Theora did a double take before she remembered that this person had no way of knowing what the both of them were calling her.

“Iso,” she said. “That’s the name Dema gave you.” She glanced into those big, black eyes gleaming with curiosity and interest, and then added, “Ah, but, you probably have chosen your own name by now. What is it?”

“Who’s Dema?” she asked in her bright and crystal clear voice.

Theora blinked.

That’s right. She was working with flawed assumptions. “Dema, the Ancient Evil. Dema is her name. You mentioned her earlier, right? My… companion.”

The person started gleaming. “Dema!” she said. “The one whose blood is flowing inside me, I think? I heard the Ancient Evil was a blood mage, so it must be hers? And she gave me a name?”

Theora nodded.

The girl raised one patch above one of her eyes that looked a lot like an eyebrow. “Wait, is that… short for… Isopod?”

“It’s apparently short for Isobel.”

“Doesn’t even sound the same!” she said, laughing.

“I—” Theora started, but didn’t know what to say. “You are right about that. I have no defence.”

‘Iso’ beamed up at Theora with her large black eyes, not saying anything for a moment, and then blurting out, “Okay! I like it. I do have another name by now, but please feel free to keep calling me Iso. I’ll just have two names, I suppose?”

Theora nodded, and then said, “Also, we’ve been assuming that you might be a girl, but…”

“Oh! You have?”

“Yes, but if that’s not—”

Iso now raised both patches of moss forming little eyebrows over her eyes. “That’s fine too! Well, I’m still figuring all that stuff out. It wasn’t really a thing back in my first life, to be honest, and I can’t say I’m too invested in this at the moment. But, female is good. Yes.” She nodded with clickety-clacks, and then yelped out, “But!” while raising a finger. “Can talk about that stuff later, I’m here for something else. I need to talk to you. Do you have time? Can we sit down somewhere?”

“Of course,” Theora answered. She would always make time for Isobel. Those Fragments would just need to wait. “There’s…” She pointed at a patch winding upwards a hill with only a few buildings on it. It was full of grass and trees and shrubs. “I think there’s space to sit on up there. Can look down at the town.”

Iso nodded, and so, they made their way up, and found a table to sit at, under a small plane tree. The drizzle was still falling, and Iso seemed to relish in it, bending her segmented body with soft clitter-clatter and closed eyes.

“You wanted to talk,” Theora eventually said, when it seemed like Iso was just going to absorb the rain forever.

“Yes! Sorry! It’s so dry outside, I need to make sure I take every opportunity.” Then, she focussed, sitting down at the table, but in a way such that she’d still get rained on, and straightened her back with a clack clack clack.

“So, how do we do this,” she murmured, putting on a slightly more serious expression, although it looked mostly like the face of a child trying hard to concentrate, and failing. She tapped the table a few times with her stone fingers, and then asked, “Can I invite you to a party?”

Theora frowned.

A party? Was there something to celebrate?

“I…” Theora stuttered, but then, Iso did it anyway, and suddenly, a System prompt materialised in front of Theora’s mind.

You have been invited to join a party with None.

The System threw parties? With None? Was she supposed to go alone?

Going either alone or with just Dema would seriously increase the chances of Theora attending. Still, she needed to get back to the Afterthoughts as soon as she could… But Isobel looked at her with such bright and expecting eyes that Theora couldn’t bring herself to say no.

And thus, she accepted. And immediately, her System HUD expanded. Suddenly, she could see a little icon with small statlines in the periphery of her vision, and as she opened it, she was met by Isobel’s stat sheet and more information about her.

A Level 23 [Mossmancer]. Her stats didn’t correspond to a Level 23 Class though, so Theora assumed she’d changed or upgraded her Class to [Mossmancer] recently. The girl had dumped most of her stats in MND; in fact, to a ridiculous amount. Apparently, she really trusted her natural rock defences, and had no interest in becoming physically strong or fast.

But, more importantly, Theora had never known it was possible to see the stats of other people that way. It dawned on her now that she hadn’t been invited to a celebration, but to a hero party — except this would have never initially occurred to her, because the idea of another hero inviting Theora to such a thing was outright ridiculous.

She hadn’t even been aware that such a functionality was integrated into the System in the first place; she’d always assumed hero parties were people simply travelling around together. Maybe it was a recently added feature? Was the System still being worked on?

When Theora managed to pull her attention away from Isobel’s statline and back to the girl herself, she saw her deeply entranced. Entranced in something invisible. It was likely Theora’s stat sheet.

“[Obliterate],” Iso whispered. “Reading it right now. Hope you don’t mind?”

“Go ahead.”

Reading [Obliterate]? Theora couldn’t even remember its description. Not like she cared. She knew that it wasn’t all too useful, and to some extent, misleading.

“You don’t have any other offensive Skills,” the girl mumbled in awe.

“[Obliterate] swallows them to get stronger. It hijacks the Skill Evolution Feature.”

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“Oh wow,” Iso let out. “That sounds scary. I’ve never heard of something like that before. Almost like it has a life of its own?” But then, she shook her head and scrunched her face, like expelling thoughts from her mind. “Actually, not what’s important right now. I’m getting distracted again. If I may, I would like to look at your sheet later in more detail, it’s just so interesting. Plus, I can see you broke part of the Interface with all those messed-up numbers, it’s going to be really fun to reverse-engineer that. Maybe I can collect some useful data from that. Ah, oops, distracted again!” She bonked her own head with a smile, releasing a sharp klonk. “I invited you to the party to show you something.”

“Show me something,” Theora repeated, and Iso nodded.

“My Main Quest. Before I show you, I need to warn you: The contents are a little vile. Please don’t get mad at me, I have no intention to pursue it.”

Theora pulled her eyebrows together, and got the uncomfortable feeling of a swarm of cold fingers creeping and tapping up her back. She didn’t like where this was going at all.

“I will not get angry at you,” Theora promised.

Iso took a small breath of relief. “I thought a long time about how I want to do this, but in the end, I decided to come to you first, since you know Dema and I’m really not sure how she would handle this. Plus, with you being her companion, I thought you might want to help protect her.”

“Protect her,” Theora echoed, and already the hairs on her body were starting to stand up — right as she received a System prompt.

None shared a view with all party members:

[Current Main Quest: Matricide.]

You have been resurrected in an evil scheme as offspring of a despicable demon, to aid in its dark aims.

Betray and kill the Ancient Evil to save the world from destruction.

And with that, a shockwave thundered through Hallmark.

Theora unleashed. What a despicable quest.

Her aura, usually hidden within her empty shell, concealed in the depths of her impossible self, burst out in a roar, sending leaves aflutter, repelling the drizzle in a bubble far around. Iso yelped out.

Oh, ‘vile’ didn’t even begin to describe the nature of this quest. What audacity. Was the System not afraid at all? A while ago, Theora had mused about whether her existence could serve as a deterrent, but clearly, there were no limits to the devilry this thing would dream up. Trying to use Dema’s own daughter to murder her? Unacceptable.

The System? Coordinator of heroes, to aid them in saving the world? What a joke. Pitiful little thing. It had just made itself obsolete.

“[O—”

“Hey!” Iso blurted out, and within the fraction of a second, her fingers had found their way to gently close up Theora’s lips. Theora recoiled violently from her own action, although in such a way that her lips remained sealed by Iso’s hand.

Iso shook her hand with a slightly scared expression. “What were you intending to target just there? Not me, I hope!”

Theora shivered violently, sweat breaking out from her body and melting into the still drying raindrops on her skin. Panic oscillated through her in waves, together with exhaustion and a heavy mind and overboiling anger.

She slumped down, and Iso removed her hand.

“The System,” Theora murmured.

Iso took a deep breath. “You know, I appreciate the sentiment, but let’s not blow ourselves up with the splatter damage of that little Skill of yours. The System is way too large to use that on safely. You should know!”

Theora wanted to disappear. Again, she had lashed out. Oh god. She couldn’t even imagine what would have happened had she spoken that word.

Slowly, the tension left Iso’s body, and she started laughing nervously. “Mom’s travelling companion has a temper!” she sighed. “Good to know. Like handling hot coals.” After another sigh, she put on a gentle smile. “Oh, you look like a sad puppy right now.” She leaned over to grasp at Theora’s hand, and softly pressed down on it with her surprisingly warm rock fingers. “It’s okay, I got you. Please don’t cry. You messed up, but I won’t let you do anything you’d regret, little girl.”

She gave a reassuring smile, and then softly shook her head. “I really hope the System felt that, though. That should have taught it a lesson — I mean, that aura burst was strong. The System must have suffered your intention too — it was so heavy that I thought I was the target!” She put on a little smirk. “I’m sure it’s sweating from all its artificial glands. Serves it right, because I don’t think you are wrong at all, in spirit. Let’s hope it was a humbling experience.”

“I’m sorry,” Theora muttered.

Iso shrugged, and clattered her rocky bones. “I got you. But all that said, I take it you are not aware that the word ‘System’ is overloaded? Or else you would have chosen a different target, I assume.”

“Overloaded?”

“Well, when we say ‘System’, we kind of conflate two things with each other, don’t we?” Iso said. “I noticed when I first talked to another Hero I met. Nice person, by the way, I travelled here together with her, but she did not want to come meet you. Uh… I’m getting distracted again.” She rolled her eyes at herself. “Anyway, there’s one part of the System that I like to call the Interface, and then there’s the part I like to call the Brat.”

Theora just stared.

“The Interface is our Skill descriptions, stats, the prompts, achievement columns, whatever you can think of. Most of what we can see in front of us when we do System stuff. None of that is conscious. It’s a fabric laid out across the world, accessible to everyone once initiated. Its rules are static and unchanging.”

She tapped on the table. “In short, the Interface is not what I am concerned about. It enables people to quantify their strengths and their abilities, whatever. I suppose it’s convenient, but we don’t really need it, since Skills and stuff are inherent to people, so we’d be able to use them without it, just a bit more cumbersome.”

She stared into the air for a moment, as if she’d lost her train of thought, and then spent a few seconds with closed eyes, happily absorbing more of the drizzle. “Right,” she said after catching herself. “But then, next to the Interface, there’s the Brat. The Brat only interacts with the world through the Hero Project. It has the power to grant quests, and attach rewards. It uses them to help get rid of bad things all around us. Heroes get most of their power from those rewards, so they prove an extremely good incentive to do the System’s bidding.”

Theora had never thought about the System that deeply, but now that Iso pointed it all out, it aligned very well with her own experience. The Hero Project was what was trying to coerce her to kill Dema. Skills and other System data weren’t affected by it — otherwise, beings like Dema would have their access revoked.

“How did you find all of this out?”

Iso shrugged. “Just observation and analysis and thought. Trial and error too, to some extent. Also, spite. To be honest, it’s mostly spite.”

“Alright,” Theora said, tongue dry, throat slightly scratchy. She was still dealing with the remains of her furious outburst. “Alright,” she repeated. “So, you wanted to show me that Main Quest?”

Iso nodded. “As Dema’s travelling companion, I need you to be aware that she is in danger. If even I got the quest, then many people probably have it. After all, that Brat took quite the risk assigning it to me, and I dare say, it backfired spectacularly. Poor thing’s probably still sweating buckets right now. Oh, I can only hope. Anyway. It wouldn’t have done this to me unless it was desperate.”

“You really don’t like that System,” Theora murmured.

“Of course I don’t. It offended me in several ways right after my resurrection, but that’s not really what bothers me. What bothers me is that it’s just wrong about Dema. Dead wrong.”

“Dead wrong?”

Iso nodded.

“How do you know?”

The girl pointed at her chest. “That’s Dema’s blood, right? You saw her make me?”

“Her blood, yes,” Theora confirmed.

“There we go. It’s her blood. I feel it every day of my life. And that’s why I know there’s no way. I don’t care what the System thinks it knows — this blood can’t possibly come from someone who’s evil.” She shrugged with a few clicks. “It’s chock-full of love. The System is wrong.”