“Bad news, Bell!” Isobel’s voice rang out in the dome.

Almost half a day had passed since Theora had woken up. She stopped doing laundry for a moment to throw a glance inside the cabin and found Bell nodded off in a chair while reading Iso’s mission reports.

Theora absentmindedly threw the last piece of wet laundry into a basket, to carry everything away to hang it up. Thin strands spun of blood crystal stretched overhead between rocky outcrops next to the cabin — the air stood mostly still inside the dome, but the sunlight burned unmitigated by an atmosphere.

“Why aren’t you responding to your messages?” Isobel shouted again with a curious voice.

‘She’s asleep,’ Theora answered via system message.

A short pause.

‘Oh. But you’re not!’

She was not. In fact, Theora was wide awake. ‘I’m at the cabin,’ she wrote.

Dema was the first to come into view, floundering up from behind a hill with tired steps. When her eyes met Theora’s, she broke into a smile. As she approached, her smile waned into amazement. She came to a halt a few steps away, staring.

“Glad to see you,” Theora said. She reached to get another piece of clothing from the basket, but exaggerated the motion to show off her bouncing ponytail — and a strip of midsection revealed by her shirt upon stretching.

She shot another glance at Dema, whose brain appeared to have shut down. Mission success, Theora thought to herself.

Right after, Isobel came up as well. “You’re awake!” she repeated with a smile, and Theora understood it as the question it was meant to be.

Dema rubbed her eyes. “Am I awake?”

“Bell wished to talk to me,” Theora said. “For advice.” Not initially, but it was close enough to the truth.

That managed to tear Dema out of whatever daydreams she’d been having. “Oh, yeah! She’d been stressing out a little. Didn’t think she was gonna go as far as to wake you, though…” Dema bit her lips. “Kinda jealous now.”

“What are you jealous for?” Isobel asked as she brushed past towards Theora.

Dema clicked her tongue and looked to the side, slowly walking ahead too. “Why, I wanted to lose my patience first!”

“We’ve all been very patient,” Isobel giggled, joining Theora in the chore work. “We’d like to have you around more, but…”

“I know.” Theora flashed her a small smile. “I feel a lot better now, but there is still a lot of sleeping left to do. That said — I was thinking I could stay up a week or two just to see how everyone is doing.” And to make sure Bell could get all her questions out for now. Of course, she would still make use of the System, but Theora wanted to make sure Bell never felt like the System was the only thing she could rely on.

Isobel considered Theora’s proposal for a while, giving her glances between putting up pieces of laundry. Eventually she said, “Sounds fine to me. At least you’re in a good mood.”

Theora nodded, fetched the last piece of clothing — underwear — hung it up and then finally looked back at Dema, who that underwear belonged to. Dema’s mouth stood half open, as if she was about to say something, but at the same time it didn’t appear like she would.

Theora decided to approach her slow and steady, head tilted to the side. When she was almost in arm’s reach, she paused. “You alright there?”

Dema immediately lurched and grasped Theora’s shirt, dragging her in for a kiss. Theora leaned down to grant it, laughing into Dema’s mouth.

“Yeah,” Dema said, hand still clenching the fabric. “Just not used to the sight.” She sucked in air through her teeth. For a moment, she looked like she wanted to do more, but then her eyes zoomed past Theora, likely falling on Isobel, who was busy clacking around the cabin. Dema sighed and let go, then turned away from Theora, shaking her head and combing fingers through her hair. “Damn, gonna need a lava bath to cool down from that.”

Theora huffed out a short laugh. “No can do. The lava is for emergencies.”

Squelching sounds issued from the cabin, so Theora turned to see Bell emerge from it, rubbing her eye with a tendril.

“What’s the bad news?” Bell asked, half yawning.

“Oh, you heard that?” Dema asked. “Sorry for waking you up! Didn’t think you’d be napping now, and Bun Bun’s hard to wake up by accident.”

“It’s fine,” Bell said. “It was just to replenish some mana. I had to use all of it earlier.”

“Oh…” Dema threw some furtive investigative glances around to find anything amiss. “…Something bad happen?”

Bell nodded. “I had a terrifying encounter. Triggered my [Last Stand], and I was still only a moment away from dying.” She yawned, but other than that, her delivery was amazingly deadpan.

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“You know you can message us when you need help, right?” Dema looked between Bell and Theora a few times, then shrugged. “I guess you had Bun Bun here to defend you.”

Theora almost expected the ruse to be kept up for longer, but instead, Bell reiterated: “Still waiting for the bad news.”

“Ah… yeah!” Dema scratched her head, then looked at Theora. “Honestly, maybe better if we just show you? Gotta leave the base though. It’s got to do with our next testing site.”

“Right,” Isobel said ominously. “You’ll have to see it with your own eyes!”

An hour or so later they were on their way.

The process of making the SCISSoRs was fairly simple — Dema forged a new pair of scissors from different materials and with different properties, infusing them with her regenerative Skills as she went along. Isobel then also added her own magic occasionally; as did Bell. The prototype was then delivered to Theora, who would infuse it with permanent damage and try it out on the fabric of reality.

The ‘testing sites’ were the locations where Theora infused [Obliterate]. They never used the same place twice, to avoid any spillover or unintended side-effects, since there was always a chance some damage could splinter off. And who knew — microscopic fractions could be forming every time they did this, every time they tried to cut reality. It was simply safer that way.

Scouting new underground locations and hollowing out caves was part of their day-to-day, though of course Theora didn’t much participate in that, for she wasn’t needed.

The location the others had chosen next was a bit of a way out, so it took about an hour or so for them to get there. Dema excitedly led them to an entryway — truth be told, both her and Isobel’s behaviour didn’t quite go in line with whatever they had found to be ‘bad news’; if anything, they seemed to be looking forward to showing off this ‘bad news’.

‘Night’ had fallen by now — in the sense that the sun was currently out of view, though their path was still lit by the light reflected off Himaeya and the second moon.

What kind of ‘bad news’ could possibly be so exciting? Theora hoped for a moment that they had found something alive, just because she would have liked to make more friends. The hope faded quickly, of course. Theora would have known. Would have sensed presences. Making sure there wasn’t any life on this moon had been their first order of business after arriving. Nobody wanted to ruin anyone’s space of living. Theora had meditated for hours just to make sure she wasn’t missing anything.

Then what else? Had they found… water? Plants? A beautiful geological structure, perhaps? Theora slowly fell behind the others just so they wouldn’t see her gently shifting her weight from a foot to another in excitement. Oh, if they’d found a very cool phenomenon, then it would make sense to abandon the location, and it even made sense that they would want to show it off.

Theora increased her pace ever so slightly while making sure to stay behind, and she quickly learned this was a tricky thing to do; she ended up walking in curves.

Could it be anything else, possibly? Not really, right? It wasn’t like—

Theora blinked. She had completely forgotten about magic. Oh, what if they found magic here? Magical phenomena were common on Himaeya after all, so they might exist on moons too. Their experiments happened underground, so it seemed perfectly possible they might have hit on some kind of magical vein.

Ahh… wasn’t there this ancient and long-lost abode of magic beneath the surface of Himaeya? A wandering lake of glittering white, never at the same place twice. Theora had only seen it once, a long time ago. She’d forgotten about it until now. A brief flash of memory lit up in her mind’s eye — glowing liquid, softly boiling.

But they were in space now, so perhaps it was an avenue of magic like the ones she’d seen up here… similar to magic mould, perhaps? Oh, right. Theora had a vial of that in her travelling attire. She blinked as the memory hit her, and her gaze went over Dema’s back, who was cheerfully conversing with Isobel. The vial was supposed to be a present for Dema, a souvenir. Theora would have to look for it later.

None of this quite answered what might be hidden underneath the first moon’s surface. She was letting her mind wander — overthinking, but not quite in a bad way, it seemed.

A message from Treeka showed up in her inbox. Just woke up, myself. How was your sleep?

Ah, right. Theora had sent her a good morning message earlier. It was fun, she replied. Can’t wait to do it again.

Haha, Treeka answered. Thank you for messaging me. Don’t want to miss the chance to talk to you.

Neither do I, Theora admitted. And, thank you for helping me remember.

Hm?

Ah… was Treeka unaware what she was doing, or was she pretending not to know? Either way, Theora wrote: You gave me the nightgown. Now I think of you whenever I wake up.

What? You actually wear it?

Of course, Theora said. It’s very comfortable.

There came no reply. Theora skimmed through the messages again — she was pretty sure she hadn’t said anything wrong. The dress was obviously meant to be worn; Treeka had even playfully commanded her to do so when they said their goodbyes before the mission.

Before she could dwell further on this mystery, they finally arrived at a small cave entrance of peculiar twisted shape which came from the ground out of nowhere — and, together with the clumsily laid out stairs, betrayed that it was formed by Dema’s earth powers. She often half-baked her stairs, and was also always the one to trip on them.

“Alright,” Dema said, standing next to the entrance and waving Theora and Bell in. “It’s not far. We’re coming in from above, and I made it so you can oversee all of it at a glance. Be prepared!”

A soft glow of light, cast over a small plateau, loomed at the end of the straight stairway, perhaps one or two hundred steps deep. It looked like normal ground, but Theora assumed the plateau itself was the vantage point that oversaw their discovery.

Of note, of course, was that there was light at all. That probably meant magic was in play here, at least to some degree. Theora hadn’t been so far off, then.

Dema and Isobel were letting them walk ahead, probably to let them get a good view in. It couldn’t be life, but it could be magic; it was gleaming but not bright.

They made their way down the last few steps, but the plateau was sloping down gently in a way that still obstructed what lay behind; it almost felt like Dema was teasing them, having created this pathway such that what lay behind would only reveal itself at the very last moment.

And that it did.

Bell was smaller, so she saw it first — her tendrils fluffed up around her and she let out a surprised gasp of wonder.

Theora got distracted by Bell’s reaction for a moment and only then turned to behold the scene—

The ancient ruins of a massive underground city.