“Is this a weird thing to take a date to? I feel like this is a weird thing to take a date to,” I said. Feeling a little self-conscious.

“Shush...I want to hear what they’re saying,” said Hong Mirae. Taking a handful of popcorn from the bowl that sat between us.

We both watched as a young heroine in an orange costume whispered sweet nothings to her anti-hero paramour.

We were definitely being sketchy weirdos here, but in our defense, they’d been fighting seconds before, and we mostly just wanted to see if they ended up fighting again. We’d naturally leave, and give these two their privacy if they started doing anything more serious. We weren’t perverts, after all. Or at least, not that kind of pervert.

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I felt something new inside my Empty-Archive the other day. That doesn’t happen often. After I got used to my archive, things stopped feeling new. The more in-sync I grew with the archive, the more its contents became a part of me. The more the archive’s contents became a part of me, the less I was able to be surprised, unsure, uncertain. I am somewhere between hundreds of years old, or potentially millions of years old if you count the uncertain flow of the time within the nebula. Yet, funnily enough, it was only under the influence of the archive that I felt “truly” old. Ancient.

I suppose this was just to be expected. My archive holds nearly every phenomenon and event, in nearly any genre and circumstance present within the cosmos. To the archive, truly new things were far and few between, and as the Empty-Archivist my own perspective grew closer and closer to this. Making it harder for me to feel anything less than ancient. The passage of countless ages that I hadn’t even been alive for, wore on me, like the tides grinding a mountain into sand.

Can you imagine how very irresistible the “new” would be to such a being? I don’t think you can. Even “I” can’t put the experience into words. The profound levels of boredom and despair inspiring ennui that randomly strike me at the weirdest time, are beyond words. Comparing it to suddenly dying of thirst while stranded amidst the ocean, or freezing to death in the desert would be the closest explanation I could give and even that would be insufficient. It was an experience of painful contradictions.

Even when I ran into something new, if I was in a “synced” state, the Empty-Archive would learn about, and inform me of hundreds of thousands of similar instances of that phenomenon. Making me instantly experience the phenomenon to the point I got sick of it. There were very few things that could stay new to me. I’d learned that only “particularized” phenomena could surprise me. Things unique to me. Like my and Jack’s first kiss, and first time, versus the history and science of romance and sexuality as a whole.

I’ve already said this before, but I always liked to say that I stayed Jack’s friend to keep her from running amok, but at the very least it had to have been reciprocal. Or more like, Jack wasn’t the only one walking around with something missing. And in a lot of ways, I was worse off. Without Jack, and now Kalpana, in my life, there would have come a day where my identity as an Empty-Archivist and the existence of Empty-Archive became something...unmanageable. Something that could, and likely would, have put the entire Shattered World in danger.

The point being, that truly new things were a big deal for me. Now, something new was happening for the first time in a long while, rather than something that was kinda newish, that my Empty-Archive could readily supply me near-infinite data on. I could nip it in the bud, but I couldn’t quite make myself do it. I kept thinking of new rationalizations to let things unwind. Solid ones of course, I wasn’t suddenly an idiot, but they were still rationalizations. I could sense that my thinking wasn’t clear, but somehow I still couldn’t help myself.

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So, here’s what happened. I was doing a bit of bug-stomping. There was a creature made of living music that had managed to get planet-side somehow. It looked like an entire factory’s worth of brass instruments that had been welded together in a vaguely crustacean-like form. I guess the mass of living music was getting clever. Clever and maybe a bit desperate. The kind of dirty-warp that the creature had used to try and slip past the restrictions I and my allies had set over the space-time within our territories was extremely dangerous. Taking the entity perilously close to the void and the most dangerous parts of the grand nebula.

I ended up feeling thankful to that monstrous brass-shrimp. Its appearance taught me another weakness in the protections I’d set. The Empty-Archive proceeded to not only provide solutions, but also solutions to countless similar issues. I was even able to instate a portion of those changes, while coming up with precise instructions for Jack, Kal, and our allies and subordinates to initialize and execute the rest of the necessary changes.

The brass-shrimp made a bit of a mess, before I got to it. I cleaned up most of that mess before shifting us into a temporary-reality where I’d deliver the Brass-Shrimp’s beat-down, but enough must have been left behind to draw “some” attention, because when I left, there was a young girl, and several of her friends gathered in the spot, where I and the Brass-Shrimp initially clashed.

I skedaddled once I was done beating the brass-shrimp to death and sending its corpse to my labs. I’d been trying to avoid unwanted attention. Which was why I initially failed to notice that I’d left something behind. It must have been knocked out of my pocket, when I was blocking the brass-shrimp’s first continent flattening attack. Of course, I quickly realized that I’d left the thing behind, but by then one of the teens had picked up the item and taken it home with them.

That’s when something “new” happened. The thing I’d been working on was a new item that I was planning to integrate into the Empty-Dream. The item wasn’t anything too amazing. It was a simple power-up cube like one would see in pretty much any, and every, game ever. The trick for me, was making a power-cube that could affect, and aid, both mortals and immortals, in equal measure. The obvious solution was making it so that the cube’s power was so great that immortals got a modest bump in potential and strength, but...that would make the mortals explode and knock them out of the dream.

I ended up coming up with a solution that essentially created a power-gradient effect that would boost the power of whoever attained the cube according to that gradient. This gradient operated as a sort of exponential expansion of the law of magical osmosis that drew anomalous energy to the living. Making a person into a living ley-node, or power-well. I’d just about gotten the tech perfected, but there were still a few kinks left. Long story short, a certain young woman had picked up my power-cube. I went and found the girl, but by then she’d already accidentally used, and fused, with my cube.

Of course, it was no problem to separate the cube from her being. Or if that was too hard, I could have always just killed the girl, made her a new identical body, and then left things at that. Yet, I didn’t do that. Instead, I just fixed some issues that would have been disadvantageous for the girl. Such as one issue that would have resulted in unsavory entities being drawn to the girl. Another issue, that would have resulted in the girl going “pop” under certain circumstances. And a final issue, that would have messed up the girl’s senses. The girl’s own genetics had mutated after fusing with my power-cube. The girl had become something new.

I was an alien entity whose trash had been picked up by one of the primitive locals, and I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. Imagine my surprise when a year later, the girl ended up joining a hero-league. Honestly, I probably should have seen it coming, but the synergy between this new thing’s appearance, and my new hero-watching hobby was just too fortuitous. Thus I gained a new favorite subject for observation. Her name was Kid Sunset. An orange costumed, junior superheroine of the Sigfrid Radiance.