While all of that was happening, I was still in my mind—my Main Menu, to be precise—having just escaped Lantor by the skin of my teeth.

The place was rapidly becoming a death trap, and it needed to be contained.

“Can you just make me a soul crystal already, or whatever?” Kreston said.

“Just hold on a minute!” I said, raising my voice. “One thing at a time!”

The peanut gallery—Kreston and Andalon—stood behind me. My attention, however, was entirely on the lattice of world-cubes floating in front of me. It was currently zoomed in on the twinkling, orange cloud representing Lantor and its content. Focusing, I surrounded the cloud with a translucent red spherical energy shell—a half metaphorical, half literal, all-metaphysical barrier meant to keep the Incursion locked away in Lantor. At first, I made the barrier only a little bit bigger than the cloud it enclosed, but then thought better of it and willed it to grow a little more.

Looking over my shoulder, I asked Andalon for her opinion on my work. “Is that good enough?” I said. “Are we safe yet?”

She looked at it for a moment, and then faced me and said, “A little more!”

Nodding, I stuck out my arms once more and charged the energy shell with a bit more oomph. The red energy shot out of my hands and flowed onto the sphere, which glowed brighter, visibly thickening as it grew stronger and more resilient.

“Okay, that’s good,” she said.

I stepped back, letting my arms drop to my sides. A couple of deep breaths later, and my heart finally stopped racing. (Yes, I’d been so stressed out that I’d subconsciously willed myself to have a heartbeat, just so that it could race.)

Waving my hands inward, I zoomed out from Lantor’s world-cube. The other world-cubes came into view beside it, and if you looked at Lantor’s cube, you could see the red energy sphere pulsing within it.

I pointed at Lantor’s cube. “Andalon… what was that?” I asked.

“Very a lot and very scary,” she said.

“Have you ever seen any of that before?”

She paused for a moment. “Maybe?”

“Do you remember any of it?” I asked.

She stared at the ever-shifting lattice of translucent orange cubes, and then, after stuttering for a moment, muttered, “Scary-Shinies.”

“Which ones were the Scary-Shinies?” Kreston asked.

“The big, lumpy ones,” Andalon answered. “The ones that fell.”

“You mean these?” I said, conjuring an image of one of the silver things we’d seen littered in the valley right before the bridge.

Andalon answered by skittering behind Kreston in sheer fright.

I dismissed the image with a wave of my hand.

“What are they? And why are you afraid of them?”

Kreston looked over his shoulder as Andalon emerged from behind him. Her face twitched with emotion. “They’re so mean! They hurt wyrmehs! They hurt me. They hurt Amplersandalon. They chase and chase and chase.” Her voice cracked. “They’re bad guys. Really, really bad guys.”

That sent a chill down my spine. For good measure, I made the Bond-Sign.

“Why were they there,” I asked, adding, “wherever there was?”

Andalon shook her head. “I dunno.”

“Does it have anything to do with the Angels?” I asked.

“I dunno.”

“Wait,” Kreston said, his eyes going wide, “did you just say Angels? As in more than one?”

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While all of that exciting stuff was going on, I—Second Me—was on a harrowing journey of my own. Because I was decoupled from First Me at the time, I wasn’t aware of the Lantor Incursion, or the fact that it had put a whole new mystery into my lap. At the moment, all I knew was that Andalon’s attackers had somehow reached Lantor, and that First Me had decoupled from me to go and investigate. I wasn’t envious of him, though, for I had another, beefy mystery on my plate: the secret behind Vernon’s dangerous zombie experiments in General Labs. The ghosts Andalon had picked up in the garage still hadn’t finished downloading, so I’d taken the liberty of heading on over to GL, in the hopes that being closer to the scene of the crime would speed up the spirit’s uploads.

While I could have gone back to the garage—I had the rank and privilege to cross the military checkpoints, I was worried about attracting undue attention to myself. Garden Court was still kind of a mess from this morning’s near-riot, so I thought it prudent that I try my best to stay out of the way. Fortunately, WeElMed’s basement was eager to coöperate.

While my main consciousness had been busy with Lantor, I led our body down to the first basement level, to help administer the second batch of mycophage to the patients we’d been housing down there, on account of overflow. And, if I happened to wander in General Labs’ general direction while doing so, well… that would be very convenient—and it was. I definitely got a boost in my spirit upload speed, though it wasn’t as much as I would have liked, because, at a certain point, the soldiers standing guard wouldn’t let me pass, even when I showed them my credentials as a member of Ward E’s CMT.

Because my hands were now three fingered, I found myself getting quite a lot of psychokinesis practice out of using my powers to fill in the empty finger-slots in my hazmat suit’s gloves, as well as lend a helping hand when I had trouble grasping or manipulating objects with my transformed fingers.

“Your clearance is high, yeah,” one of the soldiers had said, “but not that high.”

Since that only made me more worried about what the military was doing in GL, I doubled down on trying to find a way around the soldiers, but no luck. The particular labs the military was using were part of a quasi-independent complex-within-a-complex that had only two entrances: the one the soldiers were guarding, and the one in the garage—and that one was being guarded, too.

Had I been more aware of my surroundings, I might have given more weight to the nervous conversation that broke out among the soldiers as I walked away—something about the Melted Palace.

Back in my mind, after I’d explained that, yes, there was apparently more than one Holy Angel, Kreston had been a little shell-shocked. Staring at the lattice of orange world-cubes, he turned contemplative for a moment, and then asked a question. “Why didn’t you destroy all that stuff? The Incursion?”

Andalon stepped forward to stand beside him. “Yeah, Mr. Genneth, why didn’t you make the weird stuff and the Scary-Shinies go away?”

It was an excellent question. Fortunately, I had an equally excellent answer.

Gently, I pressed my hands together, palm against palm. “So… do we all agree that we don’t understand what happened back there, in Lantor?”

Andalon nodded.

“Something was there that should definitely not have been there,” Kreston said.

“Yes, but we don’t know what it is,” I countered. I let my hands relax. “Second, do we all agree that, whatever this Incursion is, it is probably important.”

Kreston nodded. “Definitely.”

Andalon bobbed up and down. “It’s super, duper ‘porptant!”

“Great! So, when you have something important that you don’t understand, but really want to, destroying it outright is very shortsighted.” Expecting the obvious question, I turned to Andalon and said, “A thing being ‘shortsighted’ means that it’s not a good idea to do it.”

“Or,” Kreston said, “you could stop the big bad thing from becoming any bigger and badder by getting rid of it right now.”

“And if it comes back, stronger than before?” I said.

“Oh…” Kreston’s expression dropped. “Yeah, I can see that happening.”

“Exactly. And, you saw the way the landscape and lifeforms the Incursion brought with it were flickering in and out of existence, right?”

“Yeah…” he said, unsure of where I was going with my point.

“Well, like with our connection to the greater &alon, I think whatever is afoot in Lantor hasn’t fully ‘ripened’ yet,” I said. “I’d like to take some time to figure out how to examine and explore this thing on my own terms, rather than its—and, hopefully, without having to be restricted to game rules. Still,” I scratched my head, “just to be safe, I think I’m going to have some doppelgenneths start level grinding my half-pangol cleric character for more power, just in case.”

“Still…” Kreston said, “there’s one thing I don’t understand.”

“Yes?” I asked.

“If Lantor is a world you made, you’re basically its God, right?”

“Yes,” I said, nodding.

“But then why couldn’t you use your god-modding powers when we were inside the Incursion?” he asked.

“That’s a really good question,” I said, “and I wish I knew the answer.”

Suddenly, a wave of lightheadedness lowered me to one knee.

“Mr. Genneth, what’s wrong?” Andalon asked, rushing close.

I shook my head. “The doppelgenneth manning my body… he’s trying to recouple with me.”

As a progeny consciousness, he could request a recoupling, but it was up to me, the progenitor consciousness, to make that happen.

And, boy, did Second Me want to recouple.

I granted his request. All at once, a storm of information poured into my brain. I could taste the panic on my body’s lips.

My heart sank as my neck-hairs stood on end.

Closing my eyes, I reentered myself, willing my consciousness back into my body’s driver seat. I found myself standing in a hallway, staring at a console mounted on the wall, watching a fantasy play out on live TV.