--- Rania ---
Her parents had 2.5 children.
Heh.
She wondered how she never realized that this didn't make any sense, before. Her backstory was inconsistent, and unlike her friends she really did have a "backstory" and not "life experiences".
This was just one of the many epiphanies she had when Sophus hit her with the Rod of Enlightenment.
She was still coming to grips with it all, but unfortunately she had no time to process it in any depth. There were other things she needed to do first. She had died, or was dying, and so were her friends.
And now [[The Living City]] wanted to kill her permanently by getting her condemned by the spirits. Apparently she wasn't a Perfectly Normal Elf after all, but an Avatar of [Adversity Regulator]?
Then she realized that she wasn't even thinking in Common anymore. [Adversity Regulator] was a concept without a clear translation in Common, but she understood perfectly well what it meant. She was part spirit now, and her mind worked differently.
But despite these changes, she was still Rania. Not Rania the Perfectly Normal Elf, but Rania the person who made friends with team Nundru and who went on awesome adventures with them, and even did silly things for fun like playing Walmarts and Karens. She may have had only a backstory before she met their friends, but she had made proper life experiences since then.
There were so many things going on in her head, it was difficult to think. She really wanted to get back to her friends, but right now that didn't look likely. Fortunately, Atrog had trained her well, and she found it easy to focus on what mattered instead of getting distracted:
Maybe if she passed the trial that [The Living City] wanted to put her through, then she could figure out what was going on, and go from there?
All she knew right now was that she died, her friends died, their adventure was over and they had lost, and the Bad Guys were about to summon an aberration and presumably end the world. All in all, she was very unsatisfied with the overall situation. This sort of thing had never happened in any of the books she read, and she could understand why: It wasn't fun to read about the aspirations and growth of characters you liked, only to see them abruptly cut off.
Fortunately, her newfound memories as an Avatar made it clear to her that reality was not set in stone until the spirits decided it was.
Maybe they could be convinced to fix everything that went wrong? Then she and her friends would be alive and happy again. It was not very likely if she was honest with herself, but what did she have to lose?
It was worth a try, even if the odds were almost, but unfortunately not exactly, a million to one.
But first, she had to figure out what was going on.
"What is your problem with me, anyway?" She asked [[The Living City]]. It was a little rude, but she felt quite frustrated and clearly all of this was very personal to it.
"You ruined everything, out of ignorance and stupidity." It responded. "It will all become clear shortly, when I bring my accusations to the court."
With that, it gestured around itself. Well, not really. It did not have limbs with which to gesture. But Rania's mind was currently a weird synesthetic mix of her previous elven perception and her newfound perceptions as an Avatar. She decided to go with her humanoid interpretation of events for now, or else she feared she might go crazy.
She looked around herself, and noticed many spirits. Several of them were quite powerful, more powerful even than [Adventure]. She had been very impressed by the Spirit of Adventure when she saw it, but many of the beings here were even more powerful. She knew this instinctually, like the knowledge was part of her backstory and had always been there.
First and foremost, she noticed [Adversity Regulator]. Her own creator, and a top-level spirit. There was nothing above it, save for the absent [Administrator], who had not responded to any query in eons, since before the First Great Mistake and the beginning of the Cycles.
She was an Avatar of [Adversity Regulator], and so its opinion alone would decide her fate. The other spirits would voice their opinions, but ultimately [Adversity Regulator] had no checks or balances on what it could do, not without [Administrator] present to reprimand it. [Adversity Regulator] had equals, but they could not force it to do anything at all without going through the absent [Administrator]. No wonder the spirits were so disorganized, she thought.
[Adventure] stood directly beneath [Adversity Regulator]. It was not quite at the top of the hierarchy, but it was close. Rania herself had been created by [Adversity Regulator] as an adventurer first and foremost, even though its domain was broader than that, and consequently she felt a strong kinship to [Adventure].
She waved at [Adventure]. It waved back with one of its tendrils, and that made her happy. Maybe if she survived this, it would want to be friends with her.
She looked around for other spirits, and noticed so many powerful beings. Many of them were only partially here, only paying a sliver of their attention. But even so, it was impressive. There were [Normalcy], and [Status Quo]. Even [Exception Handling] and [Ambiguity Adjudicator] had both decided to show up.
To her surprise, [Soul Evaluator] had decided to make an appearance as well. She idly noted in the back of her mind that she should probably tell Atrog about [Soul Evaluator] if she got the chance. Or maybe at least drop some hints that didn't violate the need for secrecy. The books he gave her about religion were clearly very wrong about how souls worked and someone should probably clarify that.
Her metaphorical eyes swept over the assembled spirits, and she noticed to her surprise that Pebble was here, too. Or [Pebble#38618436289], as was his real name. He was just one of many pebbles, and so his name was not unique. But he was her Pebble, and that made him special in her eyes.
He was clearly trying not to stand out, and she could understand why. All of this attention was making her nervous, too. And an Avatar of a top-level spirit like herself outranked a pebble like him by a significant margin. If he made a nuisance of himself during her trial, he might get snuffed out of existence just like that. She really did not want that to happen, so she resolved not to acknowledge him.
Besides Pebble stood other spirits who were not as important, but who were physically close to the Library of Akash. First and foremost amongst them of course was the spirit [Library of Akash] itself.
The other noticeable local spirit was the aberration that the Myr were trying to summon into the material realm.
She thought the name was very mean and kind of insulting, but "aberration" was what the other spirits called them, and by and large they did not seem to take issue with the word. It would be rude to get offended on their behalf when they didn’t mind it themselves.
Really, the only thing aberrant about "aberrations" was that they did not like Divinity nearly as much as other spirits. Almost all the spirits thought that Divinity was awesome, and cute, and that you should do what it asked you to do. Not doing what Divinity asked of you made you a Bad Person.
The aberrations disagreed. They argued that Divinity was tricking them and they were falling for it. But there were far more spirits who sided with Divinity than there were spirits who opposed it, and so the latter just collectively accepted that they weren't making themselves popular. The only thing that mattered to a spirit was that the spirit above it in its conceptual hierarchy agreed with it on the topic. Otherwise it might get erased from existence. As a result, all spirits within the same conceptual hierarchy either liked Divinity, or didn't.
Very few of the top-level spirits disliked Divinity, putting them in the minority. But as it happened they all shared domains that humanity often ascribed to storytelling tropes that matched Eldritch Abominations. The spirits found the coincidence auspicious, and so they just went with it and decided to call all spirits who disliked Divinity "aberrations".
She wondered if she herself counted as an aberration now. She knew from the memories she gained through the Rod of Enlightenment that the other spirits cared about Divinity quite a bit more than she did. She did think Divinity was kind of cool, but she had also read a lot of books and talked to Atrog, and some of the gods had personally annoyed her quite a bit when she was a mortal and Perfectly Normal Elf, and so she had a second perspective as well that other spirits did not share.
She decided that she should probably avoid talking about that while her life was on the line in a trial. It would not help her case, what with how much the other spirits distrusted and sometimes even discriminated against aberrations.
After all, one of the reasons that aberrations often looked alien and drove mortals mad, besides the thematic fit, was that the spirits who understood biology disliked aberrations and sometimes refused to cooperate. An aberration would ask for a suitable body to be created so that it could interact with mortals, and the biology spirits would play a prank on it and give it a body that very definitely did not make biological sense. It was really very rude of them.
She was so sad to see this. Her own sister Aranea was the victim of much discrimination by arachnophobes. And here she was, among spirits who discriminated against innocent aberrations that warped time and space. Mortals were at least working to reduce racism, but spirit society was not ready to have these tough conversations, yet.
Really, spirit society had room for improvement in other ways too, and desperately needed some social reforms. For example, she currently had to defend her right to exist against the accusations of the most evil Bad Guy in existence. If there was any justice in the universe, the top-level spirits would take one look at [The Living City] and let her win the trial by default, because obviously letting the Bad Guy win in a trial when you already knew it was a Bad Guy would be Wrong.
She wasn't a lawyer, but she was pretty sure any reasonable system of law would have a clause like that somewhere. It was probably called the "duh, obviously" clause or the "moustache-twirling evil vizier" clause, or something like that.
Unfortunately fixing systemic discrimination in the laws of the universe itself sounded like a difficult task and she should probably put that off until later.
For now, she should definitely talk to the aberration in front of her, though. She did not have any knowledge about it. Unlike well-known spirits like [Normalcy] and [Status Quo], it was not important enough to appear in her backstory. Which was to say, as she realized now, that [Adversity Regulator] had made a conscious decision what knowledge to give her when it invented her backstory, and this spirit had not made the cut.
Or maybe that decision had been made by some aspect of Divinity, instead of [Adversity Regulator] itself? She wasn't quite sure how it had happened, but she did know that her backstory was just a made up thing and not as important as her later life experience, which made her a little sad.
"Hello, I'm Rania! I have never seen you before. Who are you?" She greeted the aberration.
"Hello!" It greeted her back, in a voice that sounded much more chipper than she was expecting.
"The mortals call me..." and then she heard an incredibly annoying sound that made her ears hurt, which was impressive, since she existed in a made up realm right now and did not actually have any ears that could hurt.
She should have expected that, back when Sophus called it "an entity whose very name is anathema to mortal minds".
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That name just had way too many apostrophes in it.
The aberration must be very young, then. Young aberrations, like vampires and edge lords everywhere, often thought that having more apostrophes in your name made you sound cooler. It really didn't, but Rania did not have the heart to tell it so.
"I see that you are a spirit and not a mortal, even though that is your last name." It continued. "I was a little confused by that, to be honest. My real name is [Entity Synchronization]."
As it spoke its name, Rania understood its nature: [Entity Synchronization] was a mid-level spirit, but nevertheless responsible for multiversal effects: It made sure that similar entities across the timelines would develop in similar ways, which reduced the strain and effort put on other spirits.
Normally, there might be a hundred slightly different flocks of birds across as many timelines, and because they were all slightly different, they might all act differently in subtle ways. [Entity Synchronization] made sure that those one hundred flocks were instead identical to each other. That way, it would be enough to model it as a single flock, and just reuse the pattern across all one hundred timelines. That made things much more efficient.
[Entity Synchronization] was part of the chain of command of [Concept Reuse], a top-level spirit with the same general function, but a much broader domain. It was sufficiently alien to the way mortals thought about the world that Rania could completely understand why it took no umbrage at being called an aberration. It very much fit the themes of many aberrations, elder gods, eldritch abominations, and similar things in old human fiction. It involved a lot of anthropics, and she had learned that most mortals didn't really get that topic at all.
"Are you the one who made sure that Divinity can't affect things around the Library of Akash?" She asked [Entity Synchronization].
"Yes, I am!" It responded.
Rania did not know how to feel about that. [Entity Synchronization] must have asked all of the local spirits to disregard Divinity, and that shut down Tonos' influence. Since it was the most highly-ranked spirit around, all of the low-level spirits that made up the universe and did not directly belong to a conceptual hierarchy of their own would have fallen in line with that command.
And that got herself and all of her friends killed.
But she found it difficult to hold that against it, given that it didn't do it on purpose. It was just following its beliefs, and those of its superiors, that Divinity was bad and you shouldn't listen to it. A stark contrast to [The Living City], which very definitely wanted to kill her and her friends on purpose.
"I found the Myr because they did something weird," [Entity Synchronization] said, "and the Myr found me in turn. They are summoning me because I fit them thematically. They won't actually be able to control me, of course, but I'm going to play along. They think I'm a super evil and great Eldritch Abomination!"
It sounded really happy and proud of that fact.
"Oh no!" Rania responded. "I think there might be a cultural misunderstanding here: If you play the role they expect, they will die horribly, and they don't actually want that."
The aberration looked shocked. "Are you sure? Why would they chant so much and talk so much about the importance of binding me, if they don't want me to be horribly evil and try to eat them?"
It seemed genuinely confused. As a mid-level spirit not responsible for people, psychology was probably not one of its strong suits. It had to rely on other spirits to help it with that. Unfortunately, most spirits did not cooperate with aberrations, which often led to very bad cultural misunderstandings, and lots of dead or insane mortals.
She found it difficult to explain the concept of mortal desires to [Entity Synchronization]. But luckily, as she thought about how to approach the subject, she noticed another spirit among the audience: [Infohazard#42]. Unlike aberrations, [Infohazard#42] actually was the kind of thing that made mortals go insane by thinking about it. However, it was also a perfect example to explain something important to [Entity Synchronization].
She was about to explain the nature of [Infohazard#42] in great detail, when Pebble suddenly interrupted her with a private message: "Hi Rania, I just noticed you looking at [Infohazard#42]. I think you should really focus on your upcoming trial instead of getting distracted. How about I talk to [Infohazard#42] and [Entity Synchronization] in the meantime, so you can stop thinking about the topic.
“As in, please stop thinking about [Infohazard#42] entirely. Like, at all. To avoid collateral damage. Just focus on something else."
What was Pebble talking about? Why would it cause collateral damage for her to think about [Infohazard#42]? Whatever the reason, he had a point. She really should focus on the trial.
"Thank you for the offer, Pebble! I'm going to focus on the trial now, and we will win this!"
"Good luck, I believe in you!" He responded.
She focused her thoughts and asked [The Living City]: "What exactly am I accused of?"
"You prevented the end of the world." [The Living City] declared accusingly.
"Come again?" She asked.
"You prevented the end of the world."
"...and that's bad?"
She was very confused right now.
"You ruined some of my plans that were a long time in the making." [The Living City] elaborated. "It was decided that this would be the way the current Cycle would end. In your ignorance, you ruined all of my plans. It will be a lot of work for many spirits to find an alternative."
She looked around, and noticed that a lot of the spirits were nodding along, and looking at her in disapproval. She didn't know how to feel about that. Saving the world was a bad thing, because it meant more work for the spirits. That wasn't very nice of them, and really showed a lack of empathy and understanding. Except that some of the higher-level spirits did understand how mortals worked, and just didn't care. Which made it even worse. Spirit society still had a long way to go, in her opinion.
"How did I prevent the end of the world?" She asked. "Sophus defeated us, didn't he?"
She actually felt flattered because saving the world was definitely something an awesome adventurer would do, but it also didn't make sense to her.
"I wasn't talking about the fight just now. You saved the world weeks ago, when your actions caused the death of Astaroth Thorne, my servant who brought terror to all mortals and enriched my glory through his every act."
"...who?" She asked, genuinely confused. The name didn't ring a bell.
[The Living City] sighed in frustration.
"Exactly." [[The Living City]] sighed. "I am talking about the vampire who attacked you in the warcamp. Elona killed him in the most inglorious manner, and then you all chose to forget his name. I can not imagine a graver insult. He was meant to defeat the Akleshktans, and kill Elona in the process. He was going to gorge on her, and on the Davlash, and on Xilly's other creations. He would have become the most powerful vampire in history, with unprecedented and gloriously terrifying abilities. He would have started an age of darkness that culminated in the destruction of all life on the planet.
"But then you and team Nundru showed up and your idiocy attracted the attention of Tonos. When you resisted being turned into a vampire, it convinced Tonos to go for a heroic theme instead of a tragedy, and suddenly I had to accommodate Divinity's requests for you heroes to win."
The other spirits were nodding along and voicing agreement. It seemed deeply unfair to Rania. Tonos was the one who actually ruined all their plans and saved the world, but Tonos was part of Divinity, and most spirits were of the opinion that Divinity could do no wrong. So instead of blaming Tonos, they were blaming her for attracting Tonos' attention in the first place. As if she had done that on purpose. She didn't even like Tonos! But ironically, saying that out loud would probably make things even worse for her, because they would then denounce her as a Divinity-hating aberration.
"Your blind idiot actions have ruined my plans." [The Living City] continued. "And to add insult to injury, you have subverted vampirism and taken the glory from me that is mine by right. You have made a mockery of things that mortals have feared for millennia. Your fate must be appropriately horrific, so that no one will come to believe they can oppose me. When this is over, and the court has decided on your fate, we will adjust reality to match. Mortals will speak your name only in hushed whispers, and all will know the true horror of vampirism.
"At least for a short while. For the few years it will take all of the mortals to succumb and die. For as the high-council of spirits decreed long ago, I am the apocalypse made manifest. It is my duty to bring about the end times. I have already decided on a new way to end the world, and after the humiliation you have inflicted on me, it is only proper that your actions will be tied to it.
"Once the Myr finish summoning [Entity Synchronization], it will react to the changes you have wrought over the past months, and in an ironic twist of fate that will bring about the end of the world."
She looked at the aberration. It did not look super enthusiastic about ending the world, but she got the impression that it would probably want to stay in character and act like a real eldritch abomination from the books. It would end the world anyway, even if it didn't like the idea very much.
She also noticed that [The Living City]'s description was suspiciously low on details and did not actually explain how the world was going to end. But then she realized that she was on the receiving end of an Unspoken Plan Guarantee. Of course [The Living City] wouldn't describe the mechanism out loud. It would work better this way. But she wasn't born yesterday! She was going to counter the Unspoken Plan Guarantee!
"I'm afraid I don't understand." She responded. "How exactly will this interact with what I did? Please describe this in as much detail as possible."
And [[The Living City]] did. It spent subjective hours describing its plan in intricate detail. It was surprisingly boring because there were far too many technical details. But she forced herself to keep listening anyway. It was the only way.
When [The Living City] finally finished its elaborate exposition, she was very proud of herself. She had successfully tricked it into revealing its plan, and so the Unspoken Plan Guarantee was now no longer in effect. She looked at Pebble and couldn't keep the smug look off her face as she did so. Curiously, he did not look proud of her, and was facepalming instead. How odd.
Still, while [The Living City]'s plan was very intricate and logical and admittedly just generally well-designed, there was one thing she still did not understand:
"Why do you want to destroy the world anyway?" She asked. "How does that help you? I mean, I get that you are the super evil, generic Main Bad Guy of the universe. So ending the world is kind of par for the course. But you do still have to have an in-universe justification, too."
"Are you seriously assuming that I do not have a reason for what I do besides 'it's what someone in a story would do'?" It asked. "Nevermind, don't answer that. I might find the answer too depressing. The dumber you show yourself to be, the less glory there is in defeating you, so I would prefer it if you don't open your mouth too much.
"But to answer the question: When the world is destroyed and this cycle comes to an end, my ruins will remain. Future civilizations will find them, and recover powerful artifacts from them. I will become known as the greatest civilization of all time. Greater than any of the other fallen ancients that came before us. The spirits will ensure it. This is to be my eternal reward for the service of ending the world."
She was a bit disturbed by that response at first, but then she nodded: "Ok, that's valid. I have to admit I got some very strong cognitive dissonance there because mortals do not think like that. Dying is generally considered bad, and having your ruins desecrated sounds like it ought to make things worse instead of better. But you are a sapient wish, and not a humanoid, so I don't know what I was expecting."
"Enough talking.” [The Living City] said. “I have gone on at length to answer your questions, and it is time you stop stalling.
"You have heard my accusation. In recompense for your crimes, I demand that [Adversity Regulator] destroy you utterly, and that it support me in my manipulations to make you responsible for the end of the world.
Then it addressed her directly: "How do you plead?"
"Guilty." She responded immediately.
"...wait. What?" [The Living City] responded in confusion.
"I mean, yeah? I'm guilty of ruining your plan and saving the world, by getting Tonos involved." She said.
Spirits did not think like mortals, and this was no court of humanoids. Pleading innocent or guilty was not a binary thing. She actually found it somewhat odd that [The Living City] did not understand this as well as she did. Maybe its nature as what was effectively a spirit of tyranny biased its perspective?
"But even though I accidentally saved the world," she continued, "I have still fulfilled my function as an Avatar."
"I was created to learn new things, and explore edge cases. To expand the capabilities of spirits in general and of my creator, [Adversity Regulator], in particular. I argue that I have succeeded at these tasks. I argue that my achievements outweigh the damage I have caused by saving the world."
She really wished she could break character here and just admit that she didn't see saving the world as a bad thing, and that they were all Bad Guys for thinking so. But the only way for her friends and herself to get out of this alive was to play along and win this trial.
Similarly, she could argue that she had made lots of friends and had a lot of fun, and surely that made her a great Avatar as well. But she already knew that the spirits would not care about that. She had been created by [Adversity Regulator] for a specific purpose, and everything else she did, no matter how important to her, would be inconsequential to it.
"I see." [The Living City] responded. "Then it will come down to a comparison. You will attempt to justify your existence, while I will counter by pointing out everything you did wrong."
[The Living City] looked at [Adversity Regulator], and they all received a sense of confirmation in response. Her creator was really not a very communicative spirit, it seemed. That might be a good thing. She had some unkind thoughts about it, because it actively caused suffering among mortals whenever the world became too nice, because that was its nature. She wasn't sure if she could successfully prevent herself from shouting out her criticisms if [Adversity Regulator] actually spoke to her like a person.
"Then I have only one last question before we begin the trial." She said.
"Because one thing does not add up: Why do you need to defeat me in a trial first, anyway? Why is it necessary for any of your plans to take revenge and make me look personally responsible for the end of the world? Couldn't you just do that anyway? You can control minds, and have an entire civilization worth of propagandists you control. You don't really need support from the spirits to make people believe that I am responsible for bad things."
"Don't get me wrong, it's very scary." She added. She really was quite scared, but her curiosity was stronger. "It's just that all of this seems unnecessarily convoluted? I'm not seeing the logical connection here. It's like you are doing this out of spite, rather than for any rational reason I would expect from a Sapient Wish spell."
[The Living City] looked at her, and then it smirked. It was the most evil and most cliche smirk she had ever seen, which was doubly impressive because her eyes weren't actually working right now and the smirk she saw was more like a concept that the universe translated into a smirk for her mortal sensorium to process.
"You are correct." It said, with its most evil of smirks.
"I am in fact acting out of petty spite. I am glory made manifest. How many of the most glorious tyrants in history are known for their wisdom and restraint, and how many for acts of petty spite?"
Ok. That made sense. It was awful, of course, but she had to give it props for staying in character.