In a vast, empty room with walls nearly as dark as the void between the stars, a small male humanoid floated in the middle, gazing upon several System screens as information filtered through them. Occasionally, he would gesture or speak, making inputs and other commands into the backbone of the System. Overhead, through a seamless glass dome, lay the world, Ager.

The man was reclined upon nothing. He wore blue mage’s robes that would have been in fashion three millennia before. His long wavy black hair was tied back in a ponytail, and a light stubble ran across his fairly well defined chin, which he occasionally scratched in deep thought.

He would have appeared nearly [Human], but for the whites of his eyes, which were the shade and tone of blue commonly used by the System itself.

Suddenly, a male [Halfling] popped into existence just a few paces away.

“Adonite,” the mysterious floating man stated disinterestedly and without turning away from his screen. “I see that you changed back to a [Halfling] form.”

“Well, yes, I just got that message off to our intrepid duo via one of my [Clerics]. Needed to use a [Brillian] due to the location and timing, so had to change over.”

“And yet here you are again. Did we not just depart from one another a mere day ago?”

“It was a week. You know that.”

“That I do. But, a week, a day, what does it matter?” he continued to speak towards his screens.

“Little, except that I am here to collect. This is the second time I’ve intervened for you on behalf of these two. And I’ve started putting some things together and I’m not happy with it. So it’s best that you start explaining yourself.”

For the first time, the floating man turned his head away from the screen. He gazed at Adonite for several long seconds, before sighing, “Very well,” and with a casual flick of his wrists, the screens winked out and he assumed a cross-legged position, albeit still floating. “Where would you like me to begin?”

“I think you can begin with the subterfuge behind the System Quest and the contents of the letter. How the [Eldritch]-damned do they know divine magic?”

“You know already that I’ve been… grooming the pair for quite a while, yes?”

“Yes, this open conspiracy of ours.”

“A contradiction, but I digress. In the course of planning out their growth, I decided that they needed to learn how to defend against divine magic. Of course, how to do that without attracting the attention of the rest of the Pantheon? I decided to create their own teacher. A very simplified version of divine magic was repackaged into [Soulmancer] and related [Soulmancy] Skills. Then a few nudges were given to select individuals across Ager to push them into the field. Nudge some XP bags in their direction, give them thirty years, and voila! A perfect teacher for learning to defend against divine magic without being able to wield but the barest amounts. And their defense against it would be fairly inconspicuous.”

“What happened?”

“I nudged the pair in the direction of one of my created tutors. Unfortunately, I was a bit too subtle with the [Soulmancer] in question and I failed to take into account that he would find the champions’ souls irresistible to study. You know what happened there.”

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“The Rampages. That really screwed with the balance of power in the regional governments there. And then I redirected Nameless to rescue Bella…. So basically, everything got fucked up and they weren’t able to learn anything.”

“Well, they did pick up a [Damage Resistance] Skill for [Soul Magic], but without the broader training involved, it was a half-measure—no, a quarter-measure, at best. And given the lingering feelings, I doubted that any interaction with another [Soulmancer] would go well. So I killed them off and scrapped it from the System.”

“But you clearly didn’t give up. That letter I wrote clearly stated they had learned it, and it sounded like a full course of study in divine magic. What’d you do?”

“I reincarnated them as Fell.”

“Fell?!” The floating man winced at the outburst. “Are you mad? That could have gone six ways to shit.”

“It was a calculated risk,” the man bristled. “And a much better option than the other alternatives, which included bringing them here to Caelum.”

Adonite rubbed a temple vigorously with one hand. “Wait a minute, how’d you reincarnate them as Fell anyways? You don’t have any jurisdiction over their souls.”

“Ugh,” the man groaned in frustration. “I had to alter their souls significantly. Even I found that tedious. And then I threw them in the general direction of the Top, hoping they’d latch onto something.”

“Hope?”

“It wasn’t a great plan, just the least bad.”

“Alter?”

The man sighed. “Souls can’t hold memories, right?”

“Right…?” the [Brillian] trailed off. “Actually, how do you get reincarnation with memories to work with them? Like, normally.”

“Good question. Within the System, [Reincarnator] offloads the pair’s memories into the System and then the memories are transcribed back into the newborn. I start with the few decades that form their core personality—that can be written before they’re born—then I write in about a century per year. They don’t notice it, but it can take them most of a standard childhood before they technically have every memory within their skulls.”

“Huh. Resource intensive on your part.”

“Undoubtedly. Part of the reason I’m only working with them.”

“Okay, but how’d you work on it with the Fell. There’s no way you’d be able to modify a Fell child’s memories.”

“It took a few centuries, but I finally figured out a bypass. I said ‘souls can’t hold memories’? That’s not actually correct. Souls don’t hold memories, not that they can’t. I just had to create an enchantment strong, but lightweight, enough that the soul would hold onto memories that would write back into the brain so that the personality would develop right. But, it would also need to make sure that memories would be written back from the brain to the soul, or nothing they learned in that life would be retained later. After that, it was just a matter of adding a second enchantment to make sure the soul returned to the System, rather than passing back to the soulrealm. Once that happened—successfully, I might add—I removed the enchantments, loaded the memories manually back into the [Reincarnator] memory space, and kicked it off again.”

“Fascinating. But wouldn’t they have discovered the enchantments as soon as they learned to read their own souls though?”

“Ah, no, you see, I made it very obvious that the memories were enscribed into the soul. It created a lot of clutter and while any other Fell would be suspicious, our duo knew they were reincarnators and probably wouldn’t. So, I just hid the enchantments in the best spot: behind the pair’s most embarrassing memories.”

“Brutal,” he choked out, “but effective. Now, here’s my next question. Why are you doing this?”

At that question, the floating man suddenly looked sheepish, interlocking and wiggling his fingers, while biting his lip and refusing eye contact. At that reaction, Adonite stepped up towards the man until he was within arms’ reach, where he reached a hand out to caress the man’s cheek in familiarity.

“You remind me so much of her,” Adonite whispered mournfully. “I miss Systia.”

As the god’s hand hovered over the illusory face, a small smile perfectly calculated to elicit nostalgic camaraderie flickered across it.

“So do I,” the System replied.

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