“Hey Jade, you don’t think that protective bubble is doing anything…weird down there, do you?”

Jade paused, looking up at Jeff from the slate of stone she’d been inscribing.

“Hmm? What do you mean, weird?”

Jeff scratched restlessly at a dry patch on the top of his bald, blue-skinned scalp. He thought he was starting to develop a case of stress-induced psoriasis. I need to get better sleep, he told himself. They say that’s the most important thing you can do.

He pulled up an analysis report that he’d just finished creating. After the little mishap with the Vision last week, Jade’s team had been hard at work projecting possible outcomes.

“I’m not entirely sure, but—” Jeff didn’t want to be rude to the Goddess, but the bubble of protection she’d put up around the hydrothermal vent had seriously fucked up the accuracy of his projections. He’d had to dig deep into his tomes of probability theory to come up with anything, and even his best efforts were just possibilities.

He knew from experience that area-based magic could have some seriously strange effects. Living creatures all reacted differently to the presence of densely concentrated magical energy, and Jeff had even heard of inorganic matter being affected.

Worst of all, no one had any accurate intel from inside the protective barrier. It was sealed off tighter than a clamshell, and without that information, Jeff had to make-do with models of what might be going on.

If anyone could have done the protective bubble spell without making a mistake, it would be Jade, but even without mistakes, there could be issues.

“I’ve been running some tests, inputting different scenarios, and in, uh, an alarming number of cases, we’re getting some—some unusual results. Like this one here,” he pointed to his screen, where a three dimensional graph fluctuated wildly. “I set the initial conditions to include some kind of minor magical interference from Simon, just in case he managed to do anything before you put the bubble up. And, well…”

He switched his display to the real-world interpretation mode, which showed microbes in elaborate spacesuits piloting UFOs that shot laser beams onto a city of futuristic skyscrapers.

“Err, sorry.”

Jeff refined the likelihood parameters and turned down the artistic interpretation knob. The display changed to a swarm of basic unarmed microbes attacking a group of amoebas who defended a small rise in the ground.

“Even this one has some unlikely modifiers; I just chose it as an example of what could be going on. I’m sure you know the details of the actual magic better than I do.”

Jeff coughed. It did not feel right, questioning the decisions of a being who could end his existence in a breath.

“But the point is, things might be a whole lot tougher than expected for our girl down there.” Jade hadn’t explained the full details of the challenge to her staff, but from the resources she’d invested, it was clear that this mission was of particular importance to the Goddess. And Jeff hadn’t made it to where he was by disappointing his boss. If that meant being the bearer of bad news, so be it.

Jade frowned, then began to pace.

“No word from Simon?” she asked the head of her Communications team, who shook her head in reply. Jade turned back to Jeff.

“Expected impact on her likelihood of success?”

He shrugged helplessly.

“Not good, but it’s specific to what’s actually going on down there. For all we know, nothing has changed at all, or the changes have helped her.”

Jeff tapped quickly on his keyboard and turned a few more knobs, and the display changed again, this time to a group of microbes and pale wrinkled organisms, all huddled around a yellow vent and singing together.

He reached for the volume control, then thought better of it, and just watched Jade, who eventually spoke.

“Well, I’ll see if there are any workarounds, but unless there’s anything we can do to help…” she glanced at another team-lead, whose head shook as well. Jade’s face grew grim.

“We’ll just have to trust her to figure things out on her own.”

----------------------------------------

As Lucy searched for a nice cave in which to rest for a while and plan her next moves, she thought about the strangeness of her current situation.

So far, fighting for her survival had left her little enough time to put her thoughts in order, but now that she had plenty of energy and wasn’t in immediate physical danger, she found her mind probing more deeply as she thought about everything that had happened so far.

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Things had started off well enough.

Well, things started off terrifying and strange, but they’ve gotten a lot stranger since!

And no less terrifying. In fact, as she thought back to the sight of the Bug-Man, floating in a bubble of air with a blank expression and shimmering eyes after destroying Lucy’s cilia, she felt her cytoplasm run a bit cold.

What the fuck is going on down here? she wondered. From the moment she’d seen the humanoid creature, she had believed the gods were somehow involved. But he clearly hadn’t been put here just to kill her, or he would have done so immediately after coming into contact with her.

Something even stranger was going on.

Could the Bug-Guy be disobeying orders from Simon? A rogue agent of some sort?

That seemed unlikely, but it seemed equally unlikely that he was any kind of local organism. She just didn’t know.

And then there was Rikorlak.

Lucy still had mixed feelings about working together, but he was clearly just going to follow her around at a distance anyways, so she figured she might as well keep him close. His distractions had proven quite useful in the fighting before, and she wasn’t about to turn down an advantage that might save her life. There was a chance he was lying and just waiting to get stronger so he could kill her, but if that was his goal, he could’ve just let her die at the sulfur pits.

Lucy returned to the question of what was causing organisms around here to change.

She could accept Rikorlak’s story of being changed from his usual form into a microbe when he got near the hydrothermal vent. Jade probably had to do something to keep Simon from physically intervening, and making it so enemy agents who entered the area got turned into microorganisms seemed like exactly the kind of petty justice a god would enjoy.

But what about the others? The mutated doctor-larvae and the red-membraned microbe were more concerning, since neither seemed to have come from the outside. Why were they changing, if they were just normal local organisms?

Whatever was going on was influencing not only single organisms but whole ecosystems. Lucy had seen some pretty amazing things under a microscope, but never a society of tiny wrinkled organisms that herded other microbes for food!

For a moment, self-pity rose up in Lucy, a crashing wave of overwhelming confusion and indecision that briefly overrode everything else.

What is there to do about it all, though? she thought helplessly. They’re gods, and I’m not even a human right now. This would’ve been hard enough just trying not to get gobbled up by regular amoebas. Now I’ve gotta deal with…

She looked behind herself at Rikorlak, who was currently swimming in circles, entertaining the smaller red-membraned microbe.

Now I’ve gotta deal with monsters and other people, she finished. Despite the novelty and sense of relief she felt at talking to another sentient being, she couldn’t help but hope that her future would be a little bit…simpler.

At least for a while, she thought, sending a little prayer up to Jade. Just let me get a grip on things, then throw the weird shit at me! That’s not too much to ask, is it?

She looked up, where miles of water separated her from the life she had once known, but as usual, it didn’t feel like anyone was listening.

Lucy continued along as her emotions roiled, keeping her Awareness peeled for threats as she worked her way forwards with her flagellum. She glided through the water easily, and the current in the open area still seemed to be pulling her along as she swam, so she made quick progress. She stayed low and close to the stone wall, uneasy at the wide area above her and to the side.

She had come a decent distance since chipping her way free of the cavern with the sulfur pits, and so far, she hadn’t come across any crevices large enough to actually be worth staying in for defensive purposes. She also hadn’t come across anything that wanted to kill her, though, so that was good.

After a few moments of anxiety, Lucy felt her resolve return, like a tiny bit of solid ground rising up from a churning sea.

She may be embroiled in schemes that went beyond her, but she was still in control of her own actions. Until she worked out what exactly was going on and what she could do about it, she just had to focus on what was in front of her, and plan for the future.

The world around her would change, as it always had.

In a sense, it was fitting. Lucy had expected this challenge to be more difficult than anything she’d ever experienced, but she had also expected it to be simple: a straightforward path with a beginning and an end. And a hard, clear path between them.

But that’s not how life works, is it?

The world had never acted exactly as she’d expected or desired it to as a human, so why would it now?

Lucy was sure she could sit down and think up excuses. She was in an extraordinary situation after all, and things were still crazier than she had imagined. She had signed up to fight microbes, not bugs with crazy eyes and deadly claws! And who ever said anything about picking up stragglers?

But whatever her objections or complaints, it didn’t change the way things were. Whatever was happening, it was out of her control.

For now.

As Lucy scanned the stone for shelter and kept an eye out for danger, she couldn’t deny the spark of ambition that kindled inside her.

It was an irrational impulse, perhaps. To think that she could have an effect on a situation where the gods were involved was absurd.

But, as things were, the physical scale of things at least hadn’t changed. Some of them may be freakishly advanced, but she was still fighting microbe-sized organisms, and she still had the advantage of her System. Of choice.

Rikorlak had mentioned a system of his own, but when Lucy asked, the interface he’d described was far simpler than hers, and mostly seemed to keep track of his basic metabolic needs.

And the red-membraned microbe hadn’t understood what she’d been asking about at all, though Lucy wasn’t sure if that meant they didn’t have a system or just didn’t know how to access it.

The world around her may have changed, but Lucy’s position hadn’t.

And right now, she needed two things.

To learn more about the world around me so I can plan for the future.

And to get stronger.

Just as her steadiness began to return and she started to feel centered again, she finally found the perfect cave.

It was about halfway up the stone wall she’d been following, and opened up only after a narrow squeeze that would keep anything too large from getting in.

Lucy felt the tightness of her membrane relax in relief.

See, she told herself, you just need to think things through and remember what you’re fighting for, and the Universe will—

A tangled rush of organisms swarmed out of the cave; small worms that were little more than thin writhing tubes with mouths at one end.

As they swam towards her in a mass of snapping jaws, Lucy took a deep breath to get over her surprise, and then got ready for the first combat test of her fungal symbiotic system.

As she prepared her enzymes, she took in the simple, wriggling forms with their soundless gaping jaws.

At least these ones can’t talk.