Chapter 253: IM NOT AN NPC!!!!!

"Am I real?" I asked myself.

My voice came out, lower and rougher than usual, which was fine, that was normal. The words themselves were less normal.

I turned my hands over, looking at the lines on the palm, the faint scar on the left thumb from a rope accident two years ago.

I pinched the skin on the back of my right hand and watched it settle back into place.

"While I was unconscious," I said, to nobody, to the ceiling, to the walls, "there was something warm. Holding me."

I could still feel the shape of it somehow— not a memory exactly, more like a physical impression left behind, the way a blanket left warmth on skin even after you removed it.

Somebody had been holding me while I was out. For a long time, from the feeling of it. "And damn. What the heck."

I paused.

"Why do I talk like this now," I said. "'What the heck.' That's not— I don't say 'what the heck.' Where did that come from."

I sat with this for a moment.

Then I stopped thinking about word choices, because there were other things in my head, and they were considerably more pressing than vocabulary shifts.

And… It's all this guy called Si Hon.

His name was Kim Si Hon.

I knew that the way I knew my… wait I mean 'his' name— complete, certain, sitting in my memory as if it had always been there.

Which, in a way, it had, except it hadn't been my memory an hour ago and now it was, and the line between what I'd always known and what I'd just absorbed was uncomfortably blurry.

Middle son of the richest man in Korea. Which— I didn't know what Korea was or is, exactly, I had no frame for the geography, but I had the feeling of it from his memories: a place with electricity and buildings that didn't float, roads that didn't move, a sky that only had one moon and so many weird and bad people.

That world. His world. A world where fathers accumulated money like a reflex and that money bought everything except the thing you actually needed from a parent, and 2 older sisters who's pretty but so abusive to him… and a brother who had gone very quiet at a young age and stayed that way.

He lived alone because the alternative was being near all of that.

He had found a kid once— I had the flash of it, brief but distinct, something small and in a place it shouldn't have been, and that event had bent the shape of his life in a direction he hadn't planned.

Small people in the wrong places seemed to find him. Or he found them. I'm not really sure if the problem keeps finding him or he is the one finding them. "Aigo…"

Wew… and wow… alright I should stop this… man, I didn't know it'll be this bad to copy a whole memory… this is my first time too.

Oh and then— the rest of it.

Another world. A system that didn't exist in his world that suddenly did. A trial. A comic book he'd read before he arrived here, someone's entire life printed in panels like a story, like a narrative, like a thing that had been written to be observed rather than lived.

People here who thought they were making their own choices but might be— might be—

I stood up.

Took a very deep breath.

Let it out slowly.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. So this is a trial. This whole— the water, the village, the creatures here, me— this is a region in a trial. And he's the person who's completing this with his switched personality Main character friend who can regress, and I'm—" I stopped. "What am I…

The answer was in the memories I'd copied, somewhere. I could feel it there, the shape of it, a word he'd thought and then tried not to think too hard about.

NPC.

A non-player character. Something that existed to populate a space, to provide information, to give the person who actually mattered something to interact with.

Created by the system.

Running on rules that looked like choices.

"I—" I looked at my hands again. The scar. The lines. The specific way my third finger sat slightly crooked because of the break that hadn't healed quite right when I was 15.

"I have a broken finger that I remember getting. I remember the pain of it. I remember my grandfather telling me I should be careful of using my power and I should choose who to use it carefully… and I think, I'm doing everything right—"

I stopped. Was that real? Had I actually had that experience, or had the system given me the memory of having it because characters needed histories to feel consistent?

"I have a mind," I said.

I was talking to myself, which I did when I was thinking, which was a habit, which meant it had happened enough times before to become a pattern, which meant there was a before.

"He can regress," I said. The word sat in my head in both its meanings simultaneously— the way he'd used it, the mechanics of it, the dying and resetting, the way the world rolled back and started over and the people in it had no idea it had happened.

"If he resets— if he dies and it starts over… I won't know. I'll be back to the beginning. Whatever I know right now, whatever I just—" I gestured at my own head. "None of this will exist. I'll just be here. Not knowing. Again."

The room was quiet.

"I need him," I said.

It came out more urgent than I'd intended. I heard the urgency in my own voice and it surprised me and I said it again, more specifically, because I needed to understand it: "I need him. He's the only one who can tell me. He's the only one who knows what I am and I need him to— I need him to not reset before I—"

Before what? Before I figured out what to do with this information? Before I convinced him of something? Before I worked out whether needing something from someone counted as evidence of being real?

I pressed both hands flat against the sides of my head.

"Okay," I said, quieter now. "Think. Think, Alex."

I looked at my hands again. The crooked finger. The rope scar.

"I'm not an NPC," I said, to the ceiling, to myself, to whatever system might be listening. "I have my own mind. NPCs don't argue with people who are trying to save them. NPCs don't blame things on karma. NPCs don't have 18 YEARS SELF MEMORY!" I stopped. "NPCs probably don't talk to themselves this much."

I sat back down on the edge of the bed.

Thought about the warmth. The holding. The hours of being carried through a storm in someone's arms while I was completely useless and unconscious, and the fact that he had stayed holding me in that cave anyway.

That was a real thing that had happened.

I was going to have a lot of questions.

And… I… am… SPIDER-MAN.