Connie stood next to her lovers, Lia, Rose, and Amelia, fidgeting nervously. “Sorry again.” She said. “I really don’t know what’s going on. I don’t think we’re in trouble, but…I don’t know why else we would be called here.”
“It’s fine.” Lia said, giving Connie a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “I’d imagine we’d have gotten a warning if we were actually in trouble.”
“You’re not.” Jerry said tersely, walking into the room. “Or, rather, not in any more trouble than the rest of us. Everyone is in trouble now.”
Connie studied his face carefully. She had seen that expression on him before, and he only got like that about one thing. “You can’t mean…”
“War.” Jerry replied. “Or, rather, the prelude to war. We have at least a couple of decades and potentially up to millennia. That is if we don’t act, however; our hope is to make the first move, and if we do, we’ll do it when we’re ready, which will likely be in a matter of decades to centuries. But make no mistake, there will be war, whether we want it or not.”
“How can you be so sure?” Connie asked worriedly. “Things were stable, last I heard.”
“Lilith was visited by the Elder Gods in a Dream.” Jerry said, pacing about the room. “They have some game going, and we are, unfortunately, all part of it. It seems that a champion from each faction has been chosen, and they are going to be given tools to ‘win’ the game. In our case, at least, our victory condition is to survive. Theoretically, we could attempt to broker peace once the war begins, but…”
“The other factions won’t accept, right?” Connie finished.
“Exactly. We were told that they had ‘seeded Lilith’s circle of influence with all the tools she will need to succeed’, so we need to start leveraging those, now.”
A chill ran down Connie’s spine as she realized what he was implying. “Then the manipulation we theorized had happened…”
“Was almost certainly the Elder Gods.” Jerry confirmed.
There was a brief lull in the conversation, then Lia spoke up. “Um…sorry, I’m a little lost right now.” She said. “What’s going on? Why are the three of us here?”
Jerry turned to face Lia, expression indicating that he had forgotten she was there. “Right, right.” He said. “Sorry, I’m more than a little out of sorts right now. To put it simply, I belong to one of three major factions of Administrators. Beings beyond our comprehension have tampered with recent events, leading to…well, for one, Amelia.”
Lia’s eyes widened. “Wait, I thought that was an accident?”
“Sort of.” Jerry replied. “It is overwhelmingly likely that I was manipulated into making the mistake that allowed for the break in the system that led to Amelia, and then probability was altered so that she was the one who benefited.”
“That…would explain a few things.” Rose said thoughtfully. “I did start to get the feeling that there were a few too many coincidences for everything to be totally…normal.”
Jerry nodded. “As did I. But, back on subject, it is almost certain that the other factions have received or will receive similar tampering, and that’s going to break the tenuous balance of power and plunge us all into war again. So…we need to prepare.”
“And that involves us how?” Amelia said, narrowing her eyes. “My deals with you didn’t have anything to do with this.”
Jerry sighed. “It involves every single person living in almost every plane.” He said. “The wars you’re used to are no more than a light breeze compared to the raging tempest that the last war was. Entire universes were massacred or enslaved, and no one was safe from the devastation. As much as we might try to run, the war will come to us, and we must see to it that we’re prepared.”
He snapped his finger, and Amelia and Rose fell to their feet, breathing heavily. “Effective immediately, there are no more bindings.” He said. “Connie, you and any other god who support the swarm are free to meddle as much as you like, no restrictions on benefits you give. Your opponents will be given somewhat more of an ability to meddle, but only to the point where it is not a free victory for the swarm; I wish to train them, not annihilate them.”
Connie wasn’t given an opportunity to process that, though, as Jerry turned to her. “Connie, take them back, and make preparations for them to be gone for three days.” He instructed. “In one hour, return them here; I’m going to make them Higher Beings.”
“Wait,” Amelia wheezed, stumbling to her feet. “What’s a Higher Being? Don’t we get a say in this?”
“Higher Beings are the broad category of people that the gods fall under.” Jerry said. “Being a god is a more akin to a profession than an innate quality of a person; it is just a tool Administrators use to help mask what is happening behind the scenes. What Lia and Rose do with Blood Money and what Amelia does with Worship already put you at that level, I am simply making the process more efficient, among other benefits that will be explained later.
“For Lia and Rose, there will be no additional obligations for the time being. After the war is over and the dust has settled, we may end up revisiting that, but it is likely that your obligations will be to simply watch over the swarm. For Amelia, I’m afraid our current arrangement will need to change. You will be required to spend twenty hours a week helping out Lilith, done in four-hour chunks on Monday through Friday. We will work out an exact schedule that will be followed each week, so you will need to begin planning around your absence.”
“I –” Amelia began to speak, but Jerry waved a hand, and she was silenced.
“Lilith is going to be designing a new system using the advancements you made, and any unique properties she can imbue via her eldritch nature.” Jerry explained. “I will, of course, be helping, but your assistance will be critical; if this experiment succeeds, we can begin the process of updating all systems to follow suit, and our chances of survival will increase dramatically.
“Due to the immense importance of this task, you will have no choice in the matter. Should you resist or otherwise attempt to sabotage the process, I will put you in a coma and use mind-reading to extract the relevant information. It would be less than ideal, but I cannot understate how important this is. If it helps, look at it as a learning opportunity; you will be exposed to many new concepts that you will be able to use to improve the swarm, it won’t be something you gain no benefit from.”
He gave her a look before waving his hand again. “With Rose being unbound, the three of you made into Higher Beings, and the rest of the gods free to provide as much aid as they want, you don’t need to worry over the swarm’s wellbeing while you are away. Higher Beings cannot be permanently killed save by other Higher Beings or Administrators, and I will not let the gods do so, so your ultimate success is all but guaranteed. Do you understand?”
Amelia was silent for a moment, then clicked her tongue in annoyance. “Yes.” She said grumpily.
“Good.” Jerry said, turning to walk out of the room. “Connie, please, take them away.”
As he left, Connie gave her lovers an apologetic look. “Sorry.” She said. “I’m pretty sure he has PTSD over the last war, and he always gets like this when it’s brought up. But…he’s right; we’re in serious danger, and we can’t afford to waste any time right now. So, let’s get this done; the sooner we finish here, the sooner we can go back to our conquest.”
----------------------------------------
Amy was torn away from her work by the sound of a knock at her door. “Come in!” She called out.
The door opened, and Tess walked in. “Hey Amy, you wanted to talk to me?”
“Yes.” Amy said, dismissing the window she had been using to message the other Administrators. “Can you sleep here tonight?”
Tess raised an eyebrow. “Sure. Why?”
Amy sighed. “I need to take a very long look at Monster Breeder.” She explained. “I’ll explain more in a general assembly tomorrow, but the long of the short of it is that Lilith was visited by the Elder Gods in a Dream, and some of the things they mentioned gave me cause to look over Monster Breeder again.”
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“I’m not…in danger, right?” Tess asked cautiously.
“Nothing of the sort!” Amy said quickly. “Look…you remember about a decade ago when I told you that your mom’s Blessing shouldn’t have worked to give you Monster Breeder?”
“That sounds familiar, yeah.”
“Well, the Elder Gods have been meddling and setting up a series of improbable events, and I think you’re one of them. And, because of that, I think there’s more to Monster Breeder that we were physically incapable of noticing before. You and I both know that it’s way stronger than it should be, but I think there’s even more to it.”
“I…see.” Tess said slowly. “Should I just sleep in my room, or would you rather I sleep in one of the examination rooms?”
“If you could, the examination room would be great.” Amy said. “I can have Dreams put you to sleep if it would make it easier for you.”
“That would be great.” Tess replied. “Give me a minute to let the wives know, and then I’ll head over.”
“Thanks a bunch, Tess.” Amy said, giving her a nervous sort of smile. “I know this is rather sudden.”
“I’m sure it’s just as important.” Tess said reassuringly. “I’ll have Dreams send you a message when I’m ready for you.”
Tess stepped out of the room, and Amy pulled up the window again. She had contacted roughly forty of the hundred or so Administrators in her faction, and none of them had had any improbably occurrences that they could think of off of the top of their head, but they all told her they’d look into it and get back to her.
As she talked with each of them, she informed them that she would be holding a faction-wide meeting in one month, and made it clear that failure to attend without an incredibly good reason would be met with expulsion from the faction. The threat was something she didn’t like having to make, but she needed to make it clear just how important this meeting was, and she was confident that she wouldn’t have to follow up; each Administrator in her faction had been handpicked for their trustworthiness and integrity, and she was sure they’d understand the gravity of the situation.
A few minutes later, she received a message from Dreams indicating that Tess was asleep. She hadn’t expected Tess to go to sleep right away, but that was fine; bulk-messaging people like this was tedious work, and she could use a break. So, she dismissed the various windows she had open, and began making her way towards the examination room she had in the small plane she and the gods lived in.
As promised, Tess was asleep on the large table in the middle of the room, Dreams hovering close by. “I’ll get out of your hair.” Dreams said, moving towards the door. “She’ll…be okay, right?”
“She’s safe.” Amy confirmed. “I’m…ninety five percent sure, anyway, but I doubt it would be anything harmful. I’ll explain more tomorrow, when I know more.”
Dreams nodded, then left the room. Once he was gone, Amy dragged one of the stools over to Tess’s side and opened up her admin console, navigating to Monster Breeder, and beginning to take a close look at its construction.
And, the more she looked, the more puzzled she became. The Class was…exactly as she remembered it being. She had had to do a lot of modification with it in order to get it to work right, and especially to get Descent to work right, but…
Amy frowned. She had entirely forgotten that Descent didn’t work right at first. It put Fortune at risk of becoming subservient to Tess, and after a while she had managed to tinker enough with the class to get it to just reinforce familial love instead of a master-servant relationship, but…that shouldn’t have been necessary at all.
At the time, everyone had just waved it off as being because Monster Breeder was made with Amy’s Worship, but that wasn’t necessarily even the case. As part of the transition to being a Higher Being, Monster Breeder had been folded into Tess’s Domain, the thing she was “in charge of” and received Worship for. As such, the Worship within had effectively been converted to Tess’s, and yet…it still exhibited that mind-altering effect on Fortune.
That shouldn’t have been possible. And…even stranger, looking at the amount of Worship contained within the Class, even if Amy’s Worship had been used, it shouldn’t have affected Fortune, not with a passive effect like it exhibited. That could only mean that something within the Class was amplifying the power of the Worship contained within, or something else entirely was happening.
Amy turned the focus of her search to that particular loyalty effect, but…nothing unexpected was there. So, if it wasn’t contained there…the next step was to look at the other parts of the Class that interacted with that loyalty effect.
She spent just over an hour going through the Class in that fashion, meticulously checking a portion of the Class before moving on to the parts of the Class that touched that part. Even so, she didn’t find anything. She had checked every inch of the Class, and as far as the system was concerned, it should be doing what it was supposed to.
At that last thought, she froze; as far as the system was concerned, it was normal…but the system likely wasn’t the source of the anomaly, was it? Amy hopped off the stool, stretched for a moment, then locked the doors to the room, conjuring a sign that read “Do not disturb unless we are literally under attack or there is an extremely important, time-sensitive matter” on the outside.
She set all the rest of her notifications to a do not disturb mode, then made her way back to the stool. She pulled it over to a counter to the side of the room, used a bit of Worship to conjure up a mouse, and then got to work metaphorically poking at the mouse. She hadn’t done anything entirely without the aid of any sort of system in a long time, so she wanted to give herself a quick refresher before going back to work on Tess.
It was slow at first, but she quickly began to pick up speed. Before Jerry had invented systems, everything had been done like this, and Amy had been one of the best at it. She didn’t regret the switch of methodology for a second, though; using a system was far easier and quicker, much like how using a calculator was far easier and quicker than multiplying two large numbers by hand. And, in all of her millennia of using systems, this was perhaps the only time she had had to inspect part of the system unaided.
After she was satisfied with her skill, she teleported the mouse down to a random field in one of her planes, then brought the stool back to Tess. She took a deep breath, then began to dig deep, looking past all the trappings of the system and trying to drill down into the core of what was happening.
It was hard. Everything the system had done was so interconnected that it was nearly impossible to tell where one thing ended and another began, but fortunately she had a clear target; she just needed to find the areas most saturated with Worship, and begin looking there.
After a bit, she found Monster Breeder, and it immediately became evident what was happening. Right below where the system interfaced with Tess’s soul, there was a very obvious foreign presence, adding to what the system gave to Tess. It was…kind of like Worship, but…not. She’d have to have Jerry come take a look at it at some point; he’d probably know better than her what to make of it.
But Jerry was busy, so Amy put up all of her mental defenses, then prodded at the foreign power. To her surprise, there was no resistance whatsoever. In fact, once she poked at it, the power sort of…unfurled, and its workings became clear. She didn’t have any idea what each individual pathway of power was for, or how she would even begin to reproduce it, but she nonetheless instantly understood what it did. It was sort of as if she had opened a book in a language she didn’t speak, yet somehow knew what it said anyway.
It was a fascinating sensation, but ultimately irrelevant. She ignored the knowledge that was forced onto her and tried to manually derive the function of the stuff, but she gave up after a short time; it was dizzyingly complex work, and completely and totally unlike anything she had ever seen. She couldn’t even begin to comprehend it, so she sighed and withdrew from Tess’s soul, left with no recourse but to trust the knowledge that had been given to her. Once out she was fully out of Tess’s soul, she took a moment to use the system to undo the sleeping spell that had been cast on her, then gently shook her awake.
“Done already?” Tess mumbled, blinking a couple of times as she woke. “That didn’t feel too long.”
“It was…” Amy paused, pulling up a window to check to the time. To her surprise, she had been manually doing work on Tess’s soul for over two hours, even though it really didn’t feel like it had been that long. “Three and a half hours in total. A bit shorter than expected, but I have an idea of what’s going on.”
“So, something is out of the ordinary with me?” Tess asked, sitting up.
Amy nodded. “It appears the Elder Gods changed how Monster Breeder works for you, and hid it outside the system so it was hard to see. I couldn’t manually figure out what any of it did, but I had this strange understanding pressed onto me. I don’t currently have any reason to think it’s a lie other than the general fickleness of the Elder Gods, so take this info with a grain of salt, okay?”
“Is this a recent change, you think?” Tess asked.
Amy shook her head. “No. It’s been this way for a long time, at least since you became an Appointed, but probably from the moment you got the Class.”
“And it’s safe, right?”
Amy sighed. “For you, yes. In fact, you’ve been using parts of this for quite a while. The effect is simple; if you kill a Higher Being or Administrator, they are absorbed into you as a core instead of being put into that weird stasis dead Higher Beings normally enter. There’s basically a copy of Monster Breeder for all this stuff, so it won’t use any of the slots for normal cores and abilities, but you can directly put stuff you obtain from these cores onto normal cores and vice-versa. And…yes, you can make attendants out of these cores or do anything else you can do to a core.”
Tess’s eyes widened. “What happens to their soul?!” She exclaimed.
“It comes with them, and is stored as an Attribute, as is their status as Higher Being or Administrator.” Amy said. “All of their Worship is transferred to you as well.”
Tess was silent for a long moment. “And I’ve been using parts of this? How?”
“Descent. It’s why you can Descend for as long as you want; you already have a ton of room in you for extra souls, but it starts to apply the effects of Monster Breeder to Fortune. We’re lucky it accepted the modification I made and let us alter how it changes her view.”
“But…Fortune was stuck in me after the first Descent.” Tess said. “We had to make a workaround for her and everything.”
“It seems to be a side-effect of the process.” Amy said. “None of this feature was supposed to be visible to any of us until now, but it was still working in the background. I imagine that, next time you go into Descent, you’ll be able to use it ‘normally’. I don’t think I need to say this, but don’t alter Fortune without my permission first, even if she asks for it.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Tess said. “Um…do you need me for anything else?”
Amy shook her head. “No. Go get some actual rest, I’ll figure out what this means and explain more at the meeting tomorrow, okay?”
Tess nodded, then climbed off the table. “I’ll just sleep in my room here for the rest of tonight.” She said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“See you tomorrow.”