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[>>Now replaying: Log 1.29 - Equitable Bereavement Guidelines]

Date: 8.9.175 AA / 4404 LTC

Location: The Bunker at Haven-Of-Progress // Zephyro’s Domain

//Death casts its shadow uniquely upon us all. Every employee wanders through their own labyrinth of grief, each with their own pace and distinct needs upon reentering the realm of work. The mourning must navigate the solemn ceremonies of remembrance—are often deeply entangled in the planning of rites when the departed was near. This journey may extend well beyond the customary three to seven days typically allotted for bereavement leave. In the face of such umbral calamity, how can HR establish bereavement leave policies that are both fair and encompassing this vast chasm of despair?//

[>>DATA CORRUPTED]

E1 %Ah! Look, it did it again! Let’s do it!%

E2 %Or I could smack it, just to be sure.%

E1 %How can you even think about breaking something that important?%

E2 %We literally found it in a temple of the Witch Queen!%

E1 %Alright… Tin, you are the tiebreaker.%

E3 %I want to see what it does. I say we try a shackle.%

E2 %Oh for the love of the Lords… Fine! And wipe that smug grin off your face, Voni.%

The spider exploded into a shower of bright blue sparks that hung in the air. Before they could even twitch toward the other spider, I flung my arms to each side and inhaled as hard as I could. A stream of blue rushed into me.

{INCOMING LOGIC - 5 LB}

{AVAILABLE LOGIC - 27 LB}

{All hail.}

I coughed because along with it, I’d gotten a lung full of smoke and ash. The other spider had shaken off its dizziness and gotten back to its feet.

It detected my weakness and shot a stream of something sticky at my free hand, then pulled. I stumbled and fell, barely managing to roll to absorb the momentum. Fuck, I need an even better CPU. That would have never happened in real life.

I grabbed at the web still attached to my hand, trying to remove it, but it clung to my skin like super glue. As I fought with it, it suddenly crackled with red energy. Pain lanced through my hand, shooting through my skin, muscles, and bones, scouring through my body until it found my heart.

When it did, the sensation changed from mere pain to agony.

{DATA TRANSFER TO TSTR0110942: 0.00000000001%}

I screamed.

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My very being was ground from my soul with a belt sander.

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It wasn’t just physical pain.

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I watched memories I had cherished for decades simply disappear.

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I wanted it to stop. I think I even begged.

{DATA TRANSFER TO TSTR0110942: 0.00000000032%}

The pain swelled. Dominated every thought.

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I was ready to do anything to just make it stop, when the pain faded faded with the suddenness of a circuit breaker firing. As my vision went from stark white back to normal, the world materialized back into blurry shapes. I blinked. My face felt wet, too. I rubbed at it, and my hand came away red and slimy.

{DATA TRANSFER TO TSTR0110942: ABORTED}

“Fuck,” I whispered. What just happened?

A spider hissed in response.

I screamed again, anguished and terrified and endlessly angry, and rolled to my feet. Zephyro stood in front of me, swinging wildly to keep the last spider back.

The other one, the one who had attached itself to my hand, lay dead on the side. It was completely covered by hundreds of sparks of Logic, but that didn’t draw my eyes as much as its size.

It was easily five times as big as before, and hideously misshapen. I counted at least 26 eyes placed all over its surface, and dozens of additional legs sticking out in every direction. Where Zephyro had struck it, a massive wound had been cleft into its half-metal-half-carapace body, leaking green ichor.

It seemed it literally had grown until Zephyro’s half-blind swings couldn’t miss it anymore.

As I watched, the cloud of sparks began hovering toward the remaining spider. It skittered closer, eager to feast on… on my memories. Oh god, it would take them and—

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

“Like fuck you will,” I screamed. I missed a step, almost fell, startled by the force of my own words, roaring with anguish. My throat hurt. Everything hurt, everything was just too much. The beast had taken my fucking memories. They were mine. Mine! It is my Wish! My Soul! Get away from it! Get away from me. Oh god, get away from me, please…

My insides churned with emotions, barely contained. These feelings, despair, fury, and things way worse, thickened in my lungs until I could no longer breathe. The sounds, the smells, the sight of another spider, chirping and spitting, Zephyro holding the Feral at bay and yelling at me, that high-pitched sound in my ears, the heat on my skin as another building exploded, my memories being pulled into the fucking spider, there was so much going on and I couldn’t watch everything and I had no idea how to—

I was choking on air. Frantically, I reached for something, anything to help me keep it together.

So when the rage came again, so very familiar, offering the promise of security, I begged it to take over.

My jaw set, my shoulders tensed, my vision cleared. I faced the Logic and willed it to come to me. It resisted, as if torn between the Feral’s will and my own, but when I spread my arms, the cloud of blue obeyed and came rushing in.

{RETRIEVING DATA FROM TSTR0110942}

{UNABLE TO RETRIEVE DATA: 0.00000000001%}

{INCOMING LOGIC - 205 LB}

{AVAILABLE LOGIC - 232 LB}

The missing memories itched, like scabbed-over skin. A quiet part in the back of my mind couldn't stop picking at them, trying to remember what exactly I had lost. My main focus however kept on target with white-hot fury. I was going to make them pay. Make them all pay.

With a scream, I shouldered past Zephyro. The spider tensed, ready to jump. I didn’t give it the chance. I abandoned everything I had ever learned and pounced on it with reckless fury.

Its hairy carapace dug into my flesh where my robes did not protect me, and fuck, the hair MOVED, and it was disgusting and vile and I just kept slamming the mace onto its form, Torch trailing dark streaks of green-blue flame that erupted into puffs of teal whenever I hit the damn thing and someone grabbed me by the shoulder, pulling me back and I spun, snarling, raised my Torch and—

“Peace, Sultana. Peace! It is dead!”

{INCOMING LOGIC - 5 LB}

{AVAILABLE LOGIC - 237 LB}

Frantically, I turned back to face the spider, but it was no longer there. Just a blackened mass of crumpled chitin and ruptured organs. My entire body tingled with unspent rage. I screamed an amalgamation of sounds that didn’t even make sense to me, fell to my knees, and just kept pounding on the charred, broken mass until I could no longer lift the Torch. The weapon clattered to the floor beside me.

Panting, I watched as teal flames licked the stone.

{Core Temp: 83° C}

My breath came raggedly and sweat dripped from my forehead. A bead formed on my nose and fell, mixing with the blood and guts. I tried to wipe it away, but my arms were just too heavy.

“FUCK!” I yelled. It echoed over the rooftops and the alleys and out into the dissolving desert. It was all happening again. Everything was happening again exactly like before, after the plane crash and the fucking Angel and the goddamn Wish.

Who knew how much time had passed in the real world? Who cared? It had been enough years for nothing I had built to remain. Everything was lost and I had to build everything again. Except for some things, there was no rebuilding. All the loss and pain and anguish, all the learning and experiences, the time shared with friends, the laughter and the tears, it was all for nothing.

And it would never come back.

“Fuck,” I said, so quiet it got lost in the roar of the flames.

“I have failed you, Sultana,” a voice said next to me.

I didn’t reply. The anger still pulsed in my veins, keeping me safe from everything, urging me to push Zephyro away, telling me he would fail, or worse, betray me, just like—

“Do you know what my name means, Sultana?” he asked. I noticed he still had his hand on my shoulder. It was annoyingly comforting.

“I don’t know,” I said, wiping my face again to clear the blood away. It didn’t really work. I just smeared it around.

Instead of saying I didn’t care either, I said “Chris made up some bullshit with numbers they learned from some history book I read as a kid.”

“It is a play of words on the number zero, yes. In the language of my people, that is safira, or sifir. But it does not just mean zero, it also means null, and void. In the language of the ancients, it meant “nothingness”, darkness so vast and empty nothing can exist in it.”

“You don’t have ancients, Zephyro,” I said, too exhausted, and still too angry for niceties. “You’re a computer program that I pumped a massive amount of divine energy into.”

He laughed. He actually laughed. I turned, taken off-guard. I had barely even seen the man smile before, and now he was laughing?

Laughing. While I was slogging through the dirt, trying to reclaim scraps of my former life so I could start over. Was he insane? What was he thinking?

> It is all too much. Just yesterday we lost Underbrook, too, and now Olre is directly contradicting my orders. Patti’s next to me, holding my hand, trying to talk some sense into me, and I am desperate for her to succeed.

> “Yes, Sam. What is he thinking? What do you not yet understand? What would you do if you understood?”

Fuck! I tried gritting my teeth, but the gesture felt empty, the rage forced and stale. Fuck that nagging little voice and the person behind it. It made staying angry so goddamn hard all the time. And if I stopped being angry…

Zephyro’s laughter ended eventually, but the smile stayed on his lips. “Indeed, Sultana, I am a program! We all are. Which is why my name is so fitting. We all came from you, and to you we will return. It is Kismet.”

“Sounds fatalistic,” I said. “And it sounds like more responsibilities I don’t need. Look at me. I’m a mess! I can’t even handle my own life, so how am I supposed to handle hundreds of others?”

Yes, it was petty and childish to say. But I was so tired and so angry.

At least that was my excuse. It didn’t make the shame hurt less.

Zephyro nodded gently, as if my exhaustion relayed my apology.

“Do not misunderstand me, Sultana. We are not your responsibility, not your subjects. At least not yet. And even then, you are not some savior whose benevolent presence will solve all our issues. We are a free and proud people, and everything we have, we made ourselves. It is our desire to share this with you, to invite you to live among us because we believe it will be good for this city. What we do, we do not for you, but for what you represent.”

With a tilt of his head, he indicated the Torch lying next to me. The handle and cage were covered in ichor and giblets. It still burned, teal flame charring the bright stone rooftop.

“That’s what I represent?” I scoffed, looking at my weapon with disgust. “Blood, fire, and pain?”

“Progress,” Zephyro corrected me. He was looking at the Torch, too, but with hope in his eyes.

Beyond our rooftop battlefield, the city was burning to ash. I watched a blazing minaret tumble across a street, smashing a beautiful house and cleaving it in two. Bright flames erupted from the wreckage, spreading onto neighboring buildings in a matter of seconds.

“Not seeing it,” I said, quietly.

As Zephyro followed my gaze, a sad smile crept over his lips. “This isn’t about this city, Sultana. Progress is more than stacking bricks and smelting steel. Consider progress as an idea, not as a material thing, and it becomes a promise.

“Progress is the idea that while the-darkness-that-ends-all-things is inevitable for us, it might not be for someone else, sometime later. The idea that if we push and toil, those who come after us might be just a little better off than before. It means our sacrifice today might mean a chance for your tomorrow.”

Hot winds buffeted us, filling the silence with embers and the low roar of fire.

“That isn’t the only definition of progress,” I said.

I’d had a lot of time to think about this stuff, on the small island Chris and I retreated to after the fuckup in Wexler.

“And there’s always a price,” I finished.

“Indeed, Sultana. But as a people, this meaning is the one we chose, just as we chose the price we would pay. We are protectors, stewards, guardians, settlers, forerunners. All my people do, they do to shepherd someone else’s chance to forge even further ahead. We understand that the future holds wonder for those who sow the seed of curiosity today, and so we hold on to our definition of Progress and strive to make today a little better than yesterday, no matter how much pain it might cause us.”

“Pain…” I started, and Zephyro finished with me, nodding: “…is the price of progress.”

{Core Temp: 77° C}

I was still exhausted, didn’t know what to do about any of my problems, and the conversation was still running circles in my head, but I got up and dusted off my knees. Bending at the waist and grabbing the Torch, I flicked a switch on the hilt, quenching the fire.

As I looked for a good place to sheathe my Torch, I absentmindedly rubbed at my hand.

“What happened there, with the spider?” I asked. “Felt like it was pulling my soul through the pores of my skin.”

Zephyro got to his feet as well, chainmail clinking. “The Feral feasted on your pure Essence, drew it out of you to assimilate it into itself, Sultana. Fortunately, it was weak and had a bad… how should I say this… network connection, so not much harm was done and you could recover most of what was stolen.”

Eventually, I gave up on trying to wrap the bulky weapon in my robes and slipped the handle through my belt. The spiked iron cage dug uncomfortably into my side, but it stayed in place.

Good enough.

“Gotta move on,” I said.