“I hope you’re right,” Theora murmured, but Iso’s words did give her a lot of hope. Their daughter wouldn’t complete her Main Quest. In fact, she was actively fighting against the System, in what seemed like some kind of informational war.

‘It’s going to be really fun to reverse-engineer that,’ she had said.

At that, Theora remembered. “There is something I want to show you too,” she spoke slowly, glancing over her HUD. “How do I… How do I share a ‘view’?”

Iso lit up, the feelers on her head twitching slightly. “Oh, that’s really easy! You just open an Interface window you want to show, then you go to ‘Options’ and then you select ‘Share with Party Members’.”

Theora did as told, but… “It’s not there.”

Iso went, “Huh?” and frowned, but then she raised her finger in the air. “Right! Gotta activate the function in settings first. Dunno why. I think it’s a security measure of some kind. Want me to walk you through it?”

Theora nodded awkwardly. She had never really engaged much with the System, and especially after messing herself up so bad, looking at it just gave her bad memories and pain. Most of the System prompts Theora looked at were the ones the System shoved in her face.

She wasn’t aware of even half the things Iso showed her, which included a few recommended configurations to display additional obscure stats, and activating something called a ‘developer mode’ which showed a bunch of information, although Iso had explained that this unfortunately didn’t yield any extra privileges, just more stuff to see.

Theora stared at most of the things Iso showed her with the solemn intention to deactivate them again later, because Theora really didn’t need to know when she’d last activated a Skill, or its internal ID number.

“The System is really complex, huh,” Theora hummed at some point.

“Yeah! Pretty cool, right?”

“Why do you want to see all this information? What is it good for?”

Iso smiled and clacked some of her carapace parts against each other in a little wiggle. “There’s a common Skill called [Compute] that I want to learn. Haven’t got it yet, but I’m doing my best to unlock it. You know what it does?”

Theora nodded. She’d seen it in use before. “Allows one to calculate hard mathematical formulae. It’s a data sorting Skill.”

“Yep. And I’m gathering a lot of data now, so I can [Compute] it later.”

“So, you want to use it on the System? To find out how it works?”

Iso shrugged. “Sure, at some point, that would be ideal, but I have a more specific goal in mind for now. Something that I think might end up being really helpful.”

“I want to know,” Theora said.

“Really?” Iso let out in a cheer. “Ah, nobody ever lets me talk about this. They think I’m lost in nonsense. Alright, so. While going through research in old libraries on the topic of the System, I found some documents hinting at a weird phenomenon. Sometimes, it appears, things happen that aren’t supposed to. Most of the sources say it’s completely random, but there was one written by a person who swore they could replicate it. It was something like… Renaming a few of one’s profile fields to very specific strings of letters, numbers and symbols, then opening a certain view 117 times, then positioning it in a predetermined position in one’s HUD, next gaining a Level-up, some other more specific random stuff, and — voilà! Without fail, his stat sheet would then be upside down until he closed and opened it again.”

“Upside down?”

“Yep! Cognitive mishap, System projected it wrongly into his mind.”

Theora shook her head in confusion. “Just that? How would that be useful?”

Iso laughed. “It’s a proof of concept! That one might be useless, but since he could replicate it, that means that there might be mistakes in the System — errors in its fabric — that we can manipulate in a way to yield outputs that we want. Once I have [Compute], I want to try and drown the System in millions of random inputs, and see if any of them give us unexpected but useful results.”

This was close to incomprehensible to Theora, and she started to understand why nobody ever listened to her on that topic. Still, if Iso said there may be a chance for it to be helpful in fighting the System, Theora would trust and aid her in the process.

“Any ideas for a useful result? Something you want to achieve?”

“There is one that I would like to try first, yes,” Iso nodded with a soft clickety-clack. “The System offers a lot of random rewards. Some items in the store you buy with credits, as well as title unlocks, and of course, reward boxes.”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Theora nodded, and at that, Iso held up both her hands into the air, letting raindrops platter onto her palms. “Well, what if we could manipulate what the random result would be?”

“What? How?” Manipulating results of reward boxes? Being able to, say, get an Orb of Seven Wishes every time one opened one? That sounded ridiculous.

Iso started grinning. “I have some evidence to believe that instead of just randomly picking a result, the System uses a complex algorithm based on arbitrary variables to decide on outcomes. So, if we reverse-engineer that algorithm and find out which variables are used, we may be able to influence these results.”

Oh, that sent shivers down Theora’s spine. What an amazing outlook. If Iso really managed to find a way to do this, she would become incredibly strong.

Iso shrugged. “That will just be the start, though. The more we learn about the System, the more we will be able to break it. I want it laid bare before me in all its glitched-out beauty — to examine and probe it as intensely as it allows.”

“I see,” Theora said.

“I’m still just dreaming all of this. It’s just theory, so far. Who knows, maybe I’ll never find a way.”

“On that note, you require data to find your exploits, right?”

Her feelers jumped. “Yeah! Data is good!”

Theora nodded. “That brings us back to what I wanted to show you. I don’t know if it will help, but it can’t hurt to try.”

Theora had learned by now how to share a view, but she still needed to find the data. Theora didn’t remember the date of when she’d received it, so she couldn’t use the archive search function Iso had shown her. Thus, she just manually scrolled up and up and up.

“Actually, this may take a while,” she murmured as she was still scrolling through the experience notifications of just the last week.

“What are you looking for?”

“Something in my log. Very long time ago.”

“You know what kind of message it is?”

Theora blinked. “I… That’s hard to tell. Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe it’s not a message at all. It’s weird.”

After about half an hour of scrolling and scrolling, and with additional help of Iso in how to hide specific types of messages to make it easier to find, Theora finally hit upon the thousands of lines of error log dumps she’d received so long ago. The ones that had taught her about encoding errors and integer overflows. The ones she suspected were the reason for her glitched-out sheet.

And then, she shared the view.

Iso’s eyes went wide. “What the—” she yelped out. “Red text? This is definitely not supposed to be here. How did you do that!” Her eyes flickered up and down, taking in what she’d been presented with, and for a moment, she was stunned. “That’s beautiful! You got those without even being in developer mode?”

“I broke something, and they leaked out.”

Iso was mesmerised. With big eyes, she scrolled through the data, mouth standing slightly agape. “Internal variable name, storage addresses. Oh, this is incredible.”

“Storage addresses?”

Iso blinked, still looking at System prompts. “Like. Data is stored internally at places, and if we were to understand the layout, we could use exploits to overwrite information in specific areas with ones of our own choosing.” She refocused on Theora’s face and shook her head dismissively. “Just dreaming. Knowing a random address is one thing, but finding a way to remotely overwrite exactly what we want and calling it to be executed is like the holy grail. Still, this is amazing. None of us living in this world were ever supposed to see any of this. I can’t believe it. You are such a gold mine. My mother picked out a wonderful companion.”

Theora was unable to respond and simply started blushing. Not that she agreed — she got access to those error dumps in truly heinous ways that she regretted every day, and getting praised for it felt wrong. But still, she couldn’t help herself. She relished in the fact that her… daughter, in a way, would look at her with such round and large eyes full of curious awe.

As Theora slowly regained some of her mental capacities after having this much information dumped on her, she slowly realised that this entire situation begged another few questions.

“Actually,” she asked. “How did you find us? What brought you to Hallmark?”

Iso shrugged. “Well, I didn’t exactly ‘find you.’ Like, a while ago, another heroine and I got assigned the same quest, and bumped into each other, and kinda clicked? We disagree on some pretty fundamental things, but she is easy to work with. Very earnest and honest. As I said, she strongly opposed meeting you, so she went and did something else today. Think she mentioned going north of town, we’re supposed to meet up later. Ah, I’m rambling.” Iso took a breath, and put her focus back on what she wanted to say. “Either way, what happened was that our string of side quests eventually led us to Hallmark, after a few decades. And people here really talk about you two a lot. When we came here like a week ago, it was only a matter of time until I’d find a way to locate you.”

The more Iso spoke, the more anxious Theora became. It was a faceless feeling at first, just a shape scratching at the insides of her mind with sharp edges, and then, right when she was about to piece it all together, she heard a shout coming from below the hill.

“Little rabbit!? You still up there? Felt your aura earlier. Got angry?”

It was Dema.

“Who’s little rabbit?” Iso shouted down. “There’s only Theora and me here. Who are you?”

“Who’s that!” Dema yelled up, still out of view. “Anyway, little rabbit, remember? A while ago, you said if I find a cool companion, I can bring them with me. Gotta say, I found the perfect one! Travelling companion candidate! You’re gonna love her!”

And at that, Dema’s head finally came up behind the edge of the steep hill. A hissing and boiling sound issued from the same direction, and Theora could soon see the cause: Dema was holding a few blue-hued tentacles in her hand, wrapped around her tar-skinned arm, and they fizzled and wriggled, pumping toxins into her skin, melting it away, leaving blisters and lesions and necrotic rashes. Dema didn’t seem to care.

Soon, what she was dragging up the hill emerged as well. It was a girl Theora recognised with alarm — the tentacles made up her hair. She was being pulled up reluctantly, with an uncomfortable expression on her face, deeply embarrassed and unhappy.

At that, Iso shouted in surprise.

“Bell!”