Lorelei lurched upwards into a sitting position, gasping as she did so. She'd been dead. Hadn't she?

She vividly remembered that fucking spider rearing up to attack her, that last desperate, dance-fuelled throw of her coin, and then an all-encompassing white light that had been both scorching and yet oddly liberating.

"Yes, yes, yes," said a voice she found slightly familiar, "It's all very 'He who was living is now dead. We who were living are now dying. With a little patience,' isn't it? Although, I don't have that much patience."

Lorelei looked around at the woman in the bright red dress who stood a little way off down the motorway. "You know Eliot?"

The woman's perfect face screwed up in confusion for a second then cleared. "Oh, the poem? No, not at all. I just got lucky that I happened to say something that would resonate with you. Happens to me a lot, as I am sure you can imagine."

Lorelei blinked, then nodded in understanding. "You're Fortuna."

"Fortuna. Luck. Chance. Lakshmi. Saubhagya. Gefion. Shai. For such a small little rock in the middle of nowhere, you guys really picked any number of lanes for me, didn't you?"

"I don't know what that means."

"Don't worry about it," Fortuna said. "How you feeling?"

Lorelei glanced down and patted herself, checking for damage. "Not too bad, considering I should have been burned to a crisp." Looking back towards the remains of the petrol tanker, she was greeted with the odd sight of flames flickering as if in slow motion, like a fiery screensaver gone bad. The ignited corpse of a Shadowweaver Arachnis was slowly - infinitesimally slowly - degenerating into ash.

Fortuna saw her looking and smiled. "Don't worry about it. It's just your standard time-dilation field. With luck, the A.I. won't even notice. And trust me when I say I know what I'm talking about there.

Lorelei felt an odd pang for the missing words of the Guide but pushed them away. Now did not seem like the time. "You saved me. Again."

Fortuna gave a little shrug. "What can I say? You've caught my interest. You might want to remember that isn't a bad shout when certain death is on the cards. In just the short time I've been watching, that's twice it's saved you. Obviously, it was incredibly fortunate that, whilst being obliterated, you accidentally triggered the Skill as things fell apart. Don't count on that happening again." Fortuna wagged a finger. "I can get away with a lot by playing the 'all things are randomly possible in an infinite universe' card, but there are only so many times that card can reach the top of the deck. Do you hear what I'm saying?"

Lorelei heard but wasn't sure she understood. But that was a problem for another day. More pressing was what this being might want from her. She sensed this might not be anything good. "Why did you save me?"

"Well, isn't that the $64 million question?" For a moment, that looked like all the Goddess of Luck would say, but then - as if coming to a decision - she gave another little shrug. "What do you understand about your Class?"

Lorelei gave a quick little laugh. "That it's a complete nightmare." That didn't seem to impress her patron, so she tried again. "I can change what is supposed to happen. But I don't have enough control over it for it to be useful!" Even Lorelei recognised a certain tone of whining had entered her voice: she, once more, tried again. "What I mean is that . . ."

"Yes, yes, I can hear what you mean."

Fortuna stared at her momentarily, eyes flashing, and Lorelei realised that what she thought of as a good-looking woman in a startling red dress—bearing more than a passing similarity to Six from Battlestar Galactica—was, in reality, profoundly alien. It was as if a tear in the very fabric of reality had slapped on a human mask, one that did not quite fit, and was indulging in a little light cosplay. Just looking at Fortuna for too long was making Lorelei feel sick.

Then, the woman's outline shimmered, and she was entirely human again. Yet almost immediately, the impression of wrongness began to return: it was as if the coherent quality of the form was degrading by the moment.

"Don't get me wrong, I love it when people stare at my tits rather than listen to what I'm saying. But there's only so long I can play 'look at that shiny distraction over there' with a billion sensors designed to stop me from doing precisely what I am up to here."

Lorelei snapped her gaze up to the being's eyes. They, too, alternated from looking human - albeit stunningly beautiful, perfect blue circles - and being terrifying black holes that led to . . .

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"Back in the room, Herald." Fortuna was clicking her fingers in Lorelei's face. "Back in the room, please."

"Sorry. I don't know what's happening to me!"

Fortuna glanced upwards and grimaced. "Okay, a few alarms are going off, so I will make this quick. There's a reason my Heralds don't usually manifest on newly integrated worlds. Everything is too . . . malleable in Systems where millions of people suddenly have access to extraordinary powers. When everything is sorting itself out, the last thing that anyone needs is even more chaos being injected into the mix."

Having had quite the experiences for the last few days, Lorelei was willing to agree with that statement.

"By the time it is usually appropriate for your Class to become an option, it would appear, a few decades in, as an Evolutionary option to an existing build. Perhaps a Mage or something like that. That way, the player concerned would have had time to figure things out a little and get a few other Skills under their belt. Meaning that the sort of shenanigans I'm here for would be part of their skill set but not their be-all and end-all, you get me. You, however, . . ."

Lorelei's mind whirled as a few things clicked into place. So, Fortuna's Herald wasn't supposed only to have Luck-based abilities? Like, what should have happened was that she should have been able to heal like Kriss, throw fireballs like Zorrobar or protect the others like Pete and throw out a few rolls of randomness? As well as instead of. "So, what the fuck happened here?"

Fortuna frowned. "Hey, easy on the attitude. You picked it! No one descended from on high, put a gun to your head and asked you to fuck up your integration. In fact, I have a very vivid memory of pulling your arse out of a dragon-related death about a minute into Day One." Thinking of her argument with Moira, she added, "And I've taken quite some heat for it too, I'll have you know. So, dial back the 'oh, woe is me' a little."

Lorelei bit back a reply. Fortuna was right, she knew. All of the other options had been there when she'd picked her Class: she had been the one who had been drawn to the idea of sprinkling a little randomness on the world.

Fortuna obviously saw that thought blossom on Lorelei's face and did a quick nod in recognition of the unspoken apology. "Good. Well, that leads me . . ." her voice trailed off and, again, her form blurred into something far less palatable for the sane human mind. "Shit! Okay. No more interruptions! I've got until Matilda finishes her doughnut and notices an email marked 'Urgent"' from Reality Security to get the fuck out of here. And if you knew Tilda, you'd know how fast pastries vanish down her gullet.

Lorelei opened her mouth to speak, but Fortuna waved her hand, sealing her mouth like they were in the interrogation scene from The Matrix. 'Keep it schtum. "Zip it! Here's the lay of the land. I don't usually get the chance to get on in on the ground floor of an integration. I'm finding it interesting. And I don't usually get a shiny, clean-skin Herald who isn't a complete psycho. So, that's two ticks in your rather shapely box." Fortuna cocked her head for a second, watching Lorelei turn increasingly blue in panic. "Fuck's sake, you still need to breathe, don't you?" She waved her hand again, and Lorelei sucked in big mouthfuls of air. "How do you survive being this breakable! No, don't answer that. I don't have time. Here's the deal. I think you and I have the chance here to shake things up a little. This planet has gained someone with significant Luck-based Skills far earlier than it should have done, and I can work with that. I understand you're already driving the A.I. to distraction, and I want you to lean into that. It's one thing for me to scare it into doing what I want, but as it gets more sure of itself, that'll be pall. It's quite another thing if we can get it to take a personal interest in a player. It finds you interesting. Keep being interesting."

"The Guide hates me! It spends most of the time trying to kill me?"

"There's a thin line between love and hate. I'd like you to, metaphorically, of course, see about straddling that."

"Why? What's in it for you?"

Then, the woman in red shimmered once again, and Lorelei became frozen in a way that had nothing to do with the time-dilation. Her breath caught in her throat, as the actual image of Fortuna materialised before her. She was an entity of unimaginable horror, an Old One whose existence warped reality around her. Lorelei's eyes widened in terror as she took in her patron's grotesque form.

Fortuna's body was a churning mass of writhing tentacles, each one slick with glistening slime. The tentacles twisted and coiled as if with a life of their own, adorned with chitinous barbs that gleamed menacingly in the flickering light of the petrol tanker's explosion. Her skin was a nightmarish patchwork of textures, ranging from rough, scale-like protrusions to smooth, almost gelatinous surfaces that pulsated.

The eyes – oh, those eyes – were what paralysed Lorelei. Gone was any trace of cornflower blue prettiness, to be replaced by lidless, unblinking horrors scattered haphazardly across its form, each one burning with a phosphorescent light. Each orb seemed to see everything, unravelling Lorelei's thoughts like a comb running roughly through bed hair.

Lorelei's mind struggled to comprehend Fortuna's shifting, amorphous nature. It was as if the Goddess's true form was not bound by the same physical laws that governed reality. She shifted and contorted fluidly, mocking the time/space continuum with ever-changing, grotesque shapes. Eldritch runes - yep, we were in full-on Lovecraft territory here - that shone with sinister energy were etched into her skin

As she stood there, helpless and transfixed, Lorelei felt a profound dread. Fortuna's existence was a corrosive force seeping into her mind and soul, threatening to drive her to the brink of madness. The air around her thrummed, a symphony of cosmic horror that resonated deep within her bones.

Then the horror was over, and the lady in the red dress was back. She winked at Lorelei - just the two eyes again now - and smiled. "What's in it for me? Me and you, babes. We're going to bring the whole fucking thing down around their ears."

And then she laughed. It was a noise far more appropriate to the being Lorelei had just had a glimpse of than a slim blonde-haired woman.

Lorelei shivered. Just what was she getting herself into . . .