"&and ask it if I can go. No, ask it if it`s safe. No& ask it how much it costs to use. There`s no way it`s free. What works for free, around here? Even Barry makes you kill rats or something before he givers you presents. Ask him& I don`t know. Just ask him, Matt," Lucy said, barely keeping the words from spilling over each other.

　　Ramsen`s hologram looked on as Matt let Lucy burn herself out on questions, an amused glint glowing in his eye. Once she had finished and while Matt was still trying to mentally organize her barrage of questions, Ramsen began to speak again.

　　"It`s quite free to use, or at least should be if nothing has happened to it. We had loaded it with enough energy to open the connection and to keep it open for quite some time. It`s a persistent bridge, or should be. As for safe, that`s a much harder question. It should work, but we never got a chance to test it. By the time we despaired enough to take the risk with our own children, who would have been the first, the Scourge made a much faster push than we thought it capable of and absorbed the bridge. This was near the end of the war, and we lacked the resources and time to build another."

　　Ramsen chuckled softly to himself.

　　"And you can tell your companion I can hear and see her perfectly well. Call it a peculiarity of this place, if you will. One of the great many interesting things that a dungeon can do beyond its intended purpose. Despite our people never having a reincarnator visit before this point, we are well aware of the guardians. She`s bound to you, Matt. She should pass through the portal perfectly safe."

　　Lucy became very quiet, apparently embarrassed about her ramble. She felt comfortable around Matt, but not yet the rest of the world. As she turned away, Ramsen smiled fondly at her. Matt felt suddenly better about the man Ramsen had been, if this was an accurate replication of him. Liking kids was a hard thing to fake, and Matt found it easier to trust people who did.

　　"If the Scourge swept over that area, why are we confident the portal is still there? It seems like it would be delicate tech, at best."

　　"Less than you`d think, but it was also retracted into its case when the Scourge engulfed it. I think you will probably understand the wonders a few inches of nullsteel would do in that situation. It should be fine."

　　"Fair enough. So if I understand my first choice correctly, it`s digging up whatever Gaian tech might still be lying around, getting stronger, and making a try at eliminating the Scourge itself."

　　"That`s correct, Matt. Although you`d have to hurry. If the Scourge is like it was, it will spread quickly. Past a certain size, it will start to split into multiple instances. Once that starts, you have little chance."

　　"Any idea of how long that would take?"

　　"In a mana poor environment? A matter of weeks, or perhaps as short as a week, based on what I knew before the museum plan was finalized. Of course, that information is necessarily a bit out of date. There were presumably some weeks after I was added to this environment and the end of the war."

　　"Can I confer with Lucy? I think we need just a moment.

　　Ramsen smiled. "Of course. I`d expect nothing less."

　　"No. No arguing. We are leaving, Matt." Lucy was adamant. More than adamant, actually. She wasn`t giving him a chance to even consider Ramsen-hologram`s choices. It was a done deal for her, not that Matt wasn`t going to try to at least debate the choice.

　　"But the estate&"

　　"Doesn`t matter. Does not matter, Matt. You can buy a perfectly good estate somewhere else. One that isn`t infested by a god-plant."

　　"It could be dangerous on the other side, too."

　　"How dangerous? More dangerous than furiously trying to outpace the growth of a plant that outgrew the best efforts of an entire planet? Matt, you aren`t a fast-growing type. You just aren`t. I`m sorry. It`s not worth the risk."

　　"What about Barry?"

　　"Barry will be fine. We already know the Scourge wasn`t able to take down the dungeons. Hell, it sounds like whatever barriers exist between the system instance and the main system are breaking down. As much as I hate the system, with you out of the way, I don`t see any big reason the system won`t call in some kind of super-powered clean-up crew to cover its ass on what happened here. In either case, Barry will understand. He`d tell you the same thing. He won`t be fine if this thing kills you, Matt."

　　Matt wanted to argue. He really did.

　　"I can tell you want to argue, Matt, but there`s nothing here to save," Lucy continued. "There`s just the stored memories of people who have been gone for centuries. They are all dead, Matt. You can`t save them. I know you want to, but you can`t. You just have to leave."

　　Ramsen drifted back over, and Lucy told him of their decision.

　　"I can`t say I`m not sorry to hear that," Ramsen`s voice sounded. "I really am. But I understand, and I can`t argue that your decision is wrong. It`s a fight that`s long since been over. It`s a wonder that even this remnant of us persists. Go, with my blessing. I understand."If you come across this story on Amazon, it`s taken without permission from the author. Report it.

　　"Will this place survive?"

　　Ramsen sighed. "For a while, it will. It`s not as solid as it once was. Even now, the damage to the structure and function of this place is severe. It will hold against the Scourge for a time, until eventually it won`t."

　　"And then?"

　　"The last of our ghosts will be extinguished. We will be well and truly gone."

　　For reasons Matt couldn`t explain, the thought of that was like a lump of ice in his soul, slowly freezing him from the inside out. He reached out his hand, which Ramsen somehow shook firmly. Then he turned tail and left the building.

　　He hadn`t chosen Earth, nor was it chosen for him. He liked it fine, but there was a reason he had jumped at the system`s offer to help a new world. Gaia had been different. It was chosen for him, something the system said it recommended for him because it was truly a good fit for who he was. Of all the things the system had said, this was one of the few things he still trusted. He hadn`t seen much of the Gaia-that-was. It was just what the museum could show him, and this one man. But what he had seen, he had come to love.

　　He barely kept himself from running as he left the exhibit, instead walking quickly and never looking back. It might have been irrational, but he did not want the hologram to see him crying.

　　—

　　As Matt walked with Lucy through the square towards the gift shop, he was filled with regret. The square was filled with dozens and dozens of holograms, each looking subtly different than they had before. Their eyes were alive and filled with light in a way they hadn`t been before the repair. There were more of them than there had been too, moving more naturally and now watching him as he moved through the square. Each of them smiled warmly but wistfully at him as he passed through their ranks, as if they were glad to see him and sorry to see him go all at once.

　　By the time they reached the gift shop. Matt had managed to get himself together.

　　"I`m sorry about that, Lucy. I`m just going to miss this place. Not only this place, but the people, too. It`s everything that could have been."

　　"We`ve been together a long time, Matt. You are allowed to cry." Lucy moved closer to Matt, the closest she could be to hugging him without actually being able to touch him. "Besides, I liked that old man too. Of the four people that could see me, he`s the second one I`ve actually liked. I felt like he liked me, too."

　　Matt blinked, then blinked again. He could see Lucy. He could see her, he could interact with her.

　　Something the other dungeon projections couldn`t do at all. None of them. And Matt had met thousands of them.

　　That son of a bitch.

　　Before Lucy could say anything, Matt was bolting back in to the museum. As he passed the denizens, they looked up from hushed conversations with surprise. It was more confirmation, but Matt skipped by them straight back into the war effort exhibit.

　　"Matt!" Ramsen stood quickly from the table, wiping the expression off his face as he did. "What brings you ba&"

　　"Shut it. You son of a bitch. How many of you are there in here?"

　　"I don`t know what you are talking about."

　　Matt grabbed him by the collar, almost lifting him off the ground as he did.

　　"No. Tell me. Now."

　　Ramsen looked like he wouldn`t for a moment, then sighed, resigning himself to the truth.

　　"Hundreds of us, perhaps thousands. Only a few are awake. The museum is still too broken to know how many made it."

　　—

　　The story of the museum was simple at first. Gaian researchers had an advantage over those on any other planet, because they monitored the land. All of Gaia was a garden, and gardens are tended. There were millions of all-purpose weather and soil monitors feeding in information from all over Gaia when the system first arrived. At least a few of them were in range of the dungeons when they surged into being. That meant data was available, data few worlds would have had access to.

　　With the fate of the planet at stake, Gaian scientists took big risks. Had the system reacted almost immediately when they piggybacked a "build a dungeon" signal? It had. It shut down quickly, but not before it laid a framework that they could work from. By then, the Gaians were desperate, and they already knew the system couldn`t take things back.

　　They had seen the dungeons scan wildlife and plants. They knew how it got its simulations. Their first thoughts were to build a tool of education and encouragement, so they worked on their own programming and their own content. They shielded it with Nullsteel and replaced everything they could with homegrown Gaian equivalents.

　　After the Scourge progressed, more and more Gaians were forced into the dungeons to try to gain power to resist. They noted how full the simulations were, how they felt emotions, or at least how they appeared to. The simulations reacted just like the real thing, following patterns at times but deviating from the norm under abnormal circumstances.

　　And they studied. They learned. They pushed. And eventually they had something that could do things the system couldn`t, or at least wouldn`t. They hid every secret under a layer of Nullsteel, content to weather whatever retaliations the system might issue for even the barest chance at survival.

　　"The biggest breakthrough was in studying how the systems got folks like you," Ramsen nodded, indicating Lucy. "Into the dungeon in the first place. More importantly, that it had to. If you were just a simulation, it wouldn`t have to. It could simulate you inside or outside. But you are something more. Does your culture has a concept of something beyond the body?"

　　Matt nodded. "Several. The usual word for that is a soul."

　　"We found that for a person entering a dungeon, both the body and that other portion are moved as a whole. It counts on a link between the two. But the instructions we recovered had instructions for not only for moving people with that dual nature, but also for moving people without a body. We had no proof of why it would need that, but we had guesses. Guesses that proved true once I met you, Lucy."