd be happy if the lack of his backing crippled the larger monsters and got rid of the guiding force behind them all. If it did, that should cripple the most dangerous beasts and the ones that could create more Grimm. There'd still be the matter of dealing with the countless monstrosities that already exist, but it should be enough to allow progress to be made. If I flew around regularly, wiping the Grimm out where I found them, that might be enough for Humanity to begin climbing out of the hole we'd been stuck in for God knows how long. That might take as long as…ten? Twenty years? Then mankind could start to begin expanding.

And then…I'd have the rest of my life ahead of me. Which, assuming I somehow managed to get that far, might be a thousand years. Ten thousand? A million? It was possible that Keter was right and time alone would never kill me. I could be here in a billion years, maybe. With my resistance to injury, the fact that I didn't need any sustenance, and my ever growing power…assuming I defeated Malkuth, it could happen. I might be able to live forever.

I looked back on how far I'd come in the last seven months of my life and then thought about where I'd be after a few thousand, a few million.

Good God. I had no idea how I was even supposed to feel about that. What would I be like in a thousand years? What would the world be like? In all honesty, I expected things to get worse before they got better. If I did something wrong and Malkuth reacted, he could wipe a Kingdom or two off the map without a problem. When we fought, and I knew that it'd come to a fight eventually, he might be able to drag a few down in his death throes. Assuming he did enough, civilization as I knew it could collapse and need to be rebuilt from scratch. Even if I managed to keep the number of casualties low, this was so…big, I had no idea what would be left in its wake.

Unless I lost, in which case…well, things would get worse, sure. Them getting better, however, was somewhat unlikely. I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it because I had no way of predicting what would happen, much less doing anything about it, but it was possible a lot of the people close to me could die in the process of taking Malkuth down. Even those who didn't fight beside me would fight to protect innocent lives and against what they'd have to face? I liked to hope for the best, but I doubted we'd all make it out of that unscathed. And even if we did…my friends were long-lived, but they weren't eternal. I might be able to do something about that and sustain them through the ages, but even most healing techniques didn't affect age. I could do a lot, but I wasn't sure I could regrow a person's brain once all the cells inside it died—or rather, I wasn't sure what would happen even if I did. If I filled their heads with new brain cells, would they still remember their lives, or would they truly be new? What role did the soul play on the memory?

It was too risky to test. I'd need to transfer their minds to some kind of external storage or preserve their brains somehow. I could turn them into cyborgs, maybe, or—now that I knew it was possible—extract their souls and bind them to new bodies somehow. I—

Good God, was I really thinking about this? Would they even want to live forever?

Hell, did I want to live forever? I wasn't sure. I didn't want to die or slowly rot away, but did I want to live only to watch everything else do so? Everyone I loved, gone. Everything I knew, literally history. I liked watching my power grow and experimenting with it—liked it enough that I could content myself with spending weeks alone doing nothing else. But I didn't consider that the same as being alone—the who cared about me in turn did so regardless of how far apart we were and they'd be there. I knew I cared about them in turn and would fight to protect them at any time, so I wasn't truly alone. But when all of those people were dead and gone…would my power alone be enough? What would I do then?

The question honestly worried me, because it led to a realization—'whatever I wanted.' The way my power grew, if I wasn't the strongest person in the world by then, I'd be shocked. I'd have the power to do whatever I wished and I had no idea what I'd wish for. Ten years ago, I was basically a different person; a hundred years from now, I could only image who I'd be. And while I trusted myself, apparently I'd done this song and dance before and it had ended badly. If it happened again, after I defeated Malkuth, there'd really be no stopping me.

I looked at myself, turning my senses inward. In some ways, my life was a game—but in others, it wasn't. In a game, the main character could defeat the villain and the story would end no matter what had been lost or changed over the course of the story. In reality, though, after you save the world…you still have to live in it.

"You're worried," Keter noted. "About life."

"Well, yeah," I replied, switching my perspective to focus back on him. "Who wouldn't be after what you just said?"

"Only a fool would be unconcerned," He answered. "However, you concern yourself with the wrong things because of your perspective."

"Oh?" I asked, raising an eyebrow.

"You fear watching things rot and fade," He said. "You worry that, in time, life itself will become a burden. We worried about the same thing, before."

"And?"

He gave me another million smiles.

"You are young," He told me.

"Technically, we're the same age," I pointed out but didn't deny it. It was true, after all. "What is it like? Living forever."

The Light Elemental seemed to take a few minutes to consider that before answering, probably trying to put it into words.

"Its life," He answered. "The same as any other, yet made more by its length. Days pass as they normally do and seconds feel the same even after a hundred years. There are tragedies, of course, as there are in any lifetime—the pain of loss and departure, stretched out to encompass more lives. There are bad days and sad days and days that seem to wear on far longer than they have any right to. Some days—some weeks, some months, some years—hurt. And yet, it's worth living. Life, you see, however long or short it might be, is something amazing. With a larger share of time you'll have more of the bad then most, but also more of the good—more than you could imagine having, in time. You fear the future will be horrible and dull, that life to grow slow and tiresome, and perhaps that will eventually be the case. But you shall find that there are more wonders in the Universe than can be lived in ten thousand thousand lifetimes."

"What should I be afraid of, then?" I asked.

"Of something greater than mere darkness," He replied. "For it is not the darkness of life that will drag you down. Darkness, in and of itself, is only the absence of light—and it has only the power you give it. It can hide and deceive and color things darkly, but it can vanish in an instant the moment you find something to light your way. The true danger if one that is far more perilous; that you shall instead be blinded by that light."

"What do you mean?" I wondered, furrowing my eyebrows. "What happened?"

He was quite for a long moment before speaking.

"If a life long enough to experience and explore the wonders of the world is the greatest blessing," He mused at last. "Then to have that lifetime squandered endlessly rolling a stone up a hill must itself be the greatest punishment."

"What do you mean?" I asked, tilting my head.

"Just as the passage of decades and centuries does little to make minutes go by faster, a thousand years spent tolerating something makes it no less tedious," Keter said. "In the beginning, we—the Archangels—vowed to protect the people that the Angels had trod upon so mercilessly. We healed the sick, raised cities across the globe, and built up the peoples of the earth. We made new Angels, raising up the wise and kind and worthy to shepherd and protect their fellows, and made a new age. And then, we promised ourselves we would be better than those who came before us, look over and protect them rather than reign over them as gods."

"And?" I asked. "What ruined it all?"

"Human nature," He answered, smiling again. "Theirs and ours. It began simply enough and though we saw it coming, it seemed to be no real issue. We'd yet to realize the extents of our own longevity, so we failed to account for it in our plans."

He chuckled.

"We were ignorant of many things, back then," He said fondly. "For all our power, for as much as we had learned, we'd been raised in a lab with only each other and our creators for company. We had the power to reshape the world, but no real idea of what the world was really like, much less the wonders it contained. Even as we tore down the twisted rule of the Angels, we were left in awe by what we saw, from such simple things as animals and other people to the wonders of science our makers had achieved. The world was a massive, miraculous thing to us, the Universe a frontier that even millennia of work on the Angels parts had only scratched the surface of. Even as we cast them power, we inherited their legacy and their achievements both—and even as we worked to make up for the former, we found ourselves drawn to the later. Perhaps it was inevitable when we'd spent our entire lives in labs and with scientists, but we were curious and there were mysteries to pursue. Though we swore to avoid crossing some of the lines they had, there were other fields and we were suddenly free to pursue them."

"What did you do?" I wondered, honestly curious myself. I was pretty sure I'd have done the safe if I could. Hell, I'd have likely continued that research simply because I could—that was why I did lots of stuff, after all. I was just interested in how far they'd gotten.

"Everything we could, within the limits we'd established," He answered, tone almost wistful. "We learned how to create fields of altered time—how to sever an instant from its surrounding moments and hold it in place and how to twist a stream such that it looped back upon itself. We created devices that could bend space, connecting two points without touching anything in-between. We studied matter until we could remake it into entirely different forms, forms that shouldn't have been able to even exist in this reality, and then we reached out to grasp at new realities. We created worlds, just like this one, but we could maintain it as a separate thing, multiplying resources to advance our works. We pushed the boundaries of what could be believed and with the ten of us working in concert, we flew past them. We had dreams to pursue and we never wanted to stop. If things had stayed the same…I think we could have chased the mysteries of this world until time itself died. And if, in the end, the stars themselves had started to flicker out around us…we'd just have made new ones."

"But things had changed," I noted. "Because of human nature, you said. Was this what you meant? You wanted to pursue your dreams and it led you astray?"

"In a way," Keter replied. "Though not the way you're thinking. We are human at our core, after all—people, whatever our power. We had wants and desires, dreams and ambitions, and hopes for the future, just like everyone else. Just like them."

"Just like them?" I repeated. "Everyone else you mean—the people you'd saved."

"Yes."

I furrowed my eyebrows slightly, confused.

"Did they try to do something?" I asked doubtfully. Not so much because I couldn't imagine anyone trying, but because I couldn't imagine them coming anywhere close to succeeding. If some group had tried to oppose the Archangels, odds were they'd have been subdued and dealt with trivially—and while it wouldn't be wise to underestimate the forces of stupidity, I sincerely doubted that all that many people would have even thought about trying. It was difficult to imagine such an attempt being the breaking point, because the actions of the suicidally stupid did nothing but prove that some people stupid to the point of being suicidal.

"Nothing worth the mentioning," He answered. "And perhaps that was part of the problem. We made a choice to aid them and that choice bound us to them. Unlike the tyrants that came before us, we gave the people voices and what those voices said was…fairly uninteresting. In truth, ruling the world is fairly dull—not difficult, at least not for us, but certainly tedious. There were, of course, meetings to discuss various events, the long process of creating and establishing laws, various aspects of the economy that needed to be dealt with, votes and polls, and all the other matters of state writ large."

"Paperwork?" I asked, with a smile.

"Don't be ridiculous," He chided. "You know full well that it would take a truly exorbitant amount of paperwork to give us even a moment's difficulty, and even then it would only take a small amount of attention. Paperwork, at the end of the day, is simple. People, however, are something else entirely."

"Ah," I said, understanding beginning to dawn. Suddenly, I was pretty sure I knew where this was going. In truth…I often had this problem myself.

People took time. It was as simple as that. He was right—I could Accelerate and use Psychokinesis to do a mountain of paperwork in seconds. When it came to dealing with the sick and injured, I could mend a thousand men in a single pass. I could memories books with a quick flip through, raise buildings in moments, run from here to Vacuo on pure speed, grow fields, level mountains, and light up the night with fire and lightning. I could probably even do all of that at the same time, if I needed to. My power was such that a lot of things were quick and easy for me.

But dealing with people was something of an exception. I couldn't use Acceleration to make a conversation go faster—or, at least, not both sides of it. I could talk to a bunch of people at the same time, maybe, but I'd have to do it at their speed. I might be able to scare people away or make them believe in things that weren't there, but if I wanted to talk to someone for real, I'd have to do it the same way as everyone else. If I wanted to listen to them, empathize with them, or convince them of something verbally, I'd need to do it slowly.

Which was why, by and large, I didn't bother. I made exceptions for my family and friends—and, in some cases, my enemies—because they were important to me, but otherwise I just…didn't really care. Sure, I could probably go hang out at the movies with some of my friends, though I'd need to make some that did that kind of thing. I could play video games again, pick up sports, or whatever else.

Or, you know, I could just spend another night in Naraka gaining some more superpowers. In my eyes, it wasn't a very hard choice to make, but then, I was of the opinion that learning to shoot city-leveling laser beams out of my hands was its own reward.

"You begin to understand. On a scale of billions, such things become…lengthy," He said. "Time-consuming. People took time and they were…boring. There were always exceptions, of course, but by and large, they were simply uninteresting compared to what you were doing. When you have the option of seizing the fires of creation, creating worlds, ventured beyond known reality, and twisted time and space, the notion of spending an afternoon adjusting the minutia of taxation in a given are becomes rather unappealing. Especially when one's desire to do such a thing in the first place is effectively nonexistent. As we learned more about the world and the power at our finger tips, interactions with the outside world began to look more and more like interruptions. Annoyances."

"So you pulled away," I guessed.

"While people remain difficult to deal with, they do become fairly easy to ignore," Keter agreed. "We'd always intended to leave the world we'd created in the hands of others, after all, we'd just expected to do so when we died. Things changed when we ceased to age, but delegating minor tasks is only natural. Certainly, whoever we chose to do the job would have far lesser means at their disposal, but nothing is perfect and people need to be able to rely on their own power at times. We told ourselves that as the days seemed to grow progressively more and more wasteful, until we'd all but drawn away completely. We remained on hand to be contacted in case of emergencies, but after decades of work on our part, it seemed only reasonable that we be free to pursue our own ends."

I let that sink in for a moment before speaking.

"How badly did things change, without you there?" I asked quietly.

"I don't recall," Keter replied. "In part because many of the memories are no longer there…and in part because I simply didn't care. At first, I don't think things were too bad; people clashed as they always do, there were occasional upheavals and economic troubles, but the system we'd made wasn't so weak as to collapse after only a few decades."

"What about a few centuries?" I asked.

He smiled again and there might have been a bit of sadness in his voice when he next spoke.

"Things got worse over time, naturally," He answered. "Eventually, the distribution of power became unbalanced and some areas exerted that power over others. Things came apart, at times, and there were conflicts, even the occasional war. Nothing constant or even particularly bad, historically speaking, but enough to seem commonplace if you live through them all. We were called upon for emergencies and usually a show of power would tide things over for a decade or two, leaving us free to go back to our work. Sometimes, we'd judge a problem as unworthy of our attention and dismiss it and other times they wouldn't bother calling for some reason or another but things held. Political leaders might change places quickly and some laws could be met with outrage, but the system lived on and so did the people. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough for a while."

"But that changed, didn't it?" I said. "Do you know when?"

'Did you even care when it did?' went unsaid but not unheard.

"No," He admitted. "I don't remember and I suppose that says enough. It was never their fault, not really—in the end, it was a simply matter of growing apathy. The earliest thing I remember was a…project we were working on, when we were about four hundred years old. It had been a long time in the making and it had been a frustrating few years, both because of our repeated lack of success and because of the number of times we'd been called away to help. It had been a hard year for the people, too, or so I gathered; some group had been on the rise and causing repeated trouble. I don't remember who they were or what they planned, if I ever bothered finding out; it hadn't mattered at the time because we'd made a breakthrough and simply hadn't meant anything after the fact."

"What was the experiment?" I wondered.

"A hundred kilograms of matter and antimatter, brought together within a sphere of slowed time," He replied. "All of it self-maintained. A fraction of the explosion would bleed through the sphere every second and would be absorbed by the supporting machinery to be transformed into something more useful. It was an idea we'd been working on off and on for quite some time, ever since we successfully created a large amount of Antimatter and kept it stable—and we'd finally made it work. We'd proven the design on a smaller scale several hundred times, but it was finally time to test the real thing within a contained dimension."

"What happened?"

"We were interrupted," Keter answered. "There was an emergency—a large-scale terrorist attack that had grown into a riot. I'm not certain of the details, but several important people had gotten involved and Angels had eventually started fighting in the streets."

"And?" I prompted when he paused. "What did you do?"

Keter's wings twitched minutely in an almost imperceptible shrug.

"I didn't do anything," He stated. "It was Gevurah's turn to clean things up."

I recognized the name for obvious reasons and it was easy to tie it to another of the Archangels, but I still raised an eyebrow inquisitively.

"Gevurah was rather crude, to put things lightly," Keter answered my unspoken question. "Exceptionally powerful, too. But he was…fun. A good friend, if not a good man—I can say that, despite how things ended. Passionate about his work, whatever it happened to be, and reliable. He…"

Keter shut his eyes for a moment and then smiled again.

"He looked like he could have killed the man for the interruption. He was as invested in the project as the rest of us and not afraid to say it. In fact, I remember we all laughed at what he said even after the fact—'I'm halfway through seducing the panties off of Matter and Energy and you want me to deal with a fucking riot!? What the fuck do they have to riot about!?'" Keter's voice shifted into a foreign voice, all million voices ringing the same.

I couldn't help it—I laughed myself, surprised to hear the words coming from Keter.

"Really?" I asked, eyes and smile wide.

"Really," Keter confirmed, voice serious and yet still a touch amused. "As I said, he was always rather crude. In the end, he looked at the rest of us and said 'I'll be back in five minutes; don't finish the unwrapping until I get back.'"

My smile faded and Keter gave a very slight nod.

"He left and returned less than three minutes later. When we asked what he'd done to end things so quickly, he said he'd just figured out who was causing the trouble and killed them all. I was annoyed at the time—he should know that indiscriminate murder was counterproductive. While it may have momentarily resolved the issue, it would just create greater problems for us in the long run. I told him so."

"What happened?"

"He told me he didn't care what they did, so long as they didn't do it while he was busy with things that were actually important.," Keter replied. "Then Malkuth shouted 'The panties are coming off' and there was an all but frozen explosion feeding whatever energy managed to seep through into the machinery around it. We'd created the first Antimatter Generator and the subject was dropped. It would be a lie to say I forget; rather…I simply didn't care very much."

I fell silent at the simple, honest statement.

"I remember us looking back on that moment, near the end," He mused. "Even then, it wasn't the death's that bothered me—just the fact that I hadn't cared enough to even ask what they'd done. By then, it just hadn't mattered anymore."