“You are never going to believe this!”

Anda’s voice was full of excitement. He started speaking as soon as Lilijoy opened her eyes.

Lilijoy took a deep breath, grateful to be spared the task of telling Anda what had happened, even for a few seconds. She had logged out before she had to witness what Sinaloa might do to her helpless, stone-encased body.

“Are you ready?” His eyes were shining, full of life, and just for a moment, Lilijoy forgot that she had just killed Skria, watched Jessila and Magpie murdered, and been happy about it.

“Yes?”

“Attaboy is at the Academy!”

Anda delivered the news triumphantly and sat back to watch her reaction. He didn’t get any. Instead, Lilijoy went utterly still. An odd, numb sensation crawled across her mind with every thought.

It was all for nothing, was the first thought. That was followed by: I could have stayed at the Academy. It took her another moment to think: Now I can’t see him Inside, which prompted: He’s at the Academy, and I’ve been captured by Sinaloa.

The irony of the reversal was not lost on her. When she finally mustered a response to the increasingly confused Anda, it didn’t have much emotion behind it.

“Perfect. Wish I’d known that a little sooner.”

Something finally clicked in Anda’s understanding. “I take it things went poorly?”

“You could say that.” She had to drag the next words out of herself. “I got captured.”

“Oh.” Anda seemed to shrink a little. “How?”

Lilijoy told him the story and filled him in on her suspicions.

“They were expecting us. I have to assume that Magpie’s organization was working with Sinaloa. Our death-wishes didn’t work, and that could only be because they weren’t meant to work in the first place. The only good news is that the others escaped, partly thanks to Magpie. I don’t think she had any idea that it was all a sham.”

She felt so stupid. No wonder Raven had wanted the infiltration to go forward. He had only emerged to talk to her when it seemed like his plans were in jeopardy. She had even picked up on the oddness but passed it off as paranoia.

I need to examine all the decisions that led to this result.

She replayed the entire infiltration in her mind, examining her reasoning and motivation at each juncture. It all came back to one central mistake; overconfidence in the respawn methods. The decision to move forward despite growing misgivings was always framed by the belief that there was a near-certain escape route from any trap.

And why was she overconfident?

She had considered the death-wishes malfunctioning, and arranged for backup respawn methods. She had made certain that they were distributed randomly. They had even tested one back at the Academy.

She had not accounted for the possibility that Magpie’s trainer would give them trapped death-wishes and that Magpie would not know. That was where everything went sideways. If Magpie had known, if her intent was truly malicious, Lilijoy felt certain she would have detected it. In hindsight, it was a painfully obvious mistake. She had not thoroughly examined the possibility that Magpie’s organization was collaborating with Sinaloa without Magpie’s knowledge.

After all, Rosemallow had invited them in, and there was never any indication that the mysterious organization with deep Inside connections would ally themselves with the most hated group of Outsiders.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t considered it as a possibility, but she had assigned it too low a probability, and focused her thoughts and energy preparing contingencies for more likely scenarios.

But what did Sinaloa really get out of any of this? Why such an elaborate charade?

“I can’t help wondering what Sinaloa’s endgame could possibly be,” Anda said in parallel to her thoughts. “Maybe they thought you would seek out Attaboy at the Outside location they provided and fall into another trap? That seems awfully baroque though.”

“It sounds about right to me,” she replied. “People haven’t been overestimating my intelligence so far, why start now? If they had been a bit more subtle, it could have worked. I’m betting that they didn’t trust me to find the file they wanted me to find, so they delivered it on a silver platter.”

Anda shook his head. “To be that obvious though? If they were working with Magpie’s people, they must have some sense of your capabilities.”

“Now who’s overestimating the intelligence of organizations? To them I’ll always be a dumb gob who has a treasure inside her. I’m not so sure they’re wrong.”

Anda’s face softened. “You know that’s far from the truth. I advised you to consider your strength over your fears when making decisions, and I stand by that advice. Here you stand, utterly free, powerful and on the brink of even greater power. You made the right decision, going in. The ones who made the mistake are those who have made you an enemy.”

Lilijoy considered his words. She had been angry with Anda when the public enforcers surrounded them in Manaus. That situation had turned out okay, but she could still remember the moment of fear, the helpless feeling that her worst imaginings were coming to pass, all because of Anda’s naive optimism. Now she was angry with him again for much the same reason, but this time the worst outcome, or near to it, had actually occurred. She knew it wasn’t fair to blame him, but the feeling of distrust, not in his character but in his competence, had occupied a small corner of her mind. But now she realized something.

“They may have kicked you out of your clan, but you never stopped being a warrior, did you?”

He looked startled for a moment. Then he nodded. “That’s exactly right. I may prize thought over action, and the greater good over my tribe, but I will never forget the lessons I learned from my people. Do not fight a lion with a stick, but never allow fear to rule your mind. Fear is the mind-killer.”

He smiled. “I stole that last one from Dune, but my people would agree. A warrior moves toward fear and uses it as a compass in their life. They use it the way a bodybuilder uses weights.”

“It gets more interesting when we can just turn off our fear though, doesn’t it?”

“If we turned off our hunger would we still eat?”

She played along with his question. “I suppose we would, to avoid dying.”

“So is the hunger truly gone, or did it change form from a biological emotion to a logical one?”

Logical emotion? “Is this going to be another long conversation about semantics? I can’t say I’m really in the mood,” she said.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ll get to my point. Fear has biological origins, but turning off the biology does not necessarily kill the fear. It may simply force it into a higher level, into a thought structure of sorts. We might then call it a rational fear, and experience it differently, but it would drive our actions just the same. And in defining it as rational, we are in danger of believing it to be correct, when it may in fact represent errors or incompleteness in our understanding.”

A smile forced its way onto Lilijoy’s face. “Anda, it’s amazing how you can philosophize under any circumstances.”

He smiled back. “Why would anyone do otherwise? But I suppose there are more pressing matters. I believe I have a very important errand to run on the Inside. Is there anything you would like me to tell Attaboy, once I track him down?”

“Tell him I’m sorry I can’t be there. If he doesn’t trust you, tell him I said that Pinton is a huge jerk, but Timout is okay when he remembers where to pee.”

Anda made a face. “I’ll have to get that story some other time. With a little luck, I can get his contact information, and put you in touch directly. He must be registered with the system if he’s Inside.”

“Good. Now get going.” She made a shooing gesture, even though Anda wouldn’t be going anywhere physically. “I’ll make sure we don’t run into anything.”

***

The hovercar moved smoothly through the night. Lilijoy savored the peaceful quiet of the ride, enjoying the fact that no active piloting was necessary. That would begin in a couple hours, when they left the swampy riverbed and began to move through the more arid country filled with termite mounds and the occasional hardened tree.

Getting close to home.

She knew she should be thinking about… things. Like her situation. Or the mysteries of the subsets. Or even Nandi’s riddle. Instead she read. Even if she took her time and savored the writing, she could easily read dozens of books in an hour. Reading for pleasure was often a strange experience, as it was accompanied by the sensation of having read the book before. Luckily, that did little to disrupt narrative flow, or spoil her appreciation of a well-turned phrase, but there were no surprises or plot twists she didn’t see coming.

She hoped that someday she might come across an abandoned library, full of texts which had never been uploaded. But in the meantime, she found herself more and more drawn to books with great writing and timeless ideas, books that would reward any amount of re-reading. When she was in research mode, she would split her mind and read multiple articles and books simultaneously, but now she just wanted to escape for a bit, to submerge her personal narrative into one created by someone else. Recently, the someone else had been William Shakespeare. She had made her through the comedies and some of the histories. It seemed an appropriate time to read the tragedies.

She hadn’t been reading long when a thought bubbled up. If she was researching, she might have enhanced her focus and repressed it, but it somehow seemed wrong to use the powers of her system in such a way when she was theoretically relaxing. Plus, this thought wasn’t half bad.

I don’t need motor circuits if I can’t move anyway.

Once the idea had surfaced, she couldn’t let it go. She could split her mind and keep track of what was happening to her on the Inside without neglecting her responsibility to not drive into things on the Outside. Part of her was a bit afraid to see what evils Sinaloa had designed for her, but she figured it would be much better to check while most of her was awake and aware of a much more benign environment. She realized she could even set it up a bit like an internal screen, so that if there was something truly horrific happening to her Inside body she could just look away.

Might as well get it over with.

The first sight that greeted her was… nothing.

Did they blind me?

She ran a quick integrity check on her Inside body, looking for any injury. Nothing seemed to be damaged, and there was no active source of pain, so she slowly eased into her other senses. She could hear all the right things internally, her heartbeat, the blood flowing through her veins. Her sense of touch and proprioception told her that she was restrained or covered in some way. After she filtered out her own scents, her sense of smell delivered earth, mold, moisture and wood. Living wood? There was a faint spice to the smell, the same basic scent as the forest she had spent several hours in earlier. The smell of Averdale.

No surprise there I guess. It’s only been just over an hour. They probably kept me enclosed in stone and put me in a cellar or something.

The air in her nose was cool. She realized that her breathing was entrained to her Outside body, which gave her another idea. She wiggled the fingers on her right hand and passed the movement impulses through to her Inside body. It was no surprise to her that her Inside fingers couldn’t replicate the motion, though she could feel them try. A few movements with other parts of her body proved that, while she was otherwise thoroughly confined, her eyebrows still had a full range of motion available.

She was tempted at that point to use tongue clicks to get a look at her space, or at least find out to what extent her hearing was blocked, but she decided to wait a while before making any sounds that might attract attention. It wouldn’t surprise her at all if Sinaloa had some way of monitoring her, or even someone right next to her in stealth.

Okay. First job is to Charm-proof myself better. Then I can build a better smell map, and then see what’s happening with my mana. Once that’s done, maybe it’s a good time to work on redundant motor pathways, so I won’t have to jump around like someone in an ancient VR system if I do get a chance to move.

She set about her tasks. The Charm-proofing was simple enough. First, she set her system to filter any sounds with similar profiles to a human voice. Then she built a small system to monitor what was being said around her and present it as text on her internal awareness. Her Outside consciousness would act as her final safeguard.

The smell map didn’t tell her much, as the air was quite still around her. She tried breathing out a bit forcefully, to see if anything would come back to her as a sort of smell echo, but all she got was more of the terpene molecules she associated with the trees of Averdale.

Finally she turned to her internal mana. She half expected some kind of mana suppression to be in place around her. She had heard that such things existed, usually in the form of arrays that could siphon away ambient mana and prevent Mana Gathering. The fact that there was none, as far as she could tell, showed that either Sinaloa was very certain of their intelligence about her abilities, or they were being a bit sloppy.

Or both, I suppose, she thought. I doubt many level tens would have a way out of this situation, though I might, if I ever find any earth magic to go with my random Fused class. I guess level ten will be long gone by the time I do that though. If I ever get the chance.

The mystery of her acquisition of Fused was one of the many loose ends she had floating on her mental to-do list. It had gotten to the point where she just attributed such enigmas to the general peculiarities of her system, and she didn’t feel much inclined to invest her mental energy on smaller problems that might disappear if she ever had the big picture. Still, she didn’t allow herself to be so sloppy as to lose track of them altogether.

There were two avenues she could pursue regarding how she picked up Fused. First was that her system somehow allowed it, despite the absence of a Source. The second seemed more likely to receive William of Ockham’s stamp of approval; that nothing unusual had happened at all, because she did in fact have a Source. Her suspicion had fallen squarely on Nandi’s Boon almost as soon as she had time to think on the subject. Now that it was activated, whatever that meant, she might be able to test her hypothesis, and if it was a Source of some kind, perhaps it could give her a way out of her current predicament. She decided to postpone her development of motor pathways and give her full attention to the white gem embedded in her right palm.

She started to pull mana from her core without any attempt to categorize it, then had an idea. She could envision a new type of mana, one compatible with the gem on her hand. She had found that her visualizations and reality seemed to feed off of one another when she developed other kinds of mana, so why not make a white mana that corresponded to the color of Nandi’s Boon? She knew that the color was probably the least valuable correlation, but it couldn’t hurt. To make her mana match the boon even better, she needed to guess, as well as she could, what the heck it did.

She knew that Nandi’s Boon was somehow related to oracle stones. After all, it was proximity to the oracle stone that activated it.

And what do oracle stones actually do? she asked herself. Is there some kind of elemental magic in play, or is it something else?

It could be some form of fire magic, the province of light and radiation, somehow gathering or connecting to energy across vast distances and dimensions. But there were certainly types of magic other than fire, earth, air and water. Magi skills was one big category, as were abilities.

Oracle stones were originally a scrying tool that allowed someone to see far away locations. Their use as glorified computer terminals was a twist, a trick, that allowed them to scry across the barrier between Inside and Outside. She suspected that it was the aspect of action at a distance that was more important than the actual energy collected.

So if the oracle stone gathers signals across space, even from other worlds, then what magic would that be?

She could easily recall every detail of her life after her system became fully functional, so she remembered quite clearly what Nandi said when he first gave it to her.

“I’ve got just the thing! Something I’ve had for a long, long time; but you might say I outgrew it almost as long ago as I got it.”

She opened herself to her internet memory and meditated on Nandi. Immediately her mind filled with tales from Hindu sacred texts and other, more obscure references. She plucked out the key facts: Nandi was the gatekeeper or guardian to Shiva’s sacred places, and also his mount, sometimes even manifesting as a chariot. He had come into being at the behest of a sage who wanted an immortal child that only Shiva could provide. When he was born, he was wrapped in armor made of diamonds.

Gatekeeper, vehicle, immortal born to man, wrapped in diamonds at birth. The thing he outgrew almost as long ago as he got it. What need has an immortal for armor?

Reconciling the rich symbolic language of the Puranas and other sacred scriptures with the manifestation of Nandi as a subset of Guardian embedded in a former video game wasn’t a simple task. She knew that her Nandi cultivated joyful anticipation, which made her skeptical of the most obvious possibility; that Nandi’s Boon was a part of the armor he was born in. For one, it just seemed so… literal. And it didn’t do much to explain the connection to the oracle stone.

Although the image of warrior-Lilijoy clad in shimmering diamond armor did have a certain attraction to it.

It wasn’t impossible that Inside-Nandi was referring more to his own origins, rather than the mythological one. It could relate to aspects of the Inside that Guardian had removed over time. Transformation, summoning and telekinesis had all been taken out, or greatly reduced. There had once been necromancy in DayNight Universe; she was forever grateful that that hadn’t made it into the Inside, at least not into the Garden. The general category of spacial magic had been almost completely phased out; its last remnant was the ubiquitous inventory ability. There used to be fast travel and teleportation type abilities, which seemed to be more up Nandi’s alley in his role as a steed.

I’ve never tried really messing with my inventory, she realized.

Of course, in the early days she had played around with it, ascertaining what would fit and what wouldn’t, seeing how fast she could put things in and take them out again. She pulled up the text from her old tutorial character sheet.

Your inventory ability allows you to store and retrieve items

in a magical space only accessible to you.

It initially takes the form of a simple bag that can never be lost.

The pack does not interact physically with the world

(for example, you may not attack or block with it*)

*credit to Reality Bender Fredicus Lee

She remembered her amusement at the image of Fredicus Lee, who her mind painted as a skinny Chinese guy for some reason, wielding his inventory in combat, clubbing his opponents and blocking their attacks. She figured the blame for that exploit probably rested squarely on the attempt on Guardian’s part to make the inventory more ‘realistic’ by manifesting it as a simple bag.

Even encased in stone, she could sense the contents of her eight cubic feet of storage, the various and sundry items for fighting, weaving and general adventuring she had accumulated. Inventories were almost completely secure against theft or looting, except in the case of manipulation of the owner via Charm, so it was no surprise to see her possessions as she had left them. To remove an inventory item, all she needed to do was reach into her bag and physically pull it out, something that wasn’t happening any time soon. The system could at times be a bit slow in furnishing whatever it was she sought, which Lilijoy figured was yet another effort to prevent over-reliance on the magical storage method. It was a bit of a mystery to her why Guardian, or subset thereof, had kept inventories at all.

She dragged her thoughts back to Nandi’s Boon, and the flavor of mana she might want to create for it. If she wasn’t encased in stone, she might have spent some time trying to perceive any mana involved in the use of her inventory, but as it was she needed different inspiration. She carefully avoided the many rabbit holes relating to the nature of space and time and decided instead to focus on the sensations and emotions associated with moving. Giddy spinning, joyously free; everything she was currently not.

Her forced immobility freed her imagination and magnified her feelings like hunger feeds the appetite, and she took every morsel of the motion she was denied and poured it into a luminous white cascade of bubbling mana that poured from her core and filled her body until it reached her right palm. There, she drove it into the white gem, which sucked it in hungrily. Internally, she could see it expand, growing to fill her palm, then covering her fingers and wrist with diamond pearlescence.

She felt a pang of regret that she could not see what was happening externally, but she imagined that her hand was now covered in a glove of diamond. She continued to summon mana from her core and pour it into Nandi’s Boon, trying to expand the effect further, but all the additional energy poured off and circulated back to her core.

Okay. Other than assuming the inheritance of the king of pop, what has this actually done? she asked herself.

The portion of her mind on the Outside sensed her desire, and expanded her fingers outward. She couldn’t feel any stone around her hand. Twisting her wrist in circles encountered no resistance either. It was as if her hand was in a different space entirely, which begged the question.

If her hand was no longer encased in the stone surrounding her, then where was it?