Chereads / Spirit Eater [Dropped] / Chapter 97 - Turn-Of-The-Millenium Headaches Return

Chapter 97 - Turn-Of-The-Millenium Headaches Return

Knowing he was about to get a severe headache from the amount of information he'd need to process and badly translate to use this system properly, Luca sighed and rolled his arms, cracked his knuckles, wiggled his fingers and prepared to type. As the display had closed, Luca first had to locate a screen button somewhere on the desk. Thankfully, it didn't take too long before it was located and pressed, opening up what Luca could only interpret as a Windows XP home screen, only without the taskbar or desktop icons. "Oh, holy shit... Just when I'd thought I'd escaped outdated computer systems..." The Dragonborn lad groaned as he understood that all of his more recent knowledge of computer systems had become worthless. Thankfully, most of his youth in his first life was spent learning Windows XP, so at least he had that going for him.

As there was no mouse, everything had to be done manually by keyboard, or typewriter in this case. On the bright side, the boy did locate a function key that worked like the Windows key beside the screen button on the desk. Using that, he opened the 'run' command and typed in 'appwiz.cpl'. This opened up the Add/Remove Programs part of the Control Panel, which Luca would use to check what things the system had installed. He then immediately regretted this as the list was so long he couldn't even count them. After exiting that particularly bad choice of program, he used the function key together with the E key, which opened up the equivalent of the 'This PC' folder (i.e. the C Drive). With some luck and a handful of necessary backtracks, he eventually located what he was looking for: a world map of Andor. With a click of the Enter key, the program was opened just as the display closed. Towards the northern side of the control centre, a 3x3 square of tiles began to switch around.

Initially, Halad was both furious and startled, [What in the name of Andor are you doing!?] As it had been focused on assisting Arthur with communications, it hadn't been monitoring the control centre completely. After going back over the control centre's system log, it discovered that Luca had not done anything dangerous at all. In fact, it appeared that he at least had some understanding of how it worked. As such, it mellowed out as it saw that Luca had managed to pull up the world map station, all without any assistance. [No wonder the High Priestess and the two Chief Deities, fools that they are, viewed you as the hope of Andor... Don't do anything stupid, kid. I'd rather not have to fix the system.] It then floated back over to continue helping Arthur, who was briefly as stunned as Halad was.

Luca made his way over as a circular solid desk rose and locked into place. A hologram briefly showed static before taking the form of an enormous spherical shape. As Luca had expected despite the game only revealing the continent itself and nothing outside of it, the Atlas Pillar contained a fully mapped display of the entire plane, which really should be called a planet due to being just that, a planet. Aside from the continent, which was confusingly named the Andor Continent and would require renaming later (since it wasn't important), the planet was roughly half the size of the Solar System's Neptune. The continent itself was enormous but was minuscule in comparison to the great ocean surrounding it. In fact, in comparison to Earth's 7/3 water-to-land ratio, Planet Andor was 8/2. This included the regions of land that had once been part of the continent and had been relocated, such as the locations of Yggdrasil and the true location of the Ancient Elf Empire, and other isles scattered throughout the great ocean. The map, however, did not include the hidden places, as they were very masterfully concealed.

Luca, on a hunch, attempted to control the map using hand gestures, as there were no controls and used the old touch-screen gesture for zooming in. Thankfully, he was correct in his guess, as the hologram zoomed in on a location around where his fingers had been aimed. Inferring that it was monitoring his body, in particular his eyes and hands, he used his actions to make it zoom in on Cyelume. He then zoomed again until it took a three-dimensional ground-view map complete with topography. Due to the immense amount of data, he opted to have it take simple models and textures rather than detailed ones, making the hologram load much faster. Once again, he focused in on the Crystal Palace, or the Eye of Selene above it in particular. His curiosity got the better of him as he tried to gesture for the hologram to 'open up' the orb. Surprisingly, it worked, taking the top parts of the frame and revealing the interior.

At the moment, it only showed the construction design, not anything else inside it. It didn't even include the silver liquid at the bottom of the Eye. Luca then reinstated the detail functions now that the scale was reduced significantly, and added the internal scanning function. The same beautiful colours that Luca had seen in person, along with their exquisite designs, appeared in the hologram, complete with the lighting effects. When the hologram fully finished updating with the new additional selections, Luca was able to view the current situation within the Eye of Selene, with some minor exceptions. In particular, as the silver liquid was a part of a divine power, lunar power to be exact, it couldn't be viewed clearly. Instead, it was only visible as a 'missing texture' piece in purple.

What could be seen more clearly, though not in perfect clarity, was Norani, who was currently seated in meditation on a mat on the other end from where Luca had first met her. However, when Luca's gaze turned towards her, her eyes opened in a squint as she looked around. With a brief moment of focus, she used her Pseudo-Sage powers to form a sort of camouflage around herself, distorting her image in the hologram until it disappeared entirely.

Luca did not find that surprising. It would be weird of such a powerful being to not notice someone observing them.