"Alright, this time, I want you to focus on the dumpster down there," Sori said, and I looked around, confused. I was standing in front of my Shadow on the flat roof of the cafe with the upstairs art studio, but for some reason, I thought we were still in the art studio. The blank canvas I'd created the illusory painting on was once again blank. It was feet away, leaning against the ledge surrounding the roof. I could remember that we came outside, but only when I really thought about it. I'd forgotten why, though—and when. It felt like a while ago.

I stepped back into the Shadow Alcove so I could speak. "What do you mean 'this time?' Did I miss something?" I asked. I'd cast a single illusion on that canvas, and then Sori brought me out here. Lost in my own fantasies of illusions, I must not have been paying attention to my surroundings or to my first illusion.

I'd been confused often enough in the last few weeks that rolling with the punches was becoming almost automatic, "What should I do, Graffiti?"

"Do something bigger; make it look like a large sleeping bear. Make it breath; oh, and stick close to your Shadow and get ready to run."

"Shit, are illusions dangerous?" I asked, hesitating.

"Are illusions dangerous? What kind of question is that? Of course, they're dangerous; what would be the point otherwise?" Sori scoffed.

I shot him as deadpan a look as my wolfish features could manage. "I meant to the caster."

"Oh, well, yeah. That'll seem obvious in a second, too. Well, not a second, but like ten-ish minutes," Sori said, "if you ever step out of the Shadow and cast it anyway."

"I mean, give me a second. I've done this once, and it was smaller and unmoving." I said. "I need to plan this out."

"You're thinking about it too hard. You know how to do this. Just do it," Sori pressed.

I shrugged and stepped from the Alcove as I pictured a sleeping bear curled up, centered on the dumpster. The dumpster was as solid an object as I could ask for, so conceptualizing it as a single thing was especially easy. Instinctively, I squinted my eyes to blur my vision while focusing on overlaying my illusory bear. To my surprise, I found Sori was right, and I did apparently have an innate understanding of what to do. I was even able to create an animated loop of the bear breathing in and out, its fur rustling slightly, if predictably, in an imaginary wind. It looked good, too good. I found myself stepping back into the Shadow suspiciously.

"I don't understand," I said. "How did I do that? It was like I'd done it a hundred times."

"Sure, that sounds about right. I mean, I haven't counted, but it wouldn't surprise me."

"What do you mean?"

"We'll talk about it in a bit; I don't want to repeat myself."

Sori basically ignored me for the next several minutes, leaving me trying to piece things together. I'd gotten confused about where we were, and creating the moving illusion of the sleeping bear had come far easier than creating the illusion of a simple painting. If anything, the painting was a more familiar exercise that should have been easier. Still, I'd found myself struggling to imprint all the details onto the canvas.

Finally, Sori bobbed up and down. "Here they come. Hopefully, this works this time," he said, his voice not sounding very hopeful.

"What are we looking at?" I asked, trying to figure out where the single eye was pointed. It didn't help that he didn't seem bothered by the haze that filled my vision.

"Um, the glowing things?" Sori said, speaking like I was an idiot. It took a few seconds, but eventually, I was able to see the moving lights in the distance through the fog.

"What are they?" I asked

"You've seen them before," Sori said. For a second, I thought I was missing memories, but then they came close enough that their undulation became apparent.

A spike of fear shot through me.

"The light webs," I said, my voice hushed as I recalled the one time I'd seen them.

Glowing gossamer webs, looking like patterns of light dappling the bottom of a pool— or, in this case, suspended mid-air—hovered across the sky toward us. I'd watched them shove spikes of energy into Nia and Jon's heads before doing the same to me. It was my first death.

I'd faced enough other horrors— and had little enough sleep at all since then—that they hadn't exactly been featured in my nightmares. Still, seeing them now sent my blood running cold and my paw hands trembling. "Time to run?" I asked, looking over my shoulder to make sure my Shadow was still open.

"Not yet; you need to see something first," Sori said, a solemnity I didn't like in his voice.

Three of the webs closed in on us, and I was considering fleeing into my Shadow, whatever Sori said. I didn't understand fully where the fear came from. I didn't even remember actually dying that time. It was far from my worst death. I'd barely even thought about it since I realized we were in a time loop. There were some questions about my identity tied up in those events. Still, those were uncomfortable ideas for me, not horrifying ones.

"Calm down, they haven't noticed you yet. Just your illusion. You're not still holding it active, right?" Sori asked.

I wasn't; the illusion had replaced the reality of the appearance of the dumpster in some way I didn't understand. "No, it's freestanding," I whispered in reply, afraid to speak too loudly and draw their attention. Sori was right about this, too, however. They weren't interested in me. Instead, they were being drawn to my illusion.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"'Light Webs,' 'Wisps,' 'Reality Drones,' it doesn't matter what you call them. These guys don't like it when people like you start messing around with reality, even if it's just in appearance. It was just over seven minutes from the time you made the illusion to the time they showed up. Remember that benchmark. You had slightly longer when you had the illusion on yourself, but still only about 10 minutes."

"Wait, when was this?" I asked, tearing my eyes away from the sight of the Wisps to shoot a brief look of confusion at the silver eye. The undulating webs of light used peripheral tendrils to feel along the edges of my illusion. Where the tendrils touched, the bear started to break down into motes of white light. It took seconds for it to go from a relatively convincing illusion of a bear back into an ordinary dumpster.

"Never mind that for now. It's time to run. You have to lure them into your Shadow, then run back out and close the door without them catching you." The Wisps were meandering back and forth at the front of the dumpster, and it took me a second to realize they were getting closer.

"Wait, shit, are you serious? They can come into my Shadow?"

"It's a door. Do you know how doors work, Sam? I may have backed the wrong horse in all this. Are you going to run or what?"

As they approached, their meandering lessened and then vanished, and they picked up speed, moving straight at me.

"Go!" Sori yelled as I swore and spun around.

The Wisps zipped in right behind me as I rushed into the Alcove. There was no time to get clever or even open the Alcove up to the hull of my Ether Ship. I dove behind one of the freestanding shelves innate to the Alcove and kicked off the floor on all fours to hurry back past the Light Webs toward the Shadow Entrance. I lost track of them as I backtracked and could only hope I'd been fast enough as I dove through the portal, collapsing it behind me.

Laying on the tarred roof, breathing heavily, more from nerves than exertion, I cast a static illusion of a speech bubble with barely a thought. It floated suspended above my head, words facing Sori. "So what was the point of that?"

"I'd thought that would be obvious," Sori answered. "Casting illusions draws trouble. You can't expect to drop an illusion on yourself and become just another person. You do illusions a little differently from everyone else—probably because of the Shadow—so your illusions draw more attention. Drawing attention is bad. Obviously. Still, we learned a lot, so it was probably worth it."

"What was worth what? What exactly did we learn?" I asked from where I lay, letting go of the first bubble and making a new one. I was finding it suspiciously easy to create and change the illusion.

"Like I said, we learned that you can make a cave-bear-sized illusion with some small animation for about seven minutes before it gets dangerous—10 minutes if it's one you're wearing. Unchanging cosmetic illusions, such as a fake painting on a canvas, are safe until the illusion is broken. Active illusions like those speech bubbles, on the other hand, can be created one after another, in the same spot, for about three minutes before trouble comes. Obviously, creating an illusion in front of a 'normal' will immediately break that illusion and call trouble. So you wouldn't be able to make speech bubbles like that for most people. Just Hands, Crowseph, maybe Alice and Nia, oh, and the Gremlins. For everyone else, you'll want to use a notebook or something."

Stretching, I grabbed the canvas to use as a notepad. "Wait, we learned all of that from this one interaction?" I asked on the canvas.

Sori snorted, "Obviously not. Like I said, that was about a hundred attempts of trying various things."

"What are you talking about?" I asked, the words manifesting easily on the canvas. I was getting pretty quick, but if I couldn't be obvious about it, I might have to pretend to write it out.

"Your Shadow is probably cleared out by now, if you want to open it back up. They wouldn't have hung out long before they respawned in the real world—or wherever they go when there are no problems to fix. They'll be back if you keep making obvious illusions or one illusion after another thought."

Reluctantly, I drew the doorway up from my Shadow and tensed, ready to lead the wisps on another chase, but nothing flew out.

"I told you they were gone," Sori said smugly.

Hesitant, I stepped into my Shadow, still ready to flee if they showed up, but at the moment, I seemed to be alone. "I think it's time to explain what's happening," I said to Sori, distrust evident in my voice.

"Sure, since you didn't die, I might as well. Umm, you know the Neutralizer from the MIB? You got neuralized by the wisps, kind of a lot. They also killed you and changed your spawn point a few times. Pretty straight forward really."

"Shit, What?! How many days have I wasted up here? Why don't I remember? For that matter, why didn't Hands ever say anything about these things?"

"I don't know how many times I need to remind you that, as he's a Dolphin, he cheats, but it remains true. He rarely has to deal with them. As for the rest: You've died half a dozen times, but they've also messed with your memory closer to a hundred times. It's just something they do. They fix a problem and reset local variables such as you to mask their existence."

"Wait, Sori, you little shit, have you just been letting me die over and over? how long have we been doing this?" In truth, the deaths didn't really bother me. I didn't like the missing memories, though. It made me feel like I was missing even more parts of myself.

Sori huffed out an offended breath. "I wouldn't say 'letting;' facilitating, maybe. You're the one who wanted to learn illusions. You just got a crash course."

"Yeah, one that's been neuralized out of existence. I didn't learn a thing except those arbitrary numbers you just gave me."

"No, don't be stupid; the Wisps aren't erasing your memories, not most of them anyway. They just give your brain a new, simpler narrative that covers up the existence of the Wisps by making you not need to think about them. You still learned plenty about making illusions; you just don't remember the events that led to lessons learned. You had to notice how easy it was. Besides, now you know the result of relying too heavily on illusions."

"That's not really the point. My memories were obliterated. Worse, I've been MIA for days for anyone who remembers me. I still don't have Nia's voice. I need to check on her, not to mention Alice— who was eaten alive just before all of this— and my other allies. I can't just disappear. People are relying on me."

"Yeah, I know," Sori sighed. " A little appreciation would be nice. After all, Wisps didn't go after a single one of your allies because of how I did things. You're welcome. Or would you rather have learned these lessons while surrounded by your 'allies?'"

"There had to have been a better way," I argued.

"You can't will a better way into existence. But congratulations, you've got the basics. Try not to draw more trouble down on yourself." Sori sounded genuinely offended all of a sudden, and I almost felt guilty, except between his questionable lucidity and his manipulation of my emotions in the past, I didn't trust it. "Go talk to Hands then," Sori said. "He should know what's up with Nia. Promise fulfilled. You have 48 weeks left to evacuate Forest Lake through the suspended exit in your Domain."

And then he was gone, and, despite my better judgment, I couldn't help but feel a twinge of guilt for hurting his feelings. Part of me thought he deserved it, and part of me doubted he felt that way at all. It was something to deal with later after I'd checked on my allies and gotten some practice with the illusions that I could actually remember.