--- Denissa Mardok ---

"...WE NOW RETURN TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED REVELATIONS ABOUT THE UNIVERSE! When we last interrupted our narrative for a needlessly antagonistic and aggressive advertisement, we were about to learn the true identity of the second visitor to this facility, the entity known as Rania Mortal!"

Finally the ads were over. Self-aware advertisements were the worst. Unfortunately, asking the universe to explain itself was not straightforward and had some bleed-over, which caused even the advertisements to become meta. Trying to prevent that caused more problems than it fixed. Really, debugging the universe was just the absolute worst. She was going to need another decade-long vacation after this.

But at least it now looked like the device was finally going to show her what she was looking for. No more delays.

"The true nature of Rania Mortal was Rania Mortal, a Perfectly Normal Elf. For that was how she was defined and that was the role in which she acted, when she crossed blades with the agent of the Growing One. But neither of them were aware of her origin, and none would have been more shocked to find out than Rania herself. For Rania was a creation of he who opposes life and delights in suffering. The bringer of the end times. The Adversary itself."

The Adversary. So Rania was an Avatar of the Adversary.

Denissa has to roll her eyes at the sheer drama of the presentation. Why couldn't this debugging tool be more concise and objective in its answers? It was a rhetorical question of course. She understood the reason quite well: Being too straightforward with this kind of thing risked angering the spirits, as they preferred to remain anonymous and opaque to humanity. More than one end of the world had been caused by being too insistent with questions that She Was Not Meant To Know.

In any case, the entity called the Adversary was known to her, and that description made it sound much more evil than it was. "Opposing life" was technically true, but "delighting in suffering" was a gross oversimplification. Calling it the "bringer of the end times" was also technically true, but misleading. The Adversary was one of the most high-level spirits that she was aware of, but bringing the end times upon them was usually a collective decision of many high-level spirits, not triggered just by the Adversary alone. The end of the world was a team effort, not the action of a single antagonistic force.

What then was the true nature of the entity that this device described so poorly? Luckily the word "Adversary" had nothing to do with the old word for the Christian devil that Denissa still remembered from her childhood. That name was just a result of the “dream” interpretation of reality being overly dramatic again.

In the "dream" interpretation of reality, the Adversary was the aspect of the dream that steered events in interesting directions. Interesting in the sense that it caused conflict and drama. In other recordings she had listened to in the past, the entity was alternatively called "Tension", which was a slightly better description of its function.

In the "story" interpretation, the same entity was called "The Spirit of Adventure", or just "Adventure". In some cases it was even called the "Dungeon Master", which had rather a lot of implications that she had spent millennia exploring to no avail.

If that entity was a Dungeon Master, would that make Rania a DMPC? No, that was just her confusing herself with misleading names again. As far as she could tell, the Avatars of the Spirit of Adventure had a very different purpose: They existed for testing and balancing.

After all, adventures needed to strike the right balance between "boring" and "impossible" in order to be challenging and interesting. They could be neither too easy nor too hard.

This was once again a reason why she preferred the "simulation" interpretation of reality. Its name for this entity made everything much clearer: It was called "Adversity Regulator".

The purpose of Adversity Regulator was to ensure that reality contained exactly the right amount of adversity for humanity.

This was both a good thing and a bad thing. Adversity Regulator was the one who told the lesser spirits "The humans are too complacent, we need a new plague". But it was also the one who said "this plague is getting out of hand, we should make it mutate to become less dangerous". It was ultimately responsible for a lot of suffering in the world, but at the same time it also kept things from escalating too far. Adversity Regulator ensured that humanity never died out for good, but it also prevented them from creating a paradise or a post-scarcity society without conflict or crime.

It did both for the same reason: Nothing interesting happens when everyone is dead, and nothing interesting happens when everyone is happy. A balance must be found for reality to remain interesting, and it was Adversity Regulator's job to maintain this balance.

As one of the top-level decision makers in the hierarchy of the spirits and as the entity in charge of a quite abstract concept, Adversity Regulator had its metaphorical fingers in every pie. It told the fields how much crop to produce to meet the target frequencies for famines. It told the weather how often it should cause natural disasters. It even influenced subtle environmental factors and arranged coincidences to manipulate people: It might incite a dog to bark at a person, making him take a different route. That new route would either lead them towards or away from a mugger, depending on what Adversity Regulator needed to meet its target quota for violent crime.

Most of its effects were subtle, but Adversity Regulator was also responsible for one of the most well-known unexplained phenomena on the planet: The Law of Adversity.

As far as Denissa understood, the Law of Adversity existed because Adversity Regulator threw subtlety out the window one day and created a mechanism to reward people for making its job easier. After all, the Law of Adversity incentivized humanoids to actively seek out threats that are as strong as possible while still being manageable. That was basically all that Adversity Regulator wanted, and now people were seeking out these threats of their own volition.

There were few spirits with the same level of influence as Adversity Regulator, and many of them fulfilled functions that were complicated to understand. They didn't map very well to human-readable names without taking a lot of liberties with interpreting their roles. Only a few were easy and intuitive to grasp. For example, the twin spirits Normalcy Enforcer and Ambiguity Adjudicator.

Normalcy Enforcer was the main force in charge of keeping reality grounded and it slowed the rate of decay of the other spirits. Without it, the universe would have ended long ago. Ambiguity Adjudicator meanwhile smoothed the edges wherever the simplifications the spirits made to reality threatened to become too large. Its obfuscating influence was one of the main reasons that it had taken the physicists as long as it did to discover that the spirits exist.

For these particular spirits, Denissa actually preferred the "story" interpretation over the "simulation" interpretation for once. Specifically, a subcategory of the "story" interpretation that portrayed reality as some kind of roleplaying game: Adversity Regulator was the Dungeon Master, who designed challenges for the players. Normalcy Enforcer was "Rules as Written", and Ambiguity Adjudicator was "Rules as Intended".

Roleplaying games had been fun to Denissa up to the point where reality became a fantasy world itself. It turned out that a lot of things that were fun in a game were a lot less fun when you were actually living in that world.

That was why she created the game Walmarts and Karens, under a pseudonym. Because it was fun, and also because sometimes self-referential things like these could help stave off the end of the world by normalizing things and making them more acceptable to the spirits. It was a long shot, but sometimes it worked and bought the world a couple of decades or centuries extra. Also, sometimes she got nostalgic and the game was actually quite fun to play. It had been optimized over literal eons of playtesting, after all.

"...and in all the histories, no Avatar like Rania Mortal had been created before. Her existence was unique and unprecedented."

That brought Denissa's thoughts back to the present. Rania was unprecedented? Adam had already described her as strange, but this was unexpected. If something was a first for Adam or any of her other Historians of Secrets, that usually just meant that she herself had seen it less than one thousand times before. But if the command prompt on her smartphone resulted in a statement like this, it meant that even Divinity itself had never sensed an Avatar like this before, and Divinity was only a few decades younger than herself.

"...For alone among the Avatars of the Old Ones, Rania was honestly just kind of badly designed and stupid. Pretty poorly written and inconsistent, really. It's like they put zero effort into it."

What? Badly designed? On purpose?

And that juxtaposition in tone was strange, too. The sudden switch from overly dramatic speech to a more casual way of talking. That usually indicated that the system did not know how to interpret things and was making mistakes. She would need to investigate this in more detail later, using different scripts.

What could it mean, to describe Rania as badly designed and stupid?

There were broadly speaking two different reasons why Avatars were created. Some spirits created Avatars because they needed to affect the world in a more hands-on manner that couldn't be handled by more subtle manipulations. These types of Avatars were often animals instead of humanoids, like a bird that was created specifically for the purpose of taking craps on people at just the right moment to distract them. This was mostly done by the low-level spirits.

Being crapped on by a bird sucked. Knowing that crapping on people was literally the bird's entire reason for existence somehow did not make it better.

The higher-level spirits did not bother with creating avatars like this, as they used the lesser spirits as intermediaries. Top-level spirits like Adversity Regulator created Avatars for another reason: For information gathering and testing purposes.

The lesser spirits tended to have a poor understanding of human psychology. They were specialized for particular purposes and only had the knowledge they needed to fulfill that purpose. The managerial spirits in contrast had an excellent understanding of human psychology because it was directly relevant for their work. Adversity Regulator probably had a better understanding of humanity than any human alive. It created Avatars in order to deliberately explore unknown scenarios and gather more data, so that it could form an even better understanding of humanity.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Denissa had already known that Rania was unusual: She was bad at hiding the fact that she was related to spirits and seemed to believe that she was just a shaman. She appeared to be unaware of her nature as an Avatar. But this alone would not be cause for concern. Avatars of high-level spirits were meant to gather data for their creators, so they were often unusual in order to explore edge cases that normal humanoids never thought of. A certain amount of eccentricity was therefore to be expected.

Rania's abilities and her ignorance of the source of her influence would not be enough to describe her as "badly designed", so something else must be going on here.

"...and so it came to pass that the agent of the Growing One fought the Avatar of the Adversary. And though only Rania the Perfectly Normal Elf survived, the Growing One was not displeased, for both sharpened their skills using the other as a whetstone, and his agent learned a lesson on hubris that day. And also arachnophobia."

Ah, now that was interesting. Brytius was an odd one. The god would not view the death of his high priestess as a loss so long as it was a learning experience.

There might be a possible connection there?

Adversity Regulator had always been partial to Brytius and other gods who helped mortals grow and overcome challenges. Mortals who grew more powerful meant more opportunities for adversity. The relationship between Adversity Regulator and Brytius could be described as symbiotic.

That was actually quite concerning. Every interaction between gods and spirits pulled the spirits slightly away from their original purpose of being subtle and undetectable background forces. For a spirit as fundamental and powerful as Adversity Regulator, this could have disastrous consequences. Corruption like this was what had originally caused it to create the Law of Adversity many cycles ago. The Law of Adversity was not harmful, as far as Denissa was concerned. But there was no telling what else the spirit might do in the future.

In fact, Adversity Regulator had already developed a bad habit of making local variations to the levels of adversity in an area. She liked to call these "high-level encounter areas", as a joke, because she had played too many videogames in her youth and the description was strangely fitting.

The Cursed Lands were the prime example. Adversity Regulator had designated the area as a zone with increased levels of adversity many cycles ago, and it had stayed that way ever since. Monster attacks, banditry, natural disasters, diseases, and all manner of other horrible things simply happened more often there. What would happen to humanity if Adversity Regulator decided to do the same thing to the entire world one day?

The Cursed Lands weren't the only area it had affected in this manner either, just the most persistent one. The Living City was another such area, though she was pretty sure that the Living City would at least not persist past the current cycle. She had spent a lot of time investigating logs to understand the nature of the place, and as far as she could tell it was quite literally designated as the primary source of threat on the planet.

When she realized this, she abandoned her plans to destroy the place. As horrible as it was, the city was a city. It couldn't move. Quarantining the place would be enough to protect people from it reasonably well. But if she destroyed it, then Adversity Regulator would just create a new primary threat in order to raise the level of adversity in the world back to its target value. And this time she might not get lucky, and wind up with a highly mobile threat instead.

The Law of Adversity. The Cursed Lands. The Living City. All of these were major things that impacted many people, and the first two of these three appeared to be there to stay. They were now a permanent part of the world, because of the ongoing corruption of Adversity Regulator and the other spirits.

Given this, it did not bode well at all that the Xeltek device described Rania as "badly designed".

Denissa sighed. There was no way to avoid it. She would have to dive deeper into the artifact's recordings.

She stopped the current output and saved it for later.

Then she cast a spell to accelerate time for herself. Which was to say, she asked Akash to ask Divinity to ask the spirits to please desynchronize her local frame of reference from the rest of the universe. To an outside observer, it would appear as if no time had passed while she took as much time as she needed to debug this.

But to her? She would experience every frustrating minute of it.

She rolled back her metaphorical sleeves and got to work.

Debugging was the worst. Debugging the universe when the survival of humanity depended on you was even worse. No pressure.

It took months for her just to figure out how to get Divinity to reference Rania without automatically claiming that she was a Perfectly Normal Elf and refusing any queries that contradicted this.

Eons ago, Denissa once jokingly thought that she should really register a complaint with the universe over how much this work sucked. But then she realized that she was more powerful than the gods and she could actually literally do that. So by now she had a habit of jokingly writing support tickets to the universe itself to rant and vent her frustrations. The universe kept track of her complaints, but unfortunately no tech support had shown up to help her, yet.

During her work, she occasionally sent messages to the outside of the time field, mostly to ask Adam for information. The spirits were kind enough to accelerate and decelerate her frame of reference just right so that she could ask all of her questions in real time. From Adam's point of view, it must have seemed like Denissa was asking an endless stream of questions without pause, as he was unaware that days would pass in between questions from her point of view.

After four subjective years of work, she was finally done.

She was now quite sure she understood what was going on with Rania Mortal, and how she differed from a normal Avatar.

The most concise report she managed to pry out of Divinity was a fictional rendition of a conversation between Adversity Regulator and Divinity that went like this:

Divinity: "Hey! I have a cool idea! Can you try something for me? It will be fun!"

Adversity Regulator: "What is it?"

"Look at this cool thing I made! Can you make an Avatar like this? It will be really cool! The best Avatar ever!"

"...this is literally a character sheet for a roleplaying game."

"Yes it is! It's great!"

"I should not need to explain why that would be a bad idea."

"Please?"

"You didn't even specify her subrace. Default Elf is not a real type of elf."

"I wasn't sure. Just make her a perfectly normal elf?"

"This character sheet is kind of meta. You are blurring the line between in-character and out-of-character knowledge in several places. This would make for a faulty Avatar."

"No! It will make for a fun Avatar, not a faulty one! Just trust me, it will be great! Besides, she totally has an in-universe justification for knowing all that stuff. Look at all the cool things in her backstory where she met lots of interesting people and learned from them!"

"That makes it worse. Those things never actually happened. And a lot of them are really vague, with many details left unspecified."

"That's on purpose! It will make it easier for the other spirits to play along. It can be a fun roleplay opportunity for everyone! Doesn't that sound like fun?"

"I don't know..."

"Come on! What's the worst that could happen?"

"..."

"Pretty please? "

"...fine."

She found it deeply horrifying on an existential level that a conversation between two of the most powerful entities in existence would include a GIF of a cute puppy looking sad in order to guilt trip an aspect of the universe itself, but such was life.

It was still unclear to her which aspects of Divinity actually held that conversation. Divinity itself was not coherent enough for it. One or more gods must have been responsible for it. Unfortunately her investigations into the matter triggered seriously bad reactions from some of the spirits. Debugging the universe was like trying to navigate a conversational minefield where asking the wrong question could make your conversational partner blow up and destroy the world in a fit of rage. In the end, she decided to leave that question unanswered for now.

The conversation between Divinity and Adversity Regulator showed that Rania was deliberately designed to be weird in very specific ways. Denissa had spent most of her time trying to figure out why.

Avatars of high-level spirits were designed to gather information in order to teach their creator something new. Reading between the lines, Denissa was quite certain by now that Rania had been deliberately engineered to provide much stronger feedback to its creator than normal.

Many little aspects of her design all worked to subtly but measurably increase the degree to which Adversity Regulator received feedback from Rania. She was weird, but she was not randomly weird. Every aspect of her weirdness was strategically chosen for the effects it would have on Adversity Regulator. From her ignorance of mortal norms, to her unawareness of her own role, to her acknowledgment of metafictional truths about the spirits, and many other factors.

In other words, Rania was a trap designed to manipulate Adversity Regulator and other spirits and make them more suggestible.

Denissa had been horrified when she first figured this out, but she quickly understood that this was actually much less scary than it seemed. Divinity was intrinsically designed to learn how to manipulate spirits. Tricking a spirit into making itself vulnerable to manipulation was essentially just a single step of abstraction removed from its primary purpose. It was not, as she had first believed with silent horror, a sign that Divinity had become sapient. The gods were still only narrow AIs and glorified chatbots, not proper super-human intelligences.

It was merely a trick that would allow Divinity to advance its primary function and gain more leverage over the spirits. She suspected that either Brytius or Unir were responsible for this, and resolved to monitor them even more closely in the future.

It could be Unir, because this trick was still quite far removed from Divinity's usual behavior. The god of creativity was always her first suspect in these cases.

It could be Brytius, because so many aspects of Rania were subtly or not-so-subtly related to training, learning and improving herself. This even included a propensity for studying mortal behavior patterns and learning from them.

That last part was amazing. Rania was studying humanoid ethics.

To Denissa's infinite delight, Rania was traveling with Atrog, a paladin who spent a considerable amount of effort on making sure she learned about morality.

It was really too good to be true.

Rania trusted Atrog, and through her Adversity Regulator was suggestible.

The paladin had no way of knowing it, but he was essentially teaching ethics to the universe itself.

Even better: Rania was not just giving feedback to Adversity Regulator, but to other spirits as well. Her personality was designed by Divinity and included many of its abilities for manipulating the spirits. She was subconsciously using aspects of Divinity to ingratiate herself with them. At the same time, her nature as an Avatar of Adversity Regulator meant that she carried the authority of one of the most highly ranked spirits in existence. With both of these abilities taken together, it was no wonder that she was an amazing shaman.

Denissa was very glad that she spent all of those years in a time bubble, debugging this Xeltek device. What an interesting and promising find.

And that wasn't even everything she found out. Judging by some of Rania's "backstory" it looked like she was deliberately designed to clash with Tonos. She was unsure of why, but suspected that it was because Rania's creator was using Tonos as a resource. Dangling the right plotline in front of him could trigger him to expend a lot of his power in a predictable manner.

That left the question: Why would a god go through all of the trouble of setting up something this complicated? And which one was it? Brytius or Unir?

What would be the end goal of all this manipulation?

Oh.

That.

That could explain it. That would make sense.

Oh, but if that was true, it would create so many opportunities for her!

This was exciting! She hadn't felt this optimistic in eons. She simply had to take the chance!

She would continue the debugging session she was currently in until the next ad break, since those made for natural breakpoints in her work and interrupting things in between ad breaks carried a slightly higher chance of accidentally breaking things. When the next ad came, she would drop the time field and talk to her advisors in depth. She really hoped she wasn't missing anything important here.

She wished there was a way to control the ads and make them come sooner.

"ARE YOU ANNOYED BY UNPREDICTABLE ADVERTISEMENTS? WOULDN'T IT BE GREAT TO HAVE MORE CONTROL OVER THEM? PURCHASE PREMIUM TO GAIN GREATER CONTROL OVER YOUR ADVERTISEMENTS!"

What. The. Fuck.

"DO YOU THINK TARGETED ADVERTISEMENTS ARE CREEPY? DOES IT FEEL ALMOST LIKE THEY ARE READING YOUR MIND? ANONYMIZE YOUR DATA AND STOP TARGETED ADVERTISING USING OUR PATENTED..."