Isekai Speedrun

I left the Starfish Mansion with Mirim and T-Sub.

The warm, dry, brightly illuminated hallway interior changed to cold, wet, gloomy exterior of the Loönois Moorlands.

This was our home territory on the Wineep Isthmus; a war-torn landmass connecting Mu continent and Ur continent like Beringia connected Asia to North America thousands of years ago.

I felt like stepping out onto Scottish countryside in the late 1800’s – or probably more like the romanticized Highlands paintings from that time period. The moorlands were always covered by dark clouds and obscured by light rain and thick fog, creating an atmosphere of dreich, dread and refuge.

For security reasons, we made random turns and twirls when we hiked down the gently sloping hill.

The constant bad weather was both a curse and a blessing: on one hand, we had to wear raincloaks every time we went out and the ground beneath our feet was slippery from mud and moss, but on the other hand, the rain washed away our tracks and kept curious outsiders from finding our secret paths in and out of home base.

Common folks in the nearby moorland towns and villages affectionately called us Raincoat Gang or Parasol People nowadays because of our black trenchcoats and dark blue waxcloth umbrellas; our signature outer layers. Just top those off with a wide-hooded raincloak and you are the height of fashion at these parts.

We acted like peacekeeper forces and kept more violent gangs under strict control along the Wineep Ishtmus, even outlining new laws and enforcing them by appointing our own sheriffs, so our umbrellas had become associated with good public order and positive vibes. Just as planned.

Superstitious parents sewed blue V’s and bluebird emblems on their children’s clothes like protective talismans, but we didn’t use any logos or emblems on our own clothes; I didn't care for that motorcycle gang vests crap. Still, even notorious war-gangs in neighboring territories knew at this point that messing with the “northern umbrella gang” who (allegedly) assassinated Caliph Tze was a bad idea.

The Revolution Movement was a peaceful fire of enlightenment spearheading this cruel world into a brighter future one territory at a time.

Yep. Just as planned.

We continued our hike over the muddy main road and exited the Radius Of Influence of the anomaly called Starfish Mansion.

Soon we entered a narrow strip of forest between hills, and in the cover of the leafless trees and giant thorn bushes, we took out one of the many stolen Strangers vehicles from a camouflaged garage shed.

These bulky mining vehicles were called Hathicars in the game. They were slower than autopalanquines, but since they were heavily armored, we didn’t have to worry about road accidents or random sharpshooters.

Safety was the priority these days, not speed.

---

One good thing you can say about Strangers is that planned obsolescence wasn’t their style: they built things to last. These mining vehicles just kept going and going as long as you occasionally fueled them with black core crystals.

The flipside was that there was a very limited supply of vehicles. Only few hundred vehicles total were known and functional in the whole world, and there was no practical way to build new ones or repair broken ones. They lasted for a long time, but they were proprietary hardware, closed platforms; no right to repair, original manufacturer out of business.

Revolution Movement had grand theft auto’d about 35 operational or mostly operational Strangers vehicles from Caliphate and Sultanate forces so far: multiple autopalanquines (many different types of light four-wheeled vehicles), Hathicars (“Campervans”), Ore Transporters (“Flat Trucks”), Slave Master Vehicles (“Mastercars” or “Humber Pigs”) and Scrapers (“Pushbacks”). In many cases, the original purposes of these vehicles in dungeon mining context were either forgotten or ignored, which meant that their improvised new purposes as war machines were clumsy and inefficient.

Yet despite being aware of the mismatches in original design and current use, people were still trying to build and sell inferior knock-offs – like a cargo cult building an airport control tower out of wood and expecting it to bring the airlift planes back; imitating the shapes of the runway lights with pottery and glass shards without understanding their purpose: These rods just have to be in rows like this, and the great magic ritual will work.

Imitations and replicas were the canonical reasons for why so many Caliphate horse carriages looked like Strangers mining vehicles. They crafted them out of scrap metal and painted patterns in the cabin that looked like dashboards.

Posers.

---

Mirim raised her eye patch and surveyed the narrow mud road with her mechanical eye.

“No observers.” (Mirim)
“Master Speedrun, everything is ready.” (T-Sub)
“Let’s hit the road then.”

Test Subject aka T-Sub was driving. He usually followed me everywhere like a part-time bodyguard. He was obsessed with Strangers ultratech and since I was the world’s foremost expert on the subject, keeping my behind safe and hearing my “Strangers wisdom” was an utmost priority for him.

T-Sub was a former slave commando supersoldier #188 from the eastern deviant lands of Ur. The last of his kind. There was no question about his strength and combat skills; he was a sidekick character specialized in dealing bludgeoning damage with two-handed reach weapons, so (by my expert recommendation) he carried Raven’s Beak warhammer as his main weapon and short-barreled Scattergun as his sidearm.

In this timeline, he didn’t have the Puppet Berserker skill from the game because I changed the timeline and prevented him from traveling to the Bone Dune Station where he would’ve gotten that skill. But it was obviously better this way since he wasn’t a non-responsive vegetable in a wheelchair, awakened to action by strings wrapped to his fingers.

T-Sub was a reliable Man Friday as long as you kept his obsession with Strangers in check.

In the anime, Test Subject was seen walking and talking normally only in flashbacks with Crys and Kimono in the city of Crumbling Shores, and then briefly in the Bone Dune Station episode, before his transformation in the Eight Floor. And every time T-Sub talked in the anime, he was a total Strangers tech otaku: every word from his mouth oozed love for unseen fascist alien idols.

When T-Sub arrived in the Starfish Mansion, I placed three heavy rules on him: 1) do not blabber about Strangers to outsiders, 2) do not open any doors or use any devices without permission, and 3) always stay together with at least one core member; Crys, Mirim, Rain or me.

If he breaks any of these rules, I will throw him out of the mansion.

And yes, we had to restrain and throw him out a few times at the start. But after spending few nights out in the moorlands, he finally learned to limit his excitement.

So, T-Sub eagerly took the driver’s seat and started the vehicle. He had spent countless hours learning everything about these vehicles like a sports car enthusiast.

“Master Speedrun, can we talk about them on the way?” (T-Sub)
“I was thinking we should sing some travel songs.”
“Eh? Songs?” (T-Sub)
“I’m just kidding. Let’s see, we talked about Starfish Mansion a bit yesterday, so – okay, I was recently thinking some ideas about their architecture...”

Strangers were into dark organic brutalism in their architectural designs, while Caliphate and Sultanate were into kitschy décor and unpractical ornaments. However, Starfish Mansion was an eclectic mix of designs taken from the vast amount of areas and cultures it contained, which told me that even though Strangers were fascist slavers, they weren’t completely fanatical in their architectural functionalism. More than that, there was a sense of attention to human sensibilities and needs in Starfish Mansion; almost like Strangers built it to function as a museum or a zoo, or maybe as an ark for obedient human masters and their human slaves.

“There’s a good possibility that S-words created Starfish Mansion for humans instead of themselves, like some kind of luxurious prison where every cell is a mini-world. Put that piece of aesthetic speculation into your pipe and smoke it, T-Bone.”
“Pipe, master?” (T-Sub)
“Big brother, you said that smoking causes disease in human lungs.” (Mirim)
“That was just a figure of speech. I’m certainly not actually recommending smoking. Don’t smoke. T-Sub, I’m not ordering you to actually smoke a pipe. What a pedagogical blunder. This was not a pipe, it was just a story about a pipe.”
“Yes, master Speedrun.” (T-Sub)

T-Sub had been a good boy for the last two years. In fact, he was usually quiet and avoided saying the word Strangers and used “S-word” instead. I guess he didn’t want to take any risks.

He was a good listener and a good student; a silent subscriber who tried his best to understand even when I used long strings of unfamiliar words. For him, my slang words from the future were probably a feature rather than a bug, adding charming exoticism on top of fascinating mystery.

I felt a bit sorry for gagging T-Sub so much, but if he were to openly preach his love for Strangers everywhere, the younger members of our group would get confused. Revolution Movement was all about fighting against Strangers and slavemasters, not revering them and their technology. You can be interested about the absurd designs of Wunderwaffe, but if you keep talking about your mad love for Hitler, you can’t complain if you get ostracized.

Even if Revolution Movement currently operates like a mafia or drug cartel in many ways, our objectives are the opposite: we assassinate drug lords and crooked sheriffs, we smuggle slaves to freedom, we distribute wealth from High Hats to the hatless like Robin Hood & Merry Men, and so on. We don’t collect protection money from locals.

Many peripheral members of the movement called us “masters”, but I’d like to think they used the word ironically rather than seriously. I called them out every time they treated me like a slavemaster or a High Hat (because that’s the socially responsible thing to do), but sometimes it sped things up considerably to take the Ghostbusters approach: when someone asks if you’re a god, you say yes.

---

We arrived at a T-intersection where the road turned sharply into the depths of Cursed Forest; the eastern sub-area of Black Forest where the environmental conditions were eternal autumn in the same way Winter Forest had eternal winter.

Two hooded figures stood at the edge of the forest holding lanterns. Guards and escorts from the orphanage school.

“Ah, they’re already here.” (Mirim)
“The students really like you.”
“Still, they don’t have to stand in attention like soldiers, I don’t like that.” (Mirim)

T-Sub stopped the car and flashed a signal with the vehicle's lights. The hooded figures answered by repeatedly closing the shutters of their storm lanterns.

These two were Koslem and Toppar, a pair of thugs known in the original lore as Road Giants. They were simple-minded bouncer-type characters who were a bit delusional about their importance as the watchmen of the north-south road snaking through Cursed Forest, but they were also fanatically loyal to Revolution Movement. When they first arrived to Loönois, I immediately placed them in their canonical roles.

“Cleared for takeoff. See you later, Mir-chan.”
“Later, big brother!” (Mirim)

Mirim hopped out of the car and waved her hand before following the two hooded figures in the fog.

Mirim’s character development during these past two years had been honestly surprising. In the original story she mostly kept quiet in the sidelines, but now she was a confident teacheress at the Cursed Forest orphanage school.

Maybe it was partly because I taught her what she is and what she will become, and partly because I gave her some important responsibilities from the get go, like the title Guardian of Doors in the Starfish Mansion. People need to feel they have a purpose and project to do as part of a community.

It probably also helps when the rest of the main crew are not violent drug addicts in this timeline, and she’s not a complete robot brain yet.

Mirim had turned from a quiet gunslinger girl meekly following orders into a skilled office lady type character.

I’m still worried about her every time she goes in the Black Forest, and not only because that’s where the bounty hunter ambush events triggered in the OG timeline. We already eliminated or hired most of the bounty hunters that roamed in these territories, and there were several delinquent groups and gang members patrolling all the roads and paths in the forest, and the twins patrolled the forest around the Spyglass Tower, promptly taking care of outsiders who got too curious… But yeah, I was worried about everyone and everything.

There were always unknown factors and random events.

As the self-titled community manager of Revolution Movement, it was basically my job to be worried.

I’m not naive. Or maybe I still am? I know this world is full of horrible things, but there are also things so horrible that you can’t show them in an anime or game; unspeakable horrors that make you want to run out with a flamethrower and burn every slavemonger who kidnaps children and sells them to High Hats. But at the same time I know that there are so many villains in this world that I need an army of full time hunters and assassins to kill all of them. And even if we manage to kill the ones who do horrible things today, new villains will pop up to take their place like mushrooms after rain.

We need multiple generations of educated anti-villains to keep the worldbuilding project going.

That’s where the orphanage school in the Cursed Forest steps in.

In the anime, Crys started the orphanage school to train street orphans as saboteurs (aka cannon fodder) for the Revolution Movement. The main canonical reason was that these young gangster-wannabes were reckless and easily manipulated to run suicide missions.

“In their ignorance, they think they are smart and powerful while their enemies are stupid and pathetic; they think they will live forever, attack enemies without care, and return home in twig coffins. They do not know how far behind they are because they cannot see the backs of those who run ahead. We allow them to keep their bravado, but cultivate their skills to the point where they can survive despite that gap.” (Crys' speech in the original anime)

Casual critics of the anime said that suddenly establishing an orphanage school out of nowhere was seriously out of character for the psychopathic protagonist group. But when you thought about it a bit more, there was a certain undercurrent of melancholic behind-the-scenes reasons: most of the main characters were orphans themselves, and survived horrible experiences. It wasn’t far-fetched to think that even during their darkest episodes of drug-addicted violence, they felt at least some sympathy for the street kids who were suffering through similar traumas; enslaved children sweating blood on the backstreets under violent slavemasters despite possessing nascent talents and rare skills to do something much greater.

Between episodes of bloody action and high drama, there surely were many days of sober words and kind gestures between the characters.

You just rarely saw those on-screen. People would've surely complained about a sudden genre-altering skip if the nihilistic antiheroes were actually nice to random strangers and laughed and had fun once.

The orphanage school project failed in the anime timeline for several reasons. The main characters got caught in the web of internal strife between Crystal Pencil’s "planning faction" and Rainwoman’s "action faction", so the orphans were left on their own without real training or supervision. They just played in the forest (with real knives and real guns, of course) and occasionally went out for random learn-by-doing missions to ambush Caliphate caravans, sabotage outposts and, yes, harass innocent civilians.

Now that I was here as a guide, the orphanage school was doing much better. The MC’s worked together with clear heads and I weeded out the worst psychos and troublemakers before they could join the team.

While Mirim was their main teacher in charge of essential knowledge and social development (essentially acting like a mother figure) and Cleaner-Goby occasionally educated them in the arts of espionage and sabotage (although mainly working as a house maintenance and security), I gave improvised lectures about all sort of topics: history, lore, geography, drawing, color theory, etc.

Most of these slightly troubled teenagers with talent and potential could be straightened out with education, or at least by giving them real options; a place to call their home and a group to call their family.

The old saying “child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel warmth” was literally true with one student named Palo – a teenage revolutionary who became a full-time pyromaniac during the fifth season of the anime and eventually self-immolated in the Sun Palace. In this timeline, he was a model student interested in airships, hot air balloons, parachutes and aerial bombardments.

Education is important. That’s how you change the world. That’s how you build a peaceful sovereign nation of smart and informed citizens.

At the very least, we should make sure that these teenagers don’t turn into medieval bandits who murder random people and cut their stomachs to check if they have gold in their bowels simply because they’ve heard a rumor that merchants swallow their gold when traveling between cities.

I had already collected most of the minor side characters I knew were trustworthy allies, so the current modus operandi was to scout for even more talents and approach orphans on the streets to ask if they want to use their skills for fun and profit. Sometimes we even arranged talent auditions in town taverns and village squares.

“Map Village, master?” (T-Sub)
“Sorry, I was high on nostalgia. What?”
“Are we going to Map Village next as planned?” (T-Sub)
“Let’s go. To the Map Base, Jeeves!”

If the game flashback scenes are reliable indicators, T-Sub also has a very active introspective presenter speaking inside his head.

For people like us, it’s strange to realize that other people don’t have a constant inner voice commentating everything, or their inner voice is much quieter and more abstract. It’s like suddenly realizing that your friend’s mind runs completely different operating system.

Over my long stay in this world, I’ve also come to the realization that my inner voice has become my streamer voice and stuck in permanent ON position.

“Hey, how do you really feel about the way I speak?”
“Master Speedrun?” (T-Sub)
“Tell me your honest thoughts. No offense taken. I declare Crocker’s Rules: give me full information without caring about my feelings.”
“Uhm... Master, I think your way of describing things is unique and detailed. It’s hard to understand, but I do not think it’s wrong. Rather, I think it’s me who is wrong.” (T-Sub)
”Yeah, I'm asking the wrong person... Well, crafting precise prompts is an essential skill in the modern world, but it’s hard to optimize for audiences so far beyond my memesphere without sounding like a pompous git. But thanks for being a bro, T-Bone.”

Keeping it surreal keeps me sane. Like poets who feel they must write to keep themselves stable, I must stream in my head to remind myself that I’m not a deranged person who was born in this world and is just imagining everything.

Slowly but surely, the rough beast rolled towards Map Base.