I heard police sirens behind me. A flying shuttle with sirens flashing atop it flew right by me, not noticing me. The invisibility hex designed by USSRA archmagi to stay unnoticed within the Dead Zone sitting atop of my eye-redirecting threads was pretty good, seemingly better than whatever cameras this newly printed segment of Eureka possessed.

Nobody chased after me. I glanced back and saw that an entire team of Dexes leapt out of the flying shuttle. They tore open the detective’s jacket and opened his chest with some kind of a magnetic key, quickly replacing his heart-battery.

Christophorus Hatchenson hissed as he stood up, his eyes scanning for me. I was rapidly walking away. The attention-redirecting hex was exceptionally convenient because it also kept people from bumping into me.

I felt giddy as I relied on Zariya’s power and knowledge to make my escape. In a few more minutes I climbed over a fence and hid behind a massive pole that extended upwards, ending up in a gargantuan holographic display.

The number of flying police cars increased akin to a swarm of angry bees. They were all trying to find me. They weren’t going to. I looked up at the massive billboard tower. A small ladder was going up the pole towards a space between two billboards. It looked like there was some sort of an old maintenance space up there. Perfect.

I started climbing.

There was indeed a maintenance space.

It was… noisy.

Holographic projections passed through it with blaring sounds that reverberated through my teeth. I cast a silencing hex on myself and relaxed. Hopefully, the police Dexes wouldn’t find me here. The space between two billboards was a bit tight, but it was also quite long and tall, featuring several floors made up from metal mesh passageways. Not a bad place as for a home base, considering how I had no money or Good ID.

I recalled what Wizard Revolution told me. She said that I could turn my white hole into Sumerian Difference Engine. Could I build a foundational point for it here, in Eureka? I felt my connection to the white hole that held a shard of my soul in its embrace. It was holding strong.

The dead planet belonging to Cassie wasn’t far from here. I pulled power from it and began writing omnicode with my finger into the metal beneath me using an Endy blade to carve hexagrams permanently into the structure.

I knew that this would take me a while, but I was dedicated. I needed resources and power, needed a way to survive in Eureka.

. . .

Doors weren’t a problem for me. The metal door groaned as I sliced through the lock with an all-dividing-blade and pulled it open. An enormous warehouse filled with goods greeted me. Perfect. I went around the shelves, looking for things to steal in the back.

I returned to my billboard with a cardboard box filled with water and dry cereal and resumed carving omnicode hexagram word-chains onto the billboard.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Evening fell. I kept at it, not allowing myself rest. Putting my body on autopilot, I flashed back into Grogtilda’s body in Nemendias.

. . .

After a several days, I returned to keep track of myself in Eureka.

The structural artifact, my new domain, was coming along nicely.

The Sumerian Difference Engine was a magitek device uncovered by the USSRA magi in the ruins of ancient city of Samarkand. It was an ultimate wand for a mage the size of a building. It worked as a massive focus mechanism that permitted a wizard to wield great power at any given location.

I needed something truly monstrous to overcome whatever Eureka could throw at me.

Minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day the body of Infi worked tirelessly writing the story of my life in omnicode into the billboard.

Not just one life, but all of my lives spread across the infinite boundary. I wrote about Yulia, Cassie, Zariya, Cali and Leon. I wrote about my dreams, passions and friendships. I tethered, bound, ingrained everything to the massive billboard, chained all of my hopes, fears and lives to it. Everything that I valued, everything that I knew. I wrote about my friends and enemies. All of it, the entire story of my life up to this point became written down across the walls and beams and metal struts in microscopic, runic text.

The more words I added to it, the more the billboard became mine, shining in my cendai-sight in the Astral like a brilliant, magic beacon.

Occasionally, I peered across Eureka in the Astral. There were no phantoms here, no other mages. Magic was my advantage in this high-tech place. Magic permitted me to be invisible under the watchful eyes of the machine city, to steal everything I needed.

I was nursing a plan in my mind-space, a daring, extremely dangerous plan to shatter the very foundational concepts that controlled reality across the multiverse. I was going to kill the lawmakers or at the very least hurt them enough to get my answers.

Endy blades, a weapon given to me by Infinity Paradox Proxima was a gun able to kill a god and as long as I combined it with the ultimate Archmage wand and struck hard and fast then perhaps I could achieve victory.

I wanted revenge, felt that I needed to do this... because this body was empty.

Whoever Infi was once had been erased, destroyed so completely and utterly that she was just an empty shell, a fragment of a person. I suspected, felt, that a monstrous avatar of machine life defending the System itself, the eraser of information, the upholder of the local laws - Three was somehow involved.

Perhaps these hands that now carved magic runes into the billboard had once belonged to someone who tried to stand up to the Good Directorate machine Gods and was punished for it, erased from reality, obliterated and left mindless and hollow.

With every hour that I spent within the body of Infi, I grew to hate the city of machine life with greater and greater fury burning in my heart. Countless worlds across the infinite divide were manufactured by them for entertainment, became abandoned, were left to die.

I was not an NPC!

I was a person and my fire, my soul, my memories and feelings would no longer be so easily extinguished.

In another week of mind-mindbogglingly focused work, I was finally done, having completed decorating the Sumerian Difference Engine with endless chains of looped runework.

With an activation word, I sliced a small piece of my soul with one of my Endy blades and pushed the shard into the billboard, igniting the patterns within it.

I saw as a firestorm of magical resonance danced across the struts of the structure, looping into itself, amplifying my magic in this place.

My soul-domain, my wizard's tower was finally finished and with it I would bend and break the rules of local reality with Stabilist magic, using the white hole on a distant dead world of Cassie as my source of power.

The chain of my little Fractal Engine connected to all parts of myself spread across distant worlds tied to the Eurekan billboard was an astronomical multiverse-wide wizard's wand, a weapon of incredible arcane power.

I was done merely making armor, done trying to hide away.

I was going to break the living rules themselves and free all those bound in invisible chains.

I was finally ready to get my answers and the inhabitants of this world would help me find discover the truth, starting with Charles Snippy.