** Year 1 **

The first year was the hardest.

The first time I came to awareness, I did so slowly. Little bits of information seeped into my conscious mind. A field of floating blue motes of light skirted on every side of me. Some bounced eagerly, excited and bubbling. Others faded in and out of my awareness as if shy. Each of the alien creatures was unique.

I watched the motes, curious and overwhelmed in equal measure. What, why, how? My thoughts stuttered, struggling to conceptualize the alien dots so wholly unfamiliar to me. In an effort to understand, I focused on a single mote of light. It was one of the energetic ones, and though I tried, it swiftly vanished in the sea of dancing lights.

I shook, feeling pressure crushing me as a whole host of unknowns threatened to snuff out my nascent mind. I hadn’t the faintest understanding of what I was seeing. What were these strange lights? Even more disturbingly, what was...I? How was I?

Was I...me?

I desperately latched on to another mote of light in an effort to compartmentalize. This time, it was lazy. Slow. I gleefully watched it. Characterizing every aspect of its existence as it bobbed slowly to music only it could hear. It dimmed. Then brightened. Then dimmed once more.

Then it vanished.

I panicked.

That perfect, insignificant mote was gone. No matter how I scanned the environment, I couldn’t find that small island of stability I’d latched on to. For the life of me, I couldn’t locate the precise variant I had studied so thoroughly. Was it gone, or would it come back? Should I wait for it? Maybe I should study a different mote, but...what if I missed the originals return while I was focused?

I reeled. Feeling small in such a massive expanse of alien mist.

Desperate, I reached out more forcefully. A tendril of pure will coalesced. A golden ephemeral cloud reached out to grab a handful of the motes. The lights scattered as my aura approached. To my utter dismay, it was as if they were repelled by my mere presence. I wouldn’t be able to restrain the lights for study.

Perhaps...

Perhaps I didn’t need to understand every single mote. What if...yes! I focused on one, noting its broad characteristics, then discarding it in favor of another. Then another. There were differences, yes. The first was larger but somehow dimmer. The second felt lazy and bright while more inquisitive with a touch of gentle softness.

I noted these differences and moved on. More and more lights passed me by. I observed each one in a cursory fashion. Perhaps I couldn’t understand why there were differences, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t simplify things. Generalize. The point wasn’t understanding but conceptualization. A framework to contain the incomprehensible soup into a single comprehensive idea.

I shall name thee Mana.

I relaxed, tension melting away as I attributed a series of meaningless syllables to the boundless concept I’d formulated within my mind. No longer did I stare into the starry void, struggling to understand. No. Mana was known to me. Was it alien? Of course. But known. No longer a source of fear.

Fear?

I felt at the edges of my perception, noting the tightness slowly fading as I relaxed. How strange. How wonderful! And what was this new thing? Excitement?

I reveled in the new sensations. Each one was alien and brought with it a touch of fear, but this time, I knew what to do. Giddy, I accepted these emotions into myself and gave them names: joy, curiosity, shock, and determination.

I shall name thee Emotions.

I looked inward, determined to collect all of the emotions that existed. It was hard. With each new emotion, it felt as if every additional one required more mental contortion to touch upon. I persevered, pushing farther and with every passing second, I added a new emotion to my repertoire.

Hold on. What was...a second?

How delightful!

Time became known to me, and I used my newfound understanding to reach out to the starry void. Hungry for more knowledge. Hungry for more names.

What greeted me was both perplexing and wonderful in equal measure. In the Above, there was a new substance. Air, I named it. An emptiness that was not empty. It moved and twirled like mana but was slower and behaved differently to the capricious motes that filled my perception. Above it, a Ceiling stood stalwart and steady, flanked on four sides by Walls. They formed a box that contained the idle Air.

In the Below, there existed a broad expanse of another strange material that rose and fell rhythmically. It was...warm? No, warmer. At least when compared to the air. It also possessed an unparalleled effect on the underlying mana. While the air seemed to ignore the dancing lights, the supple beige substance possessed millions of tiny channels of coursing mana tinged a glittering orange. Every second, the channels swelled like raging rivers, then relaxed, then swelled once more. Each pulse attracted the ambient mana before pushing it away. It was mesmerizing.

I named it Skin.

Looking further, I spotted many new, nameless oddities. The Floor glared insolently up at the Ceiling. A Desk made of Wood sat upon it. Wood was hard and full of mana channels like Skin. Unlike Skin, the mana contained within Wood collected in stagnant, lifeless pools with no life-giving pulse to drive the flow. Upon the Desk sat a crystalline cylinder with a hole in the top. A Water partially filled the Glass.

The more I named, the harder it became to develop new names. Some things were too large. Too complex to understand all at once, so I split them into pieces and named those pieces. I wondered, however, if the Bed resting beneath the Skin was made up of a Blanket that, in turn, was composed of a woven Mesh of tiny, individual Threads. Or perhaps I was falling into the same trap of overcomplication the Mana had tricked me with initially. Should I name every Thread by its color, length and consistency? Or should I forget all these names and simply call the agglomeration a Bed?

Was the Cup part of the Desk, or were they two separate entities?

In my search for knowledge, I ran into an intractable wall. My awareness wasn’t endless and all-seeing but limited by the rough shape of a sphere. A bubble where my ability to observe waned the farther away from the pulsing Skin. Looking past the Walls was possible, but the Beyond was blurry and faded.

There was one part of the environment that caught my attention the most. Stars. Glittering orbs of mana so distant that I could barely make them out floated in the Beyond. They pulsed with mana, some impossibly bright and blue, while others dim and red. Two such stars burned within the sphere of my perception, and I dropped my prior quest to focus on them.

One originated from within the Skin. It was orange and red and pulsed rhythmically with power. Every time it did so, the millions of mana channels radiating from it pulsed sequentially.

The source of the mesmerizing pulsing. A Core.

It was beautiful.

The second Core was smaller. A bright, painful gold hidden within a Crystal. A Gemstone? No, it was something else. I shook slightly with imagined fear but centered myself, focusing on observations to push back the fear budding within me.

It was small in the grand scheme of things, even when compared to the other core. It was nestled within a cage of bright Brass, a Necklace wrapped around a bulging appendage of Skin.

I examined the gemstone for many, many seconds. It felt strange and yet...familiar. Then, it came to me. The gemstone’s core pulsed with the same gold as my aura had earlier. It also existed precisely in the center of my bubble of perception. Could it be...

Me?

Before I could revel properly, a Great Change settled over the Room. The Window brightened. Its glass glowed with an incandescent light. Dim but steadily brightening. Sheeting waves of mana poured in through the Window. I’d thought the amount of mana before had been numerous and uncountable, but what the Window casually spewed into the Room was unfathomable.

I tried to watch every step of the Great Change, but it burned my perception. It was too bright. Too much. The mana density spiked with every second, blinding me. It shook me to my core as I struggled to find anything that wasn’t bathed in golden radiance.

How could the other core handle this?

I directed my attention to the pulsing orange core in the Below and found that the Skin possessed even more properties than I’d initially observed! It wasn’t merely a gorgeous mesh of mana channels but an unbreakable barrier that prevented the intrusive mana from burning the fragile core beneath.

I wanted some Skin of my own, I decided. But how?

I reached out but found my touch thwarted as the pulsing mana channels repelled me much the same as my touch pushed away ambient motes of mana. Pushing harder succeeded in slightly shifting the dense web of mana channels, but only served to exhaust me as the Window’s light burned ever brighter.

Reluctantly, I tabled the desire for skin and turned my attention back to the burning mana. The mana was repelled by my touch, so perhaps I could gain a reprieve by impressing my will upon the world around me.

I did just that, pouring my aura out into a small sphere around my core. It was small, barely extending beyond the faceted edge of my gemstone. The moment I did so, the ambient mana recoiled and left me blessedly free of the sizzling pain.

I uncoiled but couldn’t relax completely. The Window’s mana surge crashed against my fragile barrier, eating away at my will and introducing me to a different type of strain that steadily grew with each passing second.

I winced, the edges of my perception blurring as I tried unsuccessfully to retreat from the multitudinous pain. My will was only a stopgap solution. I needed Skin of my own, but I couldn’t touch it. So...how?

The mana could touch the Skin, I realized after several long seconds of pondering. It couldn’t pierce through, but it wasn’t repelled so completely as my touch was. If the mana could get close enough, maybe I could somehow use that to scrape a little bit of the Skin away and cover myself in it.

I approached the ambient mana, watching intently as it reacted to my tendril of will. It rushed away as I approached but then seemed almost eager to fill in the void left in my wake.

I could take advantage of that.

I focused my will into two parallel plates that I slowly manifested into the world. Mana rushed away, but the motes trapped between my creation compressed into a facsimile of a wall. Mana oozed out of the edges of my creation, and I swiftly capped them to prevent further leakage.

I strained, pushing my plates of will together until the vague wall of mana thinned, condensing down until it was thin and sharp. Like a blade.

Gently, I lowered the mana blade toward the Skin. As it neared, the cap I’d placed on the lower side frayed, leaking out precious mana and dulling the edge. I accelerated, bringing the blade down faster but with less precision. I didn’t have the time to cut the Skin perfectly. Any amount would do.

The blade touched down, far weaker and fading by the second, but I forced it to scrape roughly against the Skin in a circle around myself. Even greatly dulled, the blade scraped a thin layer of Skin away from the main body. It left a red welt behind — an observation I tabled for later — as I dragged the mass of torn Skin around my gemstone with jerky desperation.

My barrier of pure aura broke.

The mana washed over me and...cascaded off the mess of protective skin and the flickering mana channels within it only to rebound back into the Air.

It didn’t hurt.

It didn’t hurt!

I jittered in nervous excitement as all the tension and pressure vanished suddenly. Then I wilted in relief, a weary exhaustion setting in.

The Great Change continued, oblivious to my relief. The light grew brighter and brighter until it leveled off at a blinding radiance. With my barrier of Skin, I was safe, but I still struggled to acclimate to the terrible brightness suffusing the Room.

I named it the Dawn.

The Skin moved.

I froze in shock as the Skin ripped the Bed in two and staggered upright while expelling horrific auditory vibrations into the Air. My gemstone bounced against the Skin, and my vision blurred with every step the Skin took. I watched, fascinated, as the Skin staggered to a Wall and ripped a massive rectangular hole in it which revealed another Room beyond.

No! A Door! And...and, and—a Hallway?

The Hallway was long and narrow, but I had no time to study it properly before the Skin hobbled into another Room. I felt myself start to shake. Too fast! Everything was too fast. There weren’t enough seconds.

Shellshocked, I watched the Skin step into a strange contraption and removed parts of the torn bed still attached to it. It touched the Walls in strange ways. Suddenly, Water spewed out of the Ceiling in torrents. My thoughts ground to a halt as I tried to reframe my understanding of Ceilings. Was there a link to the strange massage the Skin had given the white porcelain Wall? Did all Ceilings produce water like this? If so, why hadn't the other Ceiling behaved like this?

...how come this water wasn’t inside of a Glass?

The Skin raised two appendages and began touching itself as the water cascaded down.

I tried to keep up. I really did, but I couldn’t understand what the creature was doing. I hadn’t even been ready to understand that the Skin could move, let alone behave with such alien mannerisms.

No. Impossible. It wasn’t Skin. It was a creature. A—a Human piloting the mass of Skin. That was the only explanation.

The Human finished, stopping the flow of water from the ceiling, and stepped out of the contraption. It stood before a Wall that reflected a copy of the Room. I could only shake as the creature touched the red welt around the necklace. It then pulled me off its neck and dunked me into more Water before it began to scrub.

Before I understood what was happening, the layer of Skin I had so carefully cultivated was stripped away, and the full power of the Dawn blasted me right to my core.

I burned.

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

Dusk eventually came to shoo away the Day. It brought Night with it and blissful, blissful darkness. I shook in agony for many, many seconds. Minutes. Maybe even hours. I waited and watched, content to recover as the Night progressed. It grew colder and darker, but as time inexorably ground on, I couldn’t help but wonder if the Day would come back.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

If it did, then I would burn again. Or maybe not. Perhaps after Night, there wasn’t another Day. Perhaps what I had experienced was a once-off event. A terrible, terrible event that would never ever come back...

I snipped that train of thought in the bud. I couldn’t afford to waste time chasing theories when there was a very real and very present danger. For the time being I needed to assume the worst case. Days followed Nights in a cycle until proven otherwise.

I had no reference for how long Nights lasted, but I was exquisitely aware of how long a Day lasted. If they were equivalent, then...I only had a few short hours before Dawn returned to burn me. It wasn’t enough time—

I snipped that thought in the bud as well. I had to focus.

My previous strategy would have worked if not for the unexpected meddling of the Skin. Or...the creature that piloted the Skin. The...Human. It owned the Skin, using it to protect its core from the harmful rays of Daylight. I couldn’t have known that the Human would have removed my barrier, I hadn’t yet acquired sufficient data on Human behavior to make such a prediction. But now I knew that a Human valued cleanliness and disliked theft. That was good to know, though the knowledge only set me back to step one.

How in the world could I survive the Day?

Minutes passed as I let thoughts bounce around my mind. None of the materials in my vicinity could block out the Day as well as Skin. Or at all, for that matter. Some materials like wood were potential candidates, but it would require aura augmentation to work which I knew was a limited resource and wouldn’t be sufficient for an entire cycle.

So I needed Skin, but I couldn’t get Skin.

It was a perplexing problem, for sure. Perhaps my first ever perplexing problem. That alone was enough to make it exciting, and I felt joy rise up inside of me as I came to a potential solution.

If I couldn’t wrap myself in Skin, perhaps I could dig my way under it.

Which would require relocating my gemstone.

A few quick tests revealed that I was surprisingly mobile. I could nudge my gemstone with a concentrated wall of trapped mana, which should be more than enough since all I needed was to move beneath the Skin.

Unfortunately, that was easier said than done. Scraping the Skin hadn’t gone unnoticed by the Human. In fact, the bright red patch of skin around the necklace was still bright and angry. It had shrunk slightly since the morning, but it would take approximately 4.28 Day/Night cycles to vanish completely. Assuming a constant regenerative factor. That ruled out simply piercing through the protective membrane with a mana blade. I would need a more subtle approach.

I examined the surface of the pink flesh for what felt like an eternity. I traced the slithering mana channels and mapped them out carefully in my mind. It was hypnotizing how the mana wove a tapestry more beautiful than anything I’d witnessed up until now.

Wait...

The Skin had Mana inside of it. It wasn’t that Skin possessed mana-like properties. It had Mana inside of it. Two separate concepts infused together to form a more powerful — more different — whole.

The realization shook me to my core as the possibilities of such a revelation struck me. If the Skin possessed Mana, then that meant that I could manipulate the mana within the skin like I manipulated mana in the Air.

I reached out, solidifying a plane of concentrated aura an inch above the intransigent Skin. Unlike the last time I’d tried this, I didn’t force my aura to butt up against the skin. I simply let it sit there. Patiently waiting. At first, nothing happened, but moment by moment, I witnessed a magical change.

The mana channels began to distort.

They moved away from my golden aura as if skittish. Far more slowly than the mana in the air, but they still moved. Minutes passed as I pushed the mana channels away from the skin's surface. A dark spot appeared, and I distantly sensed the skin touching my gemstone begin to cool.

When the effort of maintaining the pressure began to grow too great, I struck. I formed a scalpel of concentrated mana and drove my gemstone through the thin layer of skin. It broke through like Water, letting me in as a strange red substance welled up from the wound.

That was no good. I couldn’t leave a trace of my infiltration, or the Human would reverse all my hard work.

With deft manipulation of my will, I gathered up all the red Blood and forced it back into the Human. I stole a Thread from the Blanket and wove it into the cut to bring the pieces of skin back together. The Brass chain of the Necklace needed to go, and a concentrated Mana blade gently extricated my gemstone from its cage.

In the next moment I coaxed the mana channels I’d displaced back to their initial positions. Their density was intense, and they blocked my perception, but that was a worthwhile sacrifice. I took extra care to return every mana channel to its exact position. There was no telling what the Human would find offensive, so I needed to be precise. Even if such precision turned out to be unnecessary. Still, as I watched in exultation, all evidence of my infiltration vanished.

Darkness closed in as I waited with bated breath. By my calculations, Dawn was only minutes away and—

There it was. I sensed the cascade of mana smash into the skin and winced as a terrific glow shone through the thin membrane. No pain. Moments later, a pulse of vertigo hit me as the Human rose from its slumber. It moved around, shaking and bouncing. Incomprehensible auditory vibrations washed through me as the Human seemed more agitated than normal.

But I was safe.

Another star became visible. This one was a vicious platinum blue that shone with such cold frigidity that I recoiled. More sounds vibrated through me—a back-and-forth exchange between the two Humans. Something pressed against me through the skin. It poked and prodded, but eventually, I was left alone.

...I hadn't angered the humans.

I was safe.

All the tension that had been collecting inside me over the last two cycles unspooled. I drifted as I allowed time to pass. It was dark inside the skin, but I wasn’t overly bothered. It gave me time to observe just the few things I could see. The mana channels, for example, were even more vibrant and brilliant here than they were from the outside.

They were doing fascinating things.

While most of the channels extending from the human core resumed their normal behavior, the threads close to my core were...changing. It wasn’t anything intrinsic to the channels. They were still channels that carried mana. But now, the few channels near me disconnected from the main collective and attached to my core.

I shivered as a new sensation became familiar to me—a new appendage. I reached out with my aura and watched in awe as my core pulsed in that familiar rhythm. A wave traveled down the channels in an exact replica of the Human’s core. The mana drank up my aura and became mine. It moved to my will as easily so easily I almost mistook it for aura.

The pulse of my core cascaded down my nascent channels, and I playfully pulled and pushed the tiny amount of mana around me.

It was a fundamentally different force to aura. They were opposites in many ways, and yet one was required to manipulate the other. I wanted to spend a cycle studying this strange new power. Compare and contrast it to my aura. Figure out why it wasn’t repelled by my aura now when it had been before. Not just one cycle. Two cycles! Wait...could I experiment for three cycles?

Three whole cycles!

I shivered in excitement at the thought of having as much time as I wanted to do whatever I wanted. Before I could lock in the plan, a spike of pain drew my attention.

My mana channels clashed with the human channels in a sphere around me. They crashed together, sparking and fizzing in uncoordinated violence. Uh oh. I pulled my mana channels closer to myself, but the damage was done.

The human channels thrummed with coppery power and began expanding. Sparks of pressurized mana frothed out of their ends, burning into the environment and causing small ruptures and tears in the skin. The area around me was almost immediately flooded by several heterogeneous fluids, but before I could name the new development, the human’s channels crashed into mine.

White noise halted my thoughts. There was only so much I could pull my channels back, and before long, I was forced to retaliate. The human was uncoordinated. Fighting haphazardly on all fronts, a weakness I abused.

I initiated a rolling attack, focusing on weak points by clumping up my channels and driving them deep into enemy territory. My strikes were vicious and deadly. Somehow my golden mana was able to shred the coppery human mana like it was made of Air. I abused this fact to sow discord within the enemy ranks.

Even with my advanced tactics, I couldn’t trade evenly with the human. I was having trouble differentiating between my channels and the enemy’s. They were different colors, but I was only able to taste that difference once I actually interacted with them. From a distance, they all looked the same.

The problem was that the human had many, many more. Even my powerful aura could only survive so much abuse before destabilizing and losing control of the mana. I didn’t actually know how to get more channels, and until I figured that out it was only a matter of time before I was overwhelmed.

I didn’t have the bandwidth to analyze that fact. Instead, I marshaled my aura to sow discord within the human’s ranks. Whenever a wave of wrathful attacks descended upon me, I unleashed a vicious spike of aura that dispersed the attack.

Why was this human so mean?

The thought bubbled up through my subconscious as the rest of my attention was consumed with survival. Unlike every other thought, I paid it a modicum of attention. How come this human was doing everything in its power to destroy me? All I wanted was to survive.

It had skin that kept it safe from the Day. I didn’t. Why couldn’t it share? It had so much skin—so much that it certainly didn’t need all of it. Even when I grabbed some excess off the surface, it washed me in the Water and subjected me to an entire Day of suffering.

Was I here just to suffer?

I squashed the fatalistic thoughts. If I waited for events to carry on, my gemstone would be destroyed. I didn’t know what that meant, but the pain of the process was more than enough of a deterrent for me.

I was in an odd dual state of being. One part of me—somehow separate but not—was handling the defense of the core with perfect precision. The other part, perhaps even a larger part, was watching the developments with an analytical eye.

This could not continue.

The question was how did this process work. As far as I could tell, there was not enough information for the human to be doing what it was doing. It shouldn’t be able to prioritize my channels so efficiently. They looked the same. They were the same. All the way down to the mana they carried. The only difference was the unique blend of aura infused within the mana...

Wait.

I isolated a drop of human mana and brought it forcefully closer to me. It was different. There was a metallic flavor to it. A coppery tinge. Something I hadn’t seen before. An exact deviation from my airy, golden mana.

Interesting.

With almost casual curiosity, I sampled the human’s mana more deeply. I felt a whirring buzz within me. A mechanical clicking that hungered for the strange mana. Every time I tasted the mana, I extracted more information from it. There were differences. A sort of harmonic oscillation created by the human’s aura. The core’s effect painted the mana with a unique blend of sensations that seemed utterly random.

That didn’t mean they weren't important or that I shouldn't try to replicate it.

I touched upon my core and gently changed the rhythm I was using to communicate to my channels so that it was identical to the human’s.

At first, the war continued. Mana exploded just beneath the surface of the Human skin. Fluids of various origins suffused everything, cooling the area and removing torn and mangled flesh from the warzone. The temperature kept rising despite the cooling fluids, and the skin suffered for it.

In tandem, mana channels were slowly pruned as they were destroyed by the direct conflict. That had the frightening effect of thinning the protective veil of the skin.

Thankfully, it was Night, and I distantly observed the small human tossing and turning in the bed while two larger humans watched on. The first human possessed the frigid platinum core, but the second one was an enigma. The odd, emaciated creature had a dark core and instead of skin, its body was made entirely of wood.

How decidedly strange. I shall name it Father.

I returned to my task and with every passing moment, I became better and better at mimicking the small human’s mana signature. I continuously sampled the human’s mana and each time, I discovered some new nuance. Every time I incorporated a new subtlety into my own rhythm, the war changed.

The human’s assualts grew confused. Its attacks lost cohesions, which gave me room to work. Unfortunately, it seemed as if the human still sensed something was wrong, and it began resorting to scorching the flesh on which we fought. That wouldn't do. We both needed the skin to survive the dawn.

My mimicry wasn’t enough. It wasn’t that I was imperfect. It was that I was slow. I was a quarter-second delayed from the human core by necessity. Every aura pulse was subtly different, and there was a limit to how fast I could recreate the energy wave.

I wasn’t thinking big enough. I chided myself.

I forcefully attached one of the human mana channels to my own. The direct connection enabled me not just to mimic the human’s signature but extend it. Instead of a separate infiltrating entity crudely copying a master, I was a relay. A pure extension of mana that pulsed in perfect harmony with the human.

Peace.

The war calmed.

The aftermath of the chaos took many cycles to heal. I sat within my crystal and observed the comings and goings of Blood, Lymph, and Cells. The channels repaired by themselves, but the skin required more tender care. It was a learning experience that was infinitely more relaxing than the chaos of the last few days.

At the same time, I grew more accustomed to the new automatic part of myself. I dedicated a small portion of my mind to maintaining the mana signature mimicry. After a few hours of warily watching the process from the outside, I became satisfied that the part of myself overseeing that duty wouldn’t fail.

This left my mind free to do and think about...whatever I wanted. The only issue was that I was now almost completely blind. I could see a tiny volume around my gemstone, but with all the mana cascading around me, I couldn’t hope to see beyond.

So, I explored.

Playing with the mana channels was a fun pastime and taught me much. Since my mana signature exactly matched the human’s, I could now inject small pulses of aura into the channels and manipulate the flows. I used this to map out the internals of the human.

It had five appendages, two pairs of which were mirror images of each other, and the whole structure was supported by a rigid bone skeleton. The top appendage was the strangest of the bunch. All the joints in the limb were concentrated around the base — which was exactly opposite when compared to the other four appendages — with a bulbous bony sphere balanced precariously on top.

I struggled to understand the purpose of such an appendage. I understood the arms and legs; they were locomotion enhancers. I’d witnessed this human's incredible potential for movement when they navigated out of the poor Bed and into the dreaded Shower. The Head, though...Its purpose escaped me.

That was until I accidentally connected to one of the fragile nerve cells clustering within the bone shell.

My world exploded in imagery and sensation. My first instinct was to recoil, but no pain accompanied the strange flow of information.

Information?

I allowed the flood to suffuse my mind and began to understand.

Thought streams 3719-A to 8419-C were dedicated to vision channels. The Bedroom opened up to me in an array of colors I had never even considered existed. Strangely, there was no mana information inherent to these data streams.

Thought streams 9441-D to 9961-F, as well as 441-AC to 907-S, were dedicated to auditory stimuli. Sensory vibrations were collected and interpreted as precomputed checksums whose meanings eluded me. I tabled the data stream for future analysis after soaking for a time in the cacophony of sounds.

And more and more.

>>>Hello?

I flinched as a small section of neurons near the front of the Brain lit up like mana at Sunrise. A directed assault of information rocketed through my thoughts with a single unified meaning. A greeting...of sorts. Should I respond?

>>>That was weird...I hope I’m not getting sick again.

Warily. Hesitantly. Cautiously. I touched upon that ultra-dense cluster of neurons and willed a bundle of mana to wash over it with my intent

>>>Greetings.

The audio and voice channels lit up as the Brain imploded into chaos. I wilted, struggling to understand the mayhem and hoping I hadn’t angered the human. I’d only just found a place to rest. It would be terrible if they kicked me out again.

>>>Holy Smokeyes! What was that?!

The message shot through me and I wondered if I was supposed to answer that. What if the human wasn’t asking about my greeting? What if they were? But if they were...wasn’t it self-evident? It was a greeting. The same they had sent to me.

I was confused.

>>>Hey! Hello? Voice! Come back! Say something. Please! pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease!

A new emotion I had yet to encounter swelled in my soul. Annoyance, I named it. With a touch of Panic.

I decided that responding to the human was the best choice of action.

>>>I am here.

The Human Brain seemed to short-circuit again, and a flood of muddled questions bombarded my nascent mind.

I began to try to answer the questions but then stumbled.

This was too hard. There wasn’t just one question, but many. How was I supposed to answer all of them with one response? Was I allowed to answer only one? Was I supposed to scramble my response like the human had scrambled their question?

But...that was so inefficient...

And hard.

And...why?

I—I didn’t understand.

I’d achieved so much, and still, this world was throwing new things at me. No matter how much I learned or how quickly I solved problems, I kept getting thrust into new situations.

The part of myself handling mana signature mimicry stuttered.

I shook as three strange messages bubbled up from my core. I tasted metal and lightning as new information about a strange multilegged creature flooded my mind. Specifically regarding an organ known as a multi-limb neuron cluster. How to make it. What it did. Where it—

Nope!

Too many new things.

I couldn’t handle it.

I give up.

I retreated from it all, dragging every scrap of my aura back into my gemstone to hide.

While my mind escaped the chaos of reality, a cruel, uncaring aspect of my being ruthlessly continued mimicking the human’s mana signature. At the same time, a deep, soulless part of myself blinked online with several more messages: