The king wanted his kingdom back. Now I pulled him out the day before it died, but he knew the score. His was a dying kingdom, and he wanted everything the way it should be. The way it always should have been. He wanted… no… let’s be honest here… he DEMANDED that everything be made right. With all the forcefulness of a king fighting for his people. And I could not fault him for that. Not one bit. I saw the spark of life in him at that moment. He was so close to waking up on the spot, and I actually felt a bit of trepidation. He would have his people safe and strong, whatever the cost to him. He had made that same choice in the game, but he had been dealt a losing hand. Today he saw a winning hand and he was not going to fold.
I do hope you guessed that the prince wanted me to pull the king. Cause he did. So me and Red modeled the king. And his bodyguards. The time comes and we pull them all. Bring in the prince, the princess, and other assorted individuals, and I’m running a fairly major crowd. We bring them all together on a mostly-faithful recreation of a gas station owned by one of his bodyguards, rendered with hardlight holographic projectors on the edge of my family property for extra realism. My dad suggested the lakeshore around the corner and behind enough trees to hide it from our home. The king spent a few minutes talking to his son and the princess, looked around at the world around us all, and recognized the possibilities. Guess what? He had wishes.
I pulled a princess from a game, who promptly told me she wanted her prince. And once my appointed work was done, they went on a boat ride on my lake together. They discussed things with each other, and studied the real world and how their hardlight avatars interacted with it. I think they were bouncing off the edges of true self-awareness at the time, because they really groked it all. They understood what it all meant. Everyone they had lost. Everything they knew would have been lost in the game they came from. They knew that the world I lived in was better than their world. We could give them everything their world denied them. And the prince wanted to make things right. He had unfinished business with the king. Can you guess the first thing he wanted?
So I saved the princess in her moment of awesome as she saved her prince. She commanded me to save her prince next. So me and Red went off to model his character. Now the more we worked at it, the more we realized that he was too closely interlinked with his bodyguards to really be able to do it alone. They’d grown up together, so we had to model them as well. When we were done, we pulled them all at once, dropped them and the princess on a hardlight-recreation of his motorboat, and sent them out on a cruise of my nice little lake. Perfect pull. Ready for the happily ever after and all that jazz. The princess promised to explain things and Red agreed, so I let them go off and enjoy their day. Things got complicated when they came back.
The key thing to understand is that me and Red spent a lot of time modeling the princess before we pulled her out. We gave her a good childhood, a stable character base, and everything it would take to make her good. She was a princess. It didn’t matter that she was an AI that had been in the real world for less than ten minutes. When a princess looked at me and said, “I want my prince” I really only had two words for her. They were rather reflexive on my part. “Yes, Ma’am.” I hadn’t planned on it, but her wish was my command, and I did my part to make it happen. It’s kinda funny what a well-developed character can make a man do. Especially when she is a pretty girl.