”Hold on. It gets better. It’s here at the end, we turn it all around. Keep faith. I’m still with you. We all need a friend, to watch the world die out.” -Aviators, Half-Wolf-
_____
Mars’ job at the Order of Endless Rooms had put him in a number of strange positions that he wasn’t quite sure how to navigate. Most of them were social issues; Mars was a mechanical engineering student, right up until his graduation and hiring here, and while he wouldn’t say he prided himself on being socially inept… well, it was a stereotype he’d earned his place in.
A lot of the non-social issues were with things exploding when they shouldn’t, or not exploding when they should, and that was manageable. Actually, social stuff within Research was actually really easy to navigate because Planner was willing to perfectly schedule people around each other if there were any unresolvable problems. Which, even without his soft skills, Mars recognized wasn’t really a solution, but it was convenient.
Still, it was strange to sometimes take a step back and realize that he was working on literal magic. Even in the social spaces, actually. He’d gotten a haircut today, for example, which wasn’t normally weird, but it was the third day in a row that he’d gotten a haircut so that the people practicing could have someone to work on. His hair had been regrown via magic item each time, and he hadn’t had the time each day to get used to the different look in the mirror. Later, he was going to go out for a non-romantic dinner with a camraconda, and see how the nice sushi place a couple miles away would react to the big snake’s love of eel.
That was after his job duties though. Duties which, today, included being the person manning the contact point for Research that the rest of the Order could use to get in touch if they had questions or, more likely, concerns. Mars didn’t really like this job that much, but it was fine because a lot of people just directly called or messaged Researchers they knew they needed to talk to, so he only had to field a few things over the course of his day, and the rest of his time could be spent messing around.
He had been engaged in the fine art of goofing off. Which here in the Order meant listening to camraconda-made synthwave music while making testing notes on just how effective different boosts to the Utah spellbooks were, and by association, getting really good at focusing on the level one spellbook that let him offload his shadow onto someone else for about ten minutes. Unlike some of his bosses, Mars didn’t suffer from any kind of problems in focusing, so he was up to attempt number twenty, slowly letting the one level that got better and better… well, do that. It looked like about a 1% improvement to duration per use so far, and he felt satisfied to have been able to do the math.
The goofing off was past tense, because Mars had actually had to take a call. And it was an important one, too.
Lightly jogging through the halls of Research toward the broom closet Reed called an office, Mars avoided eye contact with anyone he passed and tried his best to put off the body language of someone who was in a hurry. Because he was in a hurry.
Mars would readily admit he wasn’t great at social stuff, but his years in college, especially in his degree program, had given him the hyper-specific ability to make people get out of his way. If he’d known he’d need to run today, he would have set up at one of the desks in the expanded central room, but noooo, he’d needed quiet and focus for the stupid book magic. And now, because of someone’s stupid idea of how big a building should be, he was jogging like he was late for class. They needed maps down here or something, he was pretty sure he could have cut through medical to save time. Unless Mercy caught him.
When he got to Reed’s door, there was one other person about to head in. Mars, thankfully not out of breath despite his jog thanks to being a frequent batch tester for the exercise potions, gave her a quick wave to get her attention. “Paladin message.” He said, and the human woman stepped back to let him pass with an excited wide eyed look. She lingered by the door as Mars let himself in without knocking, eyes down on the clipboard that he’d written notes on.
Reed was sitting behind his desk in Mars’ peripheral vision, silent and probably startled by his entrance. “Sorry to interrupt boss. James needs us to set up some kind of offsite lab for testing stuff, and fast. Which… actually, do we have one of those? Somewhere already, I mean.” Mars closed his eyes in a long blink, checking records through his skulljack at high speed on the Lair’s servers. “I can’t find it, but I swear Nik or Momo said something about having one after the first Status Quo attack.” Mars shrugged as he went back to looking at his notes; he hadn’t been here for that one. He knew he was kinda rambling and not letting Reed get a word in, but this seems important. “James says they have ‘someone who is like a pillar but not a pillar’, which I know sounds like a problem, and… actually yeah, that’s it. It sounds dangerous. So, since you’re in charge, and I guess never go home, James needs you to get a place for us to…” Mars looked up for the first time at the lead Researcher sitting on the other side of the cramped room filled with shelves of random dungeon acquisitions.
Instead of a chubby curly haired man, Mars instead found a ratroach. One who hadn’t been here for too long, either, he judged after a quick analysis of the awkward third limb placement coming out of the chest, the jagged lines of chitin, and the apparent trouble the ratroach was having sitting in the padded office chair comfortably.
”Oh.” Mars said as awkwardly as humanly possible. “Uh… you’re not Reed.”
”No, I am.” The ratroach replied, suppressing a sigh as Mars slouched inward at the response. “A pillar? Really?”
”Sorry, hi… uh… Reed? Why are you…” Mars swore he’d been getting better at socialization, magic, and socialization regarding magic. But this had him so far on the back foot he was about to topple over. “This?”
Reed - apparently - held a rough claw up to his throat as he started to sigh again and needed to stop himself. “We’re testing the medium term effects of the body swapping table between species and not that many people volunteered to be on the human side of human-slash-unmodified-ratroach. For some reason.” He tried to talk evenly, but within half of his statement, there were pained corrosive tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. He tried wiping them away without thinking, and quickly added to the lightly smoking burn marks on his chair. “How convincing do we need to make the… the lab?” He asked, trying to stay on track.
Mars checked his notes, not that he needed to. It just felt weird to be making eye contact with someone who was crying and in pain. ”We don’t. The pillar is cooperating, they know it won’t be the Lair. We just need a place to run tests.”
”Okay.” Reed said, gasping out a rough breath. “I’ll… I’ll get on that. Once the painkillers kick in.”
”Are you… okay?” Mars asked.
”No.” Reed snapped angrily. “This sucks, and I’m pissed for two reasons, and now I have to do this too!” The human, unused to being in extreme pain at all times, had been on the edge of being overwhelmed already, and was quickly tipping over the edge.
Mars nodded slowly. “Okay. Uh… is now a bad time to tell you I skipped the line for people wanting to talk to you?” He jerked a thumb toward the open door where the other Researcher was peeking in curiously.
”…if it’s Amanda, tell her she has to check with Davis and one other security cleared person if she wants to read the mechanic’s notes, but it’s fine.” Reed sighed at the easily solved problem, and then nearly threw up in his mouth as his throat protested the casual motion. “Ugh. Ukk. Why.” His shout became a chittering screech without meaning to. “This sucks. I’m going to kill that dungeon, holy shit.”
”…Do… do you want me to… handle the offsite lab?” Mars asked, not sure he should be offering himself up as a sacrifice for more work. But then Reed looked at him with pleading tearful eyes, and Mars sighed in a more human and less self-destructive way. “I’ll take care of it.” He said. “Can I have one of the Research account debit cards?” Reed fished out a bank card from a case on his desk and handed it across gently, trying not to carve into it with his claws. “Okay. Uh… you just… just sit there? I guess? Yeah, it’s fine. I’ll tell James you’re dead or something.”
As Mars shut the door behind him, he heard a quiet “Wait no…” before he sealed Reed back in his office.
Turning to the woman who had been waiting, they shared a look of raised eyebrows. “That seems unhealthy?” She commented.
”It’s probably worse for whatever ratroach he has to swap back with later.” Mars mused. “So that’s sorta grim. Want to help me find a derelict warehouse in the bad part of town to rent on short notice?”
”No thanks, I’m gonna go read a crazy cult leader’s notes on making zombies.”
”Cool. Good luck?”
”You too.”
_____
Outside an old brick elementary school in a worn and battered part of Oklahoma, James stepped out onto the sidewalk next to where Alanna was pacing. “You okay?” He asked.
There was a strange emotional loop for Alanna, where she could tell he wasn’t really concerned because of her Empathy, but also knew that was because James trusted her entirely. Without saying it, without even really thinking it. The words weren’t about checking on her, they were an invitation to conversation. ”I’m nervous about this whole thing.” Alanna admitted. “It’s a pillar.”
”I don’t think she is.” James said quietly, taking a seat on a nearby bus stop bench that had an eight year out of date advertisement for a realtor on it. “I think she’s something else.”
”The first time I saw her,” Alanna made the snap decision to agree with James’ treatment of Kiki as a person, even if she wasn’t agreeing in full, “she fell from the sky and ripped a guy’s head off.” Alanna paused. “She stabbed the gravity out of you! Did you forget that part?!”
James’ face lit up in a grin. “Oh yeah!” He said, way too happy about that. “That was terrifying at the time and, like, I’m not happy about it, but also I got to be so fucking cool that day. I got thrown through a window and got to make a witty one liner that was only amusing to myself.”
”Fuck, you’re right, she basically gift wrapped your ultimate fantasy for you didn’t she?” Alanna blew a gust of air out of puffed up cheeks, forced to admit that this really was everything James wanted in life. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear James’ answer. He had that face like he was going to be flippant about certain doom again.
But Alanna wasn’t the only one who could read her partner, and James met her eyes with his own as he gingerly leaned back on the old wooden bench. “I have no idea.” He said quietly. “This could be a trap, or just a disaster. I’m pretty sure she can still hear us. Everyone in that building could probably make it as a knight of the Order, and they all love her, and she hasn’t told them what she actually asked us for. And even if it does go okay… what does that even look like?” James closed his eye and tipped his chin down as he exhaled forcefully. “We could fuck everything up so badly, just going off what she’s told us, and even Kiki doesn’t know what her actual powers are. There are so many versions of this going wrong.”
”Are you doing the thing?” Alanna asked him, crossing her arms but unable to actually manage a stern look.
”What thing?”
”The thing where you’re listing off terrible things and then pausing and then contrasting them with the thing you’re doing anyway.” Alanna accused him.
James opened his eye and leaned forward, lips pursed. “I do that often enough that you have a thing tone for it?” He asked, alarmed.
”Buddy you do that once a week.” Alanna snickered.
Well, no point denying it now. “Yes,” James said, “I am apparently doing the thing.” He shifted over as Alanna sat down next to him, leaning his head on her shoulder so he could be closer to one of the people he loved. “We help people.” He said.
”That we do.” Alanna agreed. “You know, a billion years ago…”
”Oh now who’s doing the thing?” James laughed.
”Shaddup you. I’m just saying, when this started, my idea of helping people was, you know, getting good at civics and running for mayor.” Alanna wrapped her arm around James, settling her hand on his head and messing up his already disheveled hair. “Now we’re talking about diverting half our research division to helping some kind of demigod.”
James nodded, enjoying watching the trees across the street sway in the wind from his sideways perspective. “Well hey, at least we know that the menacing demigods used to be human. If we trust her, anyway. But I want to.” He held his own hand up to cover Alanna’s mouth before she could start talking. “Yeah yeah, of course I want to. But also half of Research needs something useful to do anyway.”
”Seriously?” Alanna argued around the cap on her words, before twisting her head to escape. “We could be doing something amazing! Those nerds should be curing cancer, not… oh shut up.” She laughed in time with James turning an incredulous eye up on her. “I wasn’t thinking, okay? But seriously, there’s gotta be some important projects getting interrupted, right?”
James couldn’t let this slander of Research stand. “Half of them spend their time fucking around all day, and I mean that lovingly. Messing with different attempts to combine magic, the vast majority of which just don’t work. Making happy rats. Building an asphalt mech that was obsolete almost as soon as it was done. Designing a space elevator that can’t leave the ionosphere. You know, normal stuff that they probably should take a break on.”
”The asphalt mecha was you though.”
James grinned. “Yeah. Yeah it was, wasn’t it? God that thing is so dumb. Anyway that doesn’t undermine my point because I was fucking around at the time.”
Alanna shifted her body in a wave that pushed James upright so that she could stand and stretch. ”What is your point?”
”Research can have a pillar. As a treat.” James told her.
”This is gonna go so wrong.” Alanna restated.
James shook his head. “Alanna, on our chat server, research is already taking bets on which of them gets accidentally vaporized testing stuff with Kiki. It’s already gone wrong. But maybe it can go wrong in a way that’s funny and nonlethal.”
”…did we create a problem? James you’d tell me if we accidentally made a basement full of mad scientists, right?”
Cocking his head at her, James answered slowly. ”I did tell you. I tell you every time we have lunch or hang out or go to the baths or get in bed. I tell you constantly that Research is basically two steps away from building a giant laser and threatening to sink Australia.”
“I assumed you were joking!” Alanna exclaimed, following after James as he stood and started walking back toward the Northern Oklahoma Proud Grandparents Adventuring Society.
”Stop assuming that!”
_____
Momo did not want to be in this part of the basement.
The problem, she decided, with dating someone who actually cared about you - even if both of you were too fucking dysfunctional to say it out loud - was that they actually cared about you. El cared about her. That was weird. And bluntly, Momo didn’t know how to handle it.
”You’re gonna give yourself more heartburn than a ratroach.” El had told her. “Stop fucking having anxiety, and just go talk to them!”
”Talking solves most problems.” Speaky had added, the growing infomorph lounging on their bed amidst a pile of stuffed animals that neither girl would admit to having bought.
Momo had been largely unconvinced, and unbullied, until El had deployed the atomic weapon of their relationship and guilted her into it. “Look, you dumbass. If you go down there, you get to do two things. Intimidate the shit out of a bunch of programmers, which sounds fun, and also, if you see anything that reminds you of… of what went wrong before? You can tell them to knock it off. And it’ll work. Because of the intimidation.”
Then they’d kicked her out of the room.
Now, Momo was of the opinion that she was one of the least intimidating people in the Order. Despite being kinda chunky, she was outmassed by basically every other knight just because they were all taller than her. She was terminally lazy to the point that she’d engineered a situation where she could get away with wearing patterned bathrobes everywhere around the Lair, her most powerful magic was punching someone from slightly farther away than normal, and basically every horror story people told about her was exaggerated to the point of nonsense.
She didn’t actually purposefully damage the parts of her brain that made red totems uncomfortable just so she could use them better. She didn’t feed the floating pencils that she had following her a mix of different species blood to train them. And she sure as hell didn’t spend all of her time in seclusion because she was cultivating.
That last one was a lot stupider of a rumor before they had the books from Pylon.
Momo caught herself using Alanna’s name for the parking structure dungeon as she looped through the residential basement; walking nowhere and hoping she’d get tired before she got to where she had promised to go. Two things annoyed her; first, that Alanna had beaten her to a cool dungeon name and that the name was actually kinda cool, to the point that Momo wanted to just stick with it. But also, that someone had probably used a green orb down here that made navigation inside the building easier, and she kept walking past a stairwell to Research when she was sure she shouldn’t be near one.
She was being moved toward her destination even though she didn’t want to go. Or at least, that’s what she was telling herself.
But maybe El was right - words Momo was terrified of for their own reason. Maybe she did need to slam into this problem head on. Maybe it would make her feel better to see it for herself.
The room she didn’t want to get to was probably only about halfway up the rankings for weirdest labs in the Research basement. Certainly not weirder than the majority of the alchemy stuff, but absolutely outclassing the boring ones that were just safety gear for poking unknown pencils from the Office or whatever.
Mostly it was computer stuff. But far from being a cobbled together mess like Momo had once had in her room, this was a planned and structured mess. They even had zip ties for cable management. On top of that, the room had a lot of dedicated hardware for different sensory and communication purposes.
The rest of the stuff was totems.
Momo had made a lot of them herself, and then handed them off and never come down to see them in use. They were upgrades on her earlier designs; compact in both their own size, and their range of effect. Essentially they were tightly controlled to just whoever was holding them. Or who you stuck them on top of, if that was how things were going. She was proud of the work, but she saw others here too that she hadn’t designed. Iterations on her own discoveries that Momo kind of understood at a glance even though she wasn’t quite sure how.
“Hey, do you need… oh, Momo. Hi.” A chubby man poked his head up from underneath one of the tables, breathing heavily as he worked on shifting things around. He wasn’t the only person in the room, there were a few others, and while they’d mostly ignored the door as they kept working at the keyboards and monitors, they all looked up when the man said her name. “We didn’t really expect to see you down here!”
”Yeah, hi… uh…?” Momo had no idea who this was.
”Oh! Pei. We haven’t met.” He brushed flat locks of hair off his sweaty forehead as he stood up. “We just all know about you! For the totems, and of course, the first attempt.” The man gave her an admiring smile.
And Momo felt her stomach drop. Her expression clearly showed some of her angry discomfort, because one of the others in the room gave a tentative and deeply uncomfortable “Uh… Pei…?”
”Oh. Oh! Right, I’m… sorry?” The man didn’t seem to know how to apologize. “So what do you need from us today?” He asked cheerfully.
Momo sighed, and made the conscious decision to not take this personally. She was a little annoyed that she and El were forcing each other to go to therapy right now, because in the moment, taking this personally sounded really good, but it would probably annoy the shit out of Connie during their next session, so Momo held back. “I guess… I guess I’m just here to see how things are going.” She said. “And hear about the project. If that’s okay?”
“Oh, of course, of course!” Pei beamed at her as he moved around to the other side of the row of tables and took a chair, wheeling the seat out into an open area. The desks were arranged in a kind of semicircle facing outward, but the whole wall behind them was covered in tiled monitors, looking down on everyone with their digital glow. “What would you like to know?”
”…how’s it going?” Momo thought her small voice sounded stupid, but the man didn’t even seem to notice it.
Instead he nodded eagerly. “Well, well. We’re trying to replicate your original results but with a deliberate foundation.” He seemed utterly blind to the fact that this was a sore spot for Momo, and in a way, she almost appreciated it. “The initial artificial intelligence was, as you well know, an emergent property of a number of dedicated emerald-grown programs. So we’ve begun there, and are working to supplement that with mundane hard- and software.”
”Yeah, I see the totems, too.” Momo nodded at the racks. The technical talk was easy enough to handle. “That still works?”
”Of course! Magic doesn’t change, as far as we know! We just find new ways to solve problems.” Pei rubbed at his thin patch of facial hair that probably wasn’t an intentional mustache. “The red totems are especially effective at giving the meta-program information that can’t be input otherwise. It saves on bandwidth, for one thing. But also, a computer can parse much broader totem data streams better than a biomorph brain can.”
Momo almost lost him at ‘biomorph’, but figured it out quick enough. “Yeah, a lot of it… originally… was just using Anesh’s math to sort through global weather patterns or whatever.”
”We still have that totem!” Pei said proudly, which made Momo feel something that she didn’t have a name for but sure wasn’t happy with. “The only issue of course is that there is something that enables a process to pick up on a red totem broadcast, which we cannot replicate. So of course we are stuck using the emerald programs, for now, until we can identify what part of their absolute mess of machine code is accomplishing this.”
One of the programmers in the room, wanting to participate, called over an addition. “A lot of us think that the whole reason the AI became aware in the first place was that the code for picking up the totems required them to be sentient!”
”Yes, that.” Pei nodded again. “Which means that the personhood of the first AI-“
”Nameless.” Momo heard herself say, and then shook her head to banish the fog from her thoughts. “I mean, that’s what they were. Nameless. And then I kinda made it their name, and we argued about irony for a day or two.” The people in the room were silently listening in, like she was explaining deep lore and not just something that anyone in the Order could know if they looked it up.
”Yes, yes, Nameless.” Pei seemed happy to agree. “Well, it’s likely their personhood came from that bridge, growing out of the need of the programs for sentience to receive data. Now I’m sure you know, but simply asking an emerald to grow a digital intelligence does not work at all, so…”
Momo held up a hand. “Wait. Stop.” She almost laughed. “You just asked for an AI and they said no? That’s hilarious.”
”Well we asked for several things. The project is ongoing, but someone before your own project had asked for an intelligent assistant program, and those emeralds never ripened, instead returning errors no matter what stage they were at.” Pei’s eyes moved like he was checking skulljack information. “They were all filed under a research project by someone named Virgil?”
”Ah.” Momo had no idea. Virgil would have loved this shit, actually. Maybe she could try to be enthusiastic on his behalf. She’d have to be a little more of a smug dick to complete the persona though. “So what’s the whole… plan here, I guess?”
Pei waved around at the controlled chaos that was the hardware in the room. “Simple! We have roughly two hundred separate grown programs taking in data from different totems. And then one more mundane governance program that takes that information to collate and interpret it. After that… well, there are various different functions that will allow for communication, observation, and manipulation of the outside world.” Pei gestured at the cameras and drones around the lab. “If an AI does germinate, it won’t need to figure out how to speak on its own this time!”
”Christ, Pei…” Momo heard someone mutter from the back of the room, and glanced over to see a lanky man facepalming.
The fact that someone else recognized that this was maybe a little disturbing made her grin. “So,” Momo started to talk, and then realized the one thing she wanted to know was a bit morbid, “how… how do you plan to keep this one alive?”
”If it becomes alive, you mean?” Pei asked. “Well, we obviously don’t have enough data points to create a reasonable psychological model for this ‘species’, if that term is even relevant-“
”It’s not!” Someone called over.
”-and so we are left to guessing. Our first goal of course is to avoid replicating your mistakes, but-“
”For fuck’s sake Pei…” the lanky man now had both hands covering his face and a vicarious embarrassed blush covering his face in a hot red. “Come on man, you can’t… come on!”
Momo just folded her arms, a motion that seemed to get more attention than anything else, and put a few people on edge. Wait, were people intimidated by her? That would be hilarious in this specific case. “You’re phrasing it like a jerk, but I am curious. How are you gonna avoid my one big fuckup?”
“Am I?” Pei rotated in his chair slightly, but when he spoke the idea of being a jerk seemed almost academic to him. “Well our guess is that the Nameless AI was, accidentally, a paperclipper. It was dedicated to a single purpose so powerfully that it excluded its own basic needs. So we’ve included several failsafes to prevent that kind of self-destruction. Essentially the machine version of the human instinct to keep oneself fed and rested.”
”If they work.” Momo pointed out.
”Correct, if they work.” Pei agreed readily. “In addition to that, well… in working with the ethics group, we believe we have created the conditions for a willingly stable AI.”
Momo paused with her mouth open, cutting off her remark as she thought about that. She closed her mouth, looked down at the ground, and then looked back up slowly. “Willingly?” Did her voice always sound that small?
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
”Yes, yes. The obvious answer to a digital life that doesn’t care about it’s stability is to give it a reason to care. Now, we could simply emulate that, but that’s… mmh. No, no. Even I find that distasteful. So instead we have included in the base code of the central program, and in the available hardware connections, the potential for the AI to choose from multiple different directives.” He seemed very proud of himself for this. “By making it a choice, we make the act of choosing a part of the AI’s existence, and thus keep it in a positive feedback loop of motivation.”
”…are you sure there are not AI psychologists?” Momo asked. “Also wait, hang the fuck on! What if it would have wanted to choose something you didn’t account for?! Or something destructive!”
The thin man in the back wheeled his chair around to add himself more directly to the conversation. ”Uh… I made sure there were… I guess you could call them ‘bad choices’ included. Also doing nothing is an option too, so there’s nothing forced. The only thing that the code requires is that a choice be made, and that has to happen, because we don’t think an AI will form out of these conditions unless there is an objective to be accomplished. Sorry? Sorry.”
”Hey, don’t apologize to me, that’s way more thought than I put into it.” Momo looked over at the rows of totems on their racks, and the expansive hardware framework. “You guys seem like you care about this a lot.” She muttered.
”Of course!” Pei laughed cheerily. “The cutting edge of the boundary between organic and machine life! We might redefine what a person even is in our lifetimes! And the potential for intelligences that could outstrip human minds by an order of magnitude! Who wouldn’t be excited!” He rubbed his hands together, staring into the future and also at the wall behind Momo. “The singularity may be within our reach, here in this room.” He said reverently.
”Ooooookay.” Momo said slowly, looking at the other man.
He just shrugged. “I just think it’s cool. I’m pretty sure I’d be a good dad to a robot, too? I dunno, we’re all doing our best here. Even Pei. Who is… this.” He motioned at the chubby programmer awkwardly.
Momo stared at him. And then she laughed, something breaking loose in her emotions to float away, leaving her feeling lighter as it left. “Would you believe that’s more reassuring?” She asked.
”Absolutely!” He told her with a grin.
She let them give her a small tour of the room before leaving, stepping out into the hallway with a kind of exhaustion that she wasn’t familiar with feeling. As Momo leaned her back against the closed door, she took a deep breath, and then opened her eyes to see Speaker’s tiny twenty meter long fish form floating around her. “Hey.” Momo said.
”I’m sorry.” Speaky said quietly, leviathan body turning to stare at the floor with his ring of eyes. “I didn’t realize they would be like that. I just wanted to-“
”You just wanted to help.” Momo smiled at her girlfriend’s infomorph kid, reaching an arm up through the pale light of the spatially twisted manifestation to settle it around Speaky’s body in a weird hug. “You know what? I feel kinda better.”
”Really?!” Speaky was both shocked and excited.
Momo exhaled a laugh. “Yeah. They seem like dumbasses, but they’re all excited, and they’re doing this on purpose. They’re not… they might screw up. But if they do, it won’t be the same way I did. And if their kid lives longer because of what we learned from Nameless, then… I dunno. I don’t fucking know. Maybe there’s an AI afterlife, and Nameless can simulate being proud or something there.” Momo chewed on her lip piercing, trying to focus on a physical sensation that wasn’t ’being about to cry’.
”…Are you okay?” Speaker squeaked out the question.
”I will be.” Momo said, cracking as many joints as she could as she pushed off the door. “Come on. You helped, so you get a treat. Want some ice cream?”
Speaker tried to keep themself as a calm and collected individual, and failed almost instantly at the offer. ”Yes!” They declared, spinning their fish form around Momo before settling into her hair like it was a reef. “Onward!”
And so onward they went.
_____
Camille stalked after a man who had participated in Townton’s calamity.
She knew Kirk’s name, obviously. But until she was sure that whatever he was doing wasn’t some kind of betrayal, she found it easier to think of him in the abstract. Like she’d been originally trained; she was acting to gather intelligence on a target, and that was all.
Following after him around destroyed buildings, keeping to shadows and out of line of sight, it was almost routine. Boring as well. If Camille had a flair for the dramatic, she could have leapt from what rooftops remained, but that was a stupid way to get spotted almost instantly. Also despite her thin frame she did weigh about five hundred pounds counting the wings, so landings would make a thud.
Boring wasn’t bad though. She got to hone some of the ability that had been sitting idle in the last month with the Order, and she also got to get away from the part of the city that was beginning to feel stifling. Or… no, that was the wrong word. It wasn’t choking her, it didn’t hold her back. But it felt much like when she had first come to the Lair, just in a different style.
One of her sisters was waking up for a few hours each day now - or at least, admitting to it, she was actually awake all the time - and the other captive Camille seemed to be healing too. Both of them were awkward thorns in her thoughts. Nate was around, grumbling about reports from different places, stressing himself into an ulcer about not doing enough as he ‘kept an eye on things’. The chanters and their newly hatched children were a constant source of broadcast excitement, and they liked Cam for some reason. A lot of people liked her for some reason; Indira had invited her to a ‘girls night’, Imu and Iru sought her out every time she walked a patrol path and kept bringing new human children friends with them, TQ seemed to think she was approachable for casual conversation, and there were a dozen other small interactions with people who recognized her and smiled when she approached.
So Camille the Azure felt… well, a lot of things. Annoyed, guilty, thrilled, amused, alive, and so so so very confused. Possibly as a result of all the other emotions.
Which meant it was ultimately quite relaxing to slip into a professional state of mind and put herself to work tracking a potential dissident.
The game of cat and mouse became a puzzle for her as she followed her target through the destroyed streets. Outside of the core of Townton, where the Order of Endless Rooms was restoring things in their image, it was all too easy to see just how bad of an attack this city had suffered. Cars pierced by the street itself, forms of shattered glass and warped metal, were everywhere. Buildings had partially collapsed from where the ground had shifted and lances of asphalt had broken support beams, but more than that, rot and fire and vegetation turned what would otherwise be mostly intact structures into ruins.
Packs of necroads were common. There were thousands of them, and while the population would have been sparse in a human city, these creatures didn’t spend time inside. Some of them fled if they spotted either of the two in their territory, others watched or even waved slowly. A few pursued Kirk briefly, but he outsped them, and none dared approach Cam.
It was this mess of terrain that Cam saw as a series of tactical items. Shadows and cover, certain places that would slow her down, or allow her to gain ground when Kirk had to slow his motorcycle and take a different street. He had driven this route before, clearly, but she was unfamiliar with it except from maps. But even on foot, she kept up and followed him largely based on tracking the sound of his engine.
Her target had been leaving Townton on a regular basis for some time now. At least as long as she’d been here. He told no one where he was going, and every time he slipped out, he did so through gaps in the restoration area’s security. In a way, Camille appreciated it, because their security was important. Necroads were welcome in the restored Townton if they behaved, and seeing them wander the streets in peaceful confusion was a common sight, but Route Horizon had spent enough time as a breached dungeon that there were other things out there. And having a good perimeter was important. Which meant this specific person’s penetration testing was also important. If only he’d told anyone about it.
Camille was constantly in awe - though she would never use that term - of the simple fact that no one in the Order ever sold them out. Maybe skulljacks had already spread farther than anyone knew, there was no way to really track that devil. But it would have been quite easy to sell the location of a dungeon entrance to a government or wealthy monster. It would have taken almost no effort to extract value from information on the Order’s activities. And that was even putting aside ideological reasons for internal strife. But no, none of that ever manifested. James’ simple and naive insistence on doing everything in their power to remove the obstacles to virtue worked, and it made Camille both aggravated and depressed in equal measure.
So seeing Kirk possibly going to a rendezvous with an outside agent was refreshing. This was the world working as she knew it did, and while she welcomed having something to do, she also had a grim appreciation that everything she knew wasn’t wrong.
Townton had never been an especially large city when it was functional. There were a lot of low quality apartments and the commercial areas of the city were sort of packed around the houses. It had been growing though, as cities do, so the ‘outskirts’ weren’t just a boundary line and then wilderness. Instead, there were fewer and fewer buildings. More patches of grass and trees, more empty lots. Old warehouses that looked wholly intact, homes that had never finished construction and so appeared as ruins even if they were technically less damaged than anything else.
It was into this area that her target drove, speeding up as the straightaway of the main road lost a lot of its scattered wreckage and necroad inhabitants. Cam followed more directly, flinging herself through the trees and empty lots on the side as she maneuvered after him, losing ground even as she reached fifty miles an hour in some spots.
She caught up again as the biker wound up a hilly switchback, the elevation outside of town making it a place where no one had bothered to develop yet except for a few now-derelict mansions. There was a connection to a highway out this way, but like the other two points of entry into Townton, the on-ramp had been thoroughly demolished and passage by vehicle would be a challenge. Though maybe a motorcycle would manage it.
Instead, she almost exposed herself as she followed by scaling the outside of the hill, because her target had stopped. Here. Not somewhere outside the memetic effect that had erased Townton from notice, not near the highway. But here.
On a part of the road that cut its path up the hill, where an overlook allowed for a view of Townton below, her target had parked his bike and was in the process of dismounting. The road he’d traveled here had a number of destroyed cars that he’d had to slow to pass, but this rest area was cleared of any debris. In fact, Cam noted, it was carefully cleared of any debris. There were signs that the mechanic’s attack had struck here, and she could see several spots where asphalt was pooled back into shape by the Order’s favorite spell, but the wreckage and spilled oil and gasoline was nowhere to be found.
Instead there was some kind of obelisk. Camille wished she had a better word for it than that. She was not going to call the hexagonal spike of granite a pillar, not now. At this point in her life she felt she could allow herself some small emotional attachment like that. But it still didn’t change the fact that there was an obelisk here, watching over the town both ruined and restored below, and that Kirk was approaching it.
Watching unmoving from her concealed position, Cam saw him pull a tablet computer and a bundle of rags from his satchel, and then set his hand on the granite that rose over his head as he referenced something on the screen. A second later, he managed to get a tiny quirk of a raised eyebrow from her as a small part of the obelisk liquified, thin lines melting out of it before he wiped the quickly hardening cold stone away from the space and tossed the shop rag away behind him.
Then he repeated the process. A few times, actually.
Cam watched until eventually Kirk coughed into his hand and checked his palm in the way that she was familiar with seeing when people overused blue orbs. Going back to his bike to grab a water bottle, the man sat himself on the small wall and faced toward the road as he drank and caught his breath.
He only paused briefly as Camille walked out of the trees to his right and approached the obelisk, her wings shifting the branches enough to announce her presence as she stopped putting in the effort to keep her extra limbs from hitting anything and everything around her. Holding himself frozen with the water bottle up to his mouth as she strode into view like she was supposed to be here. Cam didn’t really feel that way, but she knew what her blank expression made her seem like, so she stayed silent and let Kirk assume whatever he wanted as she walked up to his project, and looked up at the fifteen foot tall stone.
There were words on it. No, not words. Letters, yes, but they were more specific. From the top down to about eight feet up, the obelisk was covered in names.
Camille looked over at the man sitting and watching her, wondering if he would explain without her having to start an awkward conversation. But he didn’t say anything, instead just silently taking a cigarette out of a packet and lighting it with a shaking of his hands that was either nerves or lingering exhaustion from the blue orb use.
”What is this?” She asked eventually.
”A reminder.” Kirk said, holding the lit cigarette between a pair of fingers but not raising it to his lips. He stood, and slowly approached her. “Of everyone who used to live here.”
Camille wasn’t sure she understood. But when she looked up at the regimented list of human names again, she was also afraid that she did. “A monument.” She said, turning back to Kirk as he moved up next to her, a thin line of acrid smoke filling the air around them. “For the dead?”
”Everyone I got killed. That we know of, anyway.” Kirk didn’t nod; actually he seemed to be trying to keep himself as still as possible. Either that or Cam was misreading it and he was just tense to the point of having an anxiety attack that he wasn’t acknowledging. “It’s hard to know if the list is complete.”
Camille ran through some quick math. In the time she’d watched him before he’d exhausted himself, Kirk had completed what seemed to be two new names. Given the thousands that died in Townton, and the fact that he wasn’t coming out here every night, that meant that he would have been at this for some time already.
But also, the blue orb that gave Melt Stone as an ability for absorbing it wasn’t something the Order had a huge number of copies of. Everyone got a stipend of points to spend on whatever magic was available, but costs fluctuated, and she doubted Kirk had stockpiled a huge number of them. Which meant he wasn’t using his points on skills or spells. Just on this.
And he would be doing it for a while yet, at this rate.
She didn’t know what to say to someone like this. Cam didn’t have a lot of experience with grief and guilt. She knew how to use them to tip people into being informants, or push them into rash attacks, but not how to talk like James did. She didn’t know the words to comfort someone.
Which was why as soon as she felt the pressure build to the point that she had to say something, she knew she might have erred. “You’ll be doing this for a decade.” Camille commented, knowing already that it sounded stupid. “Why?”
”I… don’t think it’s up to me if I’m okay with that or not.” Kirk half-answered, looking down at his cigarette and sighing. “I did this. It’s not all my fault, but I could have done better. And… and I don’t know. Maybe if there’s an afterlife or something, some part of them will feel better watching the place come back from up here. Or maybe that’s stupid. I doubt I’d appreciate it. But I’m an asshole, so what do I know.”
”Assholes often know quite a lot.” Camille said, setting her fingertips on the granite. “And statistically, you’ve got more than a few up here already. But I understand. I understand wanting to… atone, in some way.”
”It’s not atonement.” Kirk laughed bitterly. “That’d mean that it’d make up for anything.”
Cam shook her head. “No. It never really will. It’s not a spreadsheet with good on one side and bad on the other, is it? But wanting to atone is what brings you here. Even if you know you can’t. And I understand that.”
Kirk flicked his cigarette onto the ground and stomped on it, never having taking a pull from the lit stick. “You know I used to smoke, and I hated it. Then I got the stupid Climb spell that took away the addiction, and now I want to smoke sometimes, but it smells like shit and I feel like I lost something, even if I can’t honestly say I mind that much.” His words felt disconnected to Cam, but he took a deep breath and moved away from the monument he was building to look out over Townton again. “What brought you here?” He asked her.
”Oh. The next time you breach perimeter security, would you mind telling me? It would simplify this process.” Cam asked, glad to be back in safe conversation territory.
The stare Kirk gave her made her think that maybe she’d said something foolish. But then a sardonic smile took over his face and he shook his head before staring back out over the contrasting states of the the city. “Yeah, I can do that.” He said. “And… thanks.”
”For what?”
”It’s hard to explain. I bet you’ll know one day though.”
_____
Amelia - or Red as she still referred to herself sometimes, even though that era of her life was over - was busy scowling at someone.
The thing she was scowling at wasn’t actually human, but that didn’t stop Amelia from feeling as if she should be grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking until something rattled loose in whatever passed for a brain in that body. Specifically, she was scowling at Bea, the inhabitor having just said the stupidest thing possible to the experienced alchemist.
“You… you just…” Amelia was so angry she was struggling to find the words. “I need to sit down. This is too idiotic, even for this place. No.” She waved a hand to banish the incompetent assistant. “Get out.”
”It’s the logical choice.” Bea said, not getting out. The clean room that their potions were brewed in and recipes were refined within seemed like a poor choice of place to have this conversation, but if Amelia wasn’t going to leave, neither was she. “Lab rats are useful to an extent, but I dislike watching living things die, and I am more durable. I can also give feedback-“
”Yes well isn’t that nice for you!” Amelia snapped at her. “I’m sure that the next thing we brew that kills someone will get excellent feedback from you!” She was yelling. She knew she was yelling, and the others who were working here today were staring at her. “What?!” She demanded of the room.
”They are staring because you are angry.” Bea informed her, the inhabitor understanding full well what emotions were at play, and simply choosing not to feel any of them. But one emotion crept into her active sensorium that she didn’t actually want, and for some reason, couldn’t shut down. Worry, perhaps? “I don’t understand. This works. This allows us to identify new potions faster, and safer. I thought… I thought you would be happy.”
Bea didn’t often experience regret. That wasn’t really a part of how she lived; everything she did was somewhat deliberate, and while she made practical mistakes all the time, she didn’t actually socialize enough to make any personal mistakes that were irreparable. Now, though, she suddenly realized that she might have done something that she couldn’t take back, and that it might hurt the comfortable working relationship she had been building with the older alchemist.
Amelia just stared at her, and suddenly, a lot of the anger drained out of her expression. Though the tension in the room was thick enough to cut, it stopped getting worse when Amelia sighed and set down the beaker she’d been about to throw.
”You idiot child.” She said, all the head drained out of her tone, even as she kept her focus sharp enough to maintain the proper timing on the commercial kitchen mixer they were using to prepare a batch of ghost juice. “You’re not invincible. There’s some things you can’t heal from.”
”I am aware. That is why early tests are important.” Bea agreed, glad that the conversation was back in the realm of practicality. “But once a potion has failed to kill rodent test subjects, it is only reasonable that someone like myself, who can heal from most things, tries it. The sooner potions are identified, the sooner they might be put to work improving lives.”
Amelia went back to scowling. “And what if you take something that just kills you?! What if whatever brainwashed all those rats we’re keeping around carves out your soul and turns you into a robot?! What then?!”
”That seems unlikely. Potion effects do not appear to replicate without similar ingredient pairings, you know that.” Bea factually stated.
The reassurance did the opposite of reassuring Amelia. Instead, the woman’s eyes hardened, and she silently spun on her heel to storm out of the clean room. She didn’t bother to strip off the white outer covering of the chemical suit, just throwing her filter mask to the bench on the side of the exit as she kept going.
And standing back in the production room, Bea felt the sharpest spike of anything since she’d been created. The moment of fear and pain so raw and harsh that it cut across whatever dulled an inhabitor’s natural emotional state. It was so sudden that she almost retreated into her mask, instinctively reaching for the cold dead memories of the last owner of this body to shield her before recoiling in disgust from that as well.
In a short moment, Bea found herself both frozen, and trembling. She couldn’t move, but felt like she was about to collapse. Breathing wasn’t a high priority for an inhabitor, but it suddenly became one when she couldn’t do it. The edges of her vision became a field of black spots, the constant mental tracking she did of the other humans and camracondas in the room fading into static even as one of them said something concerned to her.
The moment cut out abruptly, and without knowing what she was doing or why, Bea found herself following Amelia out of the clean room, Outline-Of-Green rapidly sliding across the floor behind her to check on the potion batch in production.
”Wait!” She called as she cycled through the exit, her limbs not reacting properly as she stumbled after Amelia. Bea didn’t know how long she’d been standing there. The human might be long gone, so she would have to search-
Amelia wasn’t gone. Instead she was sitting slumped forward, head in her hands, in one of the chairs in the central room of the alchemy department. The hub in the middle of their sap growing, potion storage, production, and testing rooms was filled with tables, chairs, whiteboards, and one vending machine. And currently, among a few other people, Amelia.
Bea stumbled as she drew up short, nearly falling forward as she approached the chair the woman had taken. “I apologize.” She said rapidly as she tried and failed to pull out the chair next to Amelia, her hands failing to work properly.
”You don’t even know why you’re apologizing.” The human said with dull annoyance.
”I don’t. But I know I need to apologize.” Bea told her. “What did I do wrong. Please.”
Amelia looked up suddenly at the last word, and at the tremor in Bea’s voice, like she was suddenly realizing something was wrong with the inhabitor. Bea was standing next to the smooth white surface of the table she was at, almost idly trying to grab the chair and not managing it. Her whole body was shaking slightly, not like how a human would experience it but in a way that was more of a mechanical failure of the nervous system. “You’re crying.” Amelia said with sudden concern, grunting in exertion as she used a foot to push the chair out and let Bea sit.
The inhabitor did so, nearly collapsing into the seat. “No. Inhabitors don’t do that.” She said.
”Uh huh.” Amelia looked at her with obvious disbelief. For long enough that Bea raised a twitching hand, stripping off the outer glove and touching under her eyes with bare fingers to find her cheeks were wet somehow. “Suppose it’d be too easy to blame this on one of the things you drank.” The alchemist said with a sigh.
Bea kept staring at her hand. “No.” She said plainly. “I have a list of the known effects, but none of them are this. Unless it was very delayed.”
Amelia gave her a look that Bea couldn’t parse. It wasn’t angry though. ”Do you want to know what you’re apologizing for?”
“Yes.”
”You…” Amelia looked away. At anything except the inhabitor. “You’re partly my fault, you know that? I helped refine the potion that made you.”
”I am aware. That is how I knew that you would know the effects.”
Amelia snorted, irritation coming back. “Well, that thought isn’t a nice one. Being reminded how many people I killed isn’t pleasant. In fact, I’d prefer if it didn’t come up again, which is why I’d like to avoid killing you again, if you don’t fucking mind.” The curse felt foreign and stupid on her lips, but the damn kids around here had worn off on her a little. “So maybe no more drinking things that might kill you without anyone noticing? Some people here might actually want to keep you around. You, not just that body.”
”I…” Bea hadn’t considered that. The Order had been kind to her kind, but the idea that it was anything more than obligation hadn’t actually occurred to her. “Me?” Her voice sounded so wrong. Like it was far away.
”You. Idiot child.” Amelia sighed again. “What have you been drinking? Nothing should have messed you up this badly. We absolutely would have noticed in early tests.”
That was an easy question. Bea grabbed onto it like a liferaft. “114-8 caused increased mouth and jaw flexibility, as well as swallowing capacity. 204-5 and 204-6 both caused sensitive and temporary nerve growth on the exterior of bones, which caused extreme pain for a short time. 211-1 created a hyperfocus on numbers, especially when formatted as a matrix or spreadsheet, and I believe it added to my ability to memorize for the duration. A second attempt of 60-1 through -8 proved that the effect was not a fluke, but the generation of chlorine gas was deemed too dangerous to continue testing.”
”At least two of those should have gotten this to stop.” Amelia’s scowl was back in place.
”They didn’t harm me permanently.” Bea reminded her.
Something changed in Amelia’s eyes, and she reached over to place a hand on Bea’s arm. The inhabitor looked down in confusion at the point of contact while the human woman spoke. “It doesn't have to kill you to hurt you, kiddo.” She said. “I… I get it. I can see why you’re thinking you have to be useful, or that you can take a risk like that. But this isn’t worth it. Can you just promise you’ll wait until we know something won’t cause you bone pain before drinking it? Promise me.”
In that moment, to make her emotions stop their turmoil, Bea would have promised to eat the sun. So in comparison, this was easy. “Yes. I promise.”
”Good.” Amelia let go of her arm. “I’m… just going to sit here. Let my damned failing heart calm down before I get back to work.”
”I will sit with you.”
”You do that.”
_____
In the basement of the Lair, a growing enclosure of lab rats went about their business. Though it wasn’t really business exactly. If they could be said to have jobs at all, it was to test potions, but this group had already tested a potion, and so their job was to simply be observed.
One of them - they didn’t have names, but they all knew each other, so this rat was just this rat - was working on gnawing at a piece of soft wood. It had been put here, by one of the big things, and this rat had come to understand the concept of gifts, so it had accepted the wood and decided to make it into its own gift. The gnawing was a work in progress; teeth were imperfect tools, and this rat’s eyesight was limited, but it was still trying.
This rat was a little hungry, and starting to feel thirsty too, but it didn’t scurry to the places where nourishment could be found. Instead, it kept gnawing. Its work was interesting to it, and this rat was chasing the satisfaction of finishing a project. Also hunger and thirst gave the world a sharpness that made the food itself more enjoyable as well.
The gnawing did not pause as other rats scurried past, sometimes pausing to inspect the gift in progress, sometimes offering grooming or affection. Another rat offered an invitation to attempt to solve the newest puzzle-game together, but this rat declined politely by continuing to shape the wood it had at its disposal. Another rat wasn’t offended, because the idea of offense wasn’t something the rats really understood.
There was a time in the past when hunger and fear and instinct had driven them, and they could almost remember it sometimes. But today, much of that had been cast away. Memory was still limited to what the average rat could manage, but there was a common recollection that things had changed when they’d sampled the odd tasting water.
Ever since then, the rats of this enclosure had been different. There were new instincts; instincts that made them want to be near each other, enjoy time together, give each other gifts, groom and mate with more focus, and, if they had ever needed them, instincts to protect.
The rats didn’t have a word for it. They didn’t have words at all, really. Which was why while they were perfectly capable of feeling it, they didn’t actually have a word for the experience they were undergoing. Instead, they simply went about their business.
But if you could ask them, they would tell you that they were content in their small world. No competition for resources gave them ample room to be kind to each other, in small rat ways, and being kind made them feel good.
If they could be said to have business at all, it was, in truth, the business of being very, very happy rats.
_____
Kiki closed the extra sets of ‘eyes’ that she had going on.
Being some kind of magical superhero was a new experience for her, as well it should be for anyone. Or at least, so she thought. These kids had taken to it pretty well. But even though she’d needed time and a fair bit of bargaining with the universe to come to grips with her own power, once she did, she found that developing new abilities came easily.
One that had come up before, that she’d used more than a few times, was to watch along lines of connection and compassion. As with all her powers, it needed her to really nail down the trick to it, but once she did, the scale she could work at went through the roof. Which was how, by quickly tracing lines mostly through James and Alex, she was able to ‘infiltrate’ the secretive depths of their Order.
Ironically, if they were all bastards, this would have been a lot more deserved, and also a lot harder to make work. Friendships and fond memories were the easiest lines for her to follow, after all. And while mobsters and politicians had friends, they tended to not have the same kind of closely tied web that the Order of Endless Rooms had made.
In a way, Kiki was following the raw pathways of a community, in her magical voyeurism.
And she wasn’t sure if she liked what she saw or not.
On the one hand, they were exactly who they said they were. Or who they told her they were, without really knowing, at any rate. They were heroes and champions. Standard bearers for the weak and hurt and leaders for those in need. They fought odd battles to take away the fears and needs of everyone they sheltered, and somehow, despite the world around them, they won more often than they lost.
And in doing that, they changed those people. Changed themselves, too. It was easy enough for her to trace the graph of emotional peaks and valleys over time for all those she peered in on, and it was even easier to see that there was a distinct upward trend in the kind of thing that made her. That was what she had become.
Kindness.
Not unquestioned, not pointless, and not hollow. It was kindness of all sorts. Tactical favors used to push people into prosocial behavior, simple apologies motivated by internal guilt and shame, and also just a whole lot of friendship and love driving mutual time together. They were outliers but not monsters, not incomprehensible. Especially not to all her weird new measuring tools.
Suddenly, the thing that the big alien had said to her came into focus. And Kiki got to the other hand of her weighing of the Order of Endless Rooms.
They weren’t going to help kill her at all. They were going to try anything else, to save her, or help her, or even just let her live as she was. And they’d do it selflessly, not without the thought of what she might be able to offer them, but certainly without the expectation of it.
Kiki realized why they didn’t find changing people’s personalities to be nicer to be bothersome. It was because they’d already done it to themselves. Almost all of them that she could find, even the ones that were like foggy ghosts at the edges of her different eyes. Of course they wouldn’t mind. They’d probably think her way was just more convenient, which fit with the current generation and their bizarre work ethic.
Someone wanting this? Aggressively? It made sense, in its own way. Arrush especially was someone who fit inside Kiki’s magic almost perfectly. Kindness had killed the thing he once was, and recreated him as what he now was, and it would take almost no effort to make him forever hers. If Kiki asked, he might even welcome it.
It terrified her. All of it. Even the rats in the basement, though at least whatever had been done to them hadn’t been done to anyone else. Yet. Whatever had happened to them hadn’t changed that they were animals, but the lines of connection between all of the blazed like a furnace, and it was just a wee bit creepy to look at.
The pillar - she supposed she was a pillar now, whatever that was - probably would trust them. Because that was the point; they were the most trustworthy that she’d found so far. They were ambitious in the extreme, but their ambition was to eliminate disease and make families stronger and to give magic to everyone everywhere. Stupid? Maybe. Kind? Absolutely.
So when James came to her and said that they’d gotten a cabin in the mountains where everyone who’d be running - and subject to - tests could be comfortable, Kiki nodded and began the process of telling her own Society that she’d be taking a vacation.
Absolutely certain that by the end of this, one way or another, they’d have turned her Name around on her. She’d be dead, or subject to the alterations of a force of kindness that would make her someone she wasn’t before.
And she’d be happy for either.
So much power at her call, it was an incredible thing that she could still be so afraid.