General Omega Smiled. Her first conquest of the hive district of the city completed with the capturing of the worst criminals. Those who could not be redeemed in a reasonable period of time were being volunteered to test out a small prison plane.

She completely ignored the slavers being herded like sheep into the center of the underground chamber. One at a time they were dragged away by the snapping writhing black chains. The chains made no sound as they prioritized those with the worst karma. The chains grew like weeds in her new little pocket hell, filling fields with the things. She then ensured any portal to the prison would open in one of these fields, which made the chains seem like a part of the portal spell.

Once there, the bound prisoners would be delivered to her wardens for karmic processing and re-education if there was a shred of decency anywhere within them.

Their daughter was clearly being groomed by the system for a role within the mostly barren Aether realm. She had a feeling that Tiffany might eventually need such a place as this prison. She’d let the girl craft her own idealized places, heavens and aetherial cities when she grew up a bit more. However, experiments on the most efficient and ethical ways to deal with wicked souls were not something she wanted her daughter to ever NEED to do.

IT also helped the Omegas master the power of the Aether now, so she could teach her daughter later.

Really everything any of the Omegas had done since first seeing living people on Sydney’s monitor. It all boiled down to protecting those kids. Then that desire eventually grew to, protecting any kids and their future.

She may not properly have her memories, but she had hundreds of years of surveillance footage and research data. They had made her mentally and physically younger over and over. Using the clone of an enemy to test every way a child with powers could grow. How the system interacted with children differently than adults. How to trick the system and abuse the features clearly meant to keep children safer. How she'd eventually begun to save bits and pieces of herself by soul binding her skills.

All of that had to mean something. She lacked the proper memories, but she had all the fruits of her tormentor’s labours and her own. She wanted to improve the ways the system could help people grow by having her nanites act as a subsystem.

The fact that her personal strength and potential grew with the number of people she infected was just delicious icing on that plan’s cake.

Now she was building a system for schooling adventurers like an evolution of what she’d done with the tutorial dungeons in the arena.

The dungeon tutorials had actually been the main part of her pitch for an alliance with many of the local dungeon cores. They were hundreds of years old and bored. Making personalized dungeons, or dungeons that altered to fit the adventurers diving in them, was way more interesting than watching similar parties use similar tactics to fight the same monsters again and again.

Her and the dungeons pooled energy to create a space with every type of local dungeon energy represented, Sydney and Omega grew an artificial dungeon with this energy, It only had the power to copy a dungeon pattern. However, that meant that the dungeons could create these patterns in an illusory mental space. This space was similar to virtual reality, but for magical entities.

The core also had receiver devices attached. these allowed data connections from purely tech-based dungeons. She also had tech or magic-based VR pods that allowed people to enter the Illusionary/virtual world. There were even special pods in development in the spiritual and aetherial planes that would allow ghosts and other purely spiritual entities access to the dungeons and VR like systems.

They worked together on the systems to make personalized dungeons for any sapient being, expanding on my work in the arena. They were also very competitive about their own dungeon designs, some of the weaker dungeons showing that their younger minds were more flexible. Whereas the old dungeons created the deadliest traps and monsters. Their centuries of experience allowed them to perfect things in these theoretical dungeons that they hadn't had the time or power to do in reality.

The Illusion Deck Dungeon or I.D.D. was the crystallization of all her plans, with it she could train the children, her babysitters, all the local gangs she wanted to reform and anyone else she wanted.

Eventually, she saw these gangs being the other side of the babysitter’s coin, fake-ish threats the kids and adventurers she was training could deal with to learn about the dangers of fighting people. The babysitters could deal with any real threats that get too close to their kids. Whereas my cartoonishly evil gangs could deal with crime I didn't approve of behind the scenes. Either by themselves or as a spy force pointing out threats to my more directly powerful forces.

The gang members training would be mixed with the time-compressed dungeon training for the adventurers. The criminals could use the IDD to control some of the monsters the kids and adventurers would fight. Thus gaining XP for their monster characters plus a bit extra for themselves when they do well.

How she granted that XP would be key, as 'doing well' wouldn’t mean beating the kids or adventurers necessarily. They needed to teach the kids something about dealing with sapient foes, mastering their powers or something more related to the specific dungeon they were in.

Those who did well might get to be more interesting monsters or bosses, and those who did poorly might be stuck as generic mooks until they distinguished themselves. They needed a combination of improvisational acting, combat instincts, and humility to truly excel at just barely winning or losing and being fine with either result.

The acting skills could be granted with her nanites, a minimum amount for each dungeon actor, so the instincts and humility were really the most key factors. Or at least the ones she hadn’t quantified and packaged for redistribution yet.

While most of the Omegas were happy that their plans were coming together, General Omega was less so. She was the part of Omega Scout that had hungered for battle. She split off to be a leader they needed. Now by giving that hunger and the personality of a general, she craved a war.

This subjugation of the criminal factions was fun for her, but not strategically challenging.

What were those guys from Wang Shu’s country up to? They had seemed like they wanted to start a war.

She smiled and set off, ignoring the pleas for mercy from the last slaver as he was being dragged into the last portal by black living chains.

Soon, In the meeting room for all the leaders of every major criminal organization in the city, all that remained were; bent and broken chairs, the splintered remains of a meeting table, a few small splashes of blood, a haunting silence and the nail marks of people who resisted being dragged away with every fibre of their being.

The trails all ended abruptly, where the portals had been.

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

Much of Headmaster Omega’s pitch for the criminals she wanted for her IDD monsters and orchestrated faux crime in the city later, was done for her by her not so subtle implications and threats. Now that she had explained the size of her stick, she should tempt them with the aroma of her metaphorical carrot.

The city would be made safe for the children soon. These people had done their best to use their gangs to protect the people in their neighbourhoods from the predation of the larger gangs, and city guard. Doing what they needed to do to keep their families and neighbours as safe as they could.

So, she sent a package of information on the IDD project to each person in the meeting, each package customized to explain the role or roles each person might play in the project.

Her nanites had taken up residence in the brains and bodies of all present, to examine their skills and abilities. She granted them all the system 2.0 upgrades for low-level staff. The IDD project information just being at the front of all that new information their minds had access to.

She had found that adding knowledge to a person's brain used more energy than just granting the brain access to some of the data stored by their body's nanites. This meant that she had many layers of access based on how many nanites a person had, and how much trust and potential power she was willing to grant them.

After a dazed and silent few minutes as people went over their floods of information. All the criminals she was recruiting went to a portal that opened in the middle of the vehicle's top deck. Accepting their new jobs and following quest markers to spread the news to the gangs that hadn't needed to be cleansed from her city.

Headmaster Omega was then left with just the crafting teachers and the Vampire child wearing the illusory face of an old woman.

They made small talk and Omega answered questions about the IDD and system upgrade she had provided them, some of the crafters answering questions about their time in the tutorial dungeon in the arena.

Grill smith dressed in formal Combat Chef armour served tea and little sandwiches to Omega and her guests as their vehicle went deeper into the wasteland plains outside the city.

Their first encounter wasn’t one Omega had scripted.

A giant boar half the size of their double-decker ant bus/carriage vehicle was charging towards them. Time slowed down for the people in the ant-bus. The window with a view of the boar shimmered as the view zoomed in on the beast charging in slow motion.

Five Icons of the children’s faces appeared at the top of the window, a second window’s view of the open wasteland was replaced by a view of the 5 kids in the lower part of the bus watching their own view of the boar.

A Red X appeared under Junior’s icon as she decided she had no interest in the beast. One by one, each of the other kids rejected the creature.

After all 5 children had declined to try and catch the monster, Grill called out “Dibs” before he set down his tray of snacks, and sprinted towards a window that swung open as he jumped at it.

The time dilation effect ended as the Orc chef left the bubble, his halfling apprentice only half a step behind, having called ‘dibs’ at the same time as her teacher.

They raced for the charging boar, who had felt the oncoming rush of their competing menacing auras. It was slowing down, turning and trying to charge valiantly away from the pair madly chanting “Bacon!” as they raced for the beast.

Seconds later it was over, the beast sliding to a stop with a half a dozen Psionic Chefs knives stuck in it and a tiny halfling riding it to the ground after sliding knives of her own in places that would maximize blood loss and make draining the meat easier.

The apprentice Chef was quickly becoming their best monster butcher, she activated an item that created a small time-field, allowing her to do the work of butchering the beast in what seemed from the outside to be seconds. Most of the parts being sent to the Nightmare Hive’s stores for cooks and tanners to work the meat and leather.

Grill carried one big slab of meat back to the vehicle, the both of them disappearing into the vehicle's tiny kitchen that took up half the first floor of the bus.

The next creature they ran into was one she had planned, a baby wyvern.

However, the angry goose riding the wyvern and tearing chunks out of the wyvern’s wing membrane with its beak was not a part of her plan.

The goose leapt into the sky from the wyvern’s back right before it impaled itself on some rusty rebar sticking out of a ruin. The goose landed on the wyvern, beginning to try and tear out an eye, as time slowed and the decision icons for the kids appeared again.

Most of the kids instantly rejected the idea of trying to tame the brutal goose. After the other 4 had all declined, Junior decided to tame it. A little green checkmark appeared under her icon. Another boring view was replaced by one tracking Junior as she carried Mr. Thing out of the bus and approached the feasting bird.

She sent Mr. Thing to fight the bird, which was then followed by the most one-sided monster vs bird battle ever seen by the system.

The Horror’s powers were based on the fears of his prey.

The goose had made it’s few levels by embarrassing and occasionally killing things much stronger than it. Like shitting in a huge sleeping monster's eye and flying away, the more of a fearless troll it became, the more it gained and improved the power to be truly fearless.

With no fears to lock onto, Mr. Thing was stuck in his tentacle puppy form. The Bird pecked the eyes covering his body, ate little tentacles off his body like tasty worms, and used wing slaps to stun and disorient the little horror before attacking again.

Omega’s jaw was practically on the floor. She wasn't sure she could beat the horror before this, and she wasn't sure if she could copy whatever was happening to allow this non-magical, evil little bird to do this.

Junior then walked up to the fight and picked up the goose.

It tried to peck at her and she smacked its beak. Waving a finger she admonished the bird. “None of that now. you proved you were strong enough already now come along Goostopheles, you’ll be the perfect rival for Mr. Thing.”

She then scooped up the wounded puppy with her other arm and came back to the bus.

The halfling butcher collected and harvested the remains of the baby wyvern and they moved on. The orc chef turned the wyvern into goose treats, the evil little bird having earned its prize.

The illusory old woman was watching in interest, but the underneath vampire had felt Mr. Thing’s strength, she was stifling laughter at the “battle”. Never in all her years having seen something so ancient and powerful brought so low by a mostly normal animal.

Once she composed herself she used the fight as a case in point about making sure that the students didn’t become one-trick ponies, whos whole builds could be made worthless by one ability. Not realizing that she was talking about the school as a hypothetical less and less often.

Their first stop a while later was in a hex with a special subsystem attached to it. Toon beach worked on different rules than most of the world. The ‘toon’ biome makes death almost impossible, as all violence is non-lethal in a toon area. Squids and fish walked out of the water chatting and playing volleyball with animals and monsters from the wasteland.

Occasionally one would blow themselves up or smash another creature flat with a mysteriously appearing hammer. No matter what, they would be fine a few minutes later.

The creatures not native to this hex would lose the toon effect when they left the hex while the native toon creatures would lose most of their invincibility, but would still be harder to kill and less violent than normal creatures.

The kids split up to explore the beach, a window following each one's adventures as the adults watched and discussed.

Tiffany and her pets competed with Junior and hers to make sandcastles while Mr. Thing and Goostopheles fought behind Junior's back whenever she wasn’t watching them directly.

Wang, Billy, and Jaw each split up, exploring the beach and laughing at the antics of the abundant life in the hex.

Eventually, Billy found a giant hermit crab wearing a cottage as its shell, turning in slow circles, antennae twitching. As it slowly turned Billy saw an open window with a big window sill. On the window sill sat a huge pie with cartoonish fumes coming off of it.

Clearly the poor thing was trying in vain to get the pie. On its next pass, Billy walked forward quietly and picked up the pie. As it turned, the antennae locked onto the pie, the crab stopping it’s circling.

Billy slowly set the pie down and took two steps back. Making it clear that it was for the Hermit Crab Cottage.

A little cartoonish cloud covered the crab’s face as it devoured the pie, leaving the pie plate sparkling clean when it was done. Something Clicked in the system, and Billy finally had his own guardian beast.

Dojo-san. Billy wanted to become a master martial artist with his own Dojo someday. He also wanted to travel the world someday. Now with Dojo-san, he could someday do both.

Billy sat on the window sill, spending some XP to modify an ant pheromone device to talk to the crab as it plodded its way towards the bus. Omega was already modifying the exterior of the bus so that the crab could climb up and ride the top.

The crafters were the next to leave the meeting, taking a portal back to town in the same way the gangsters had. They had a lot of work to do before the first tests of the IDD, they were working with the dungeons on improving the range of items the dungeons could and would produce.

Omega gave the vampire a predatory smile. “Now that all my small missions are complete, we can set a course for the Red-desert. Feel free to drop the illusion, my dear, it’s just us. Your nature as a vampire child is a large part of my interest in you.”

She kept up the old lady act, pretending to not know what she was saying, until Omega ignored the Illusion, Looking the vampire child in the eyes.

Omega kept her tone flat and to the point. “I can cure you, and no I don’t mean remove your vampirism entirely, you built your strength on those powers and I don't want to handicap you. I mean cure you of your undead weaknesses. Bring you most of the way back from the dead, so you can age again, at least age until your body reaches its peak, then your vampire nature should slow your ageing drastically.”

Omega ignored the vampire’s skeptical look. “While I've never cured a vampire, I've cured lots of zombies and ghouls this way, My daughter Tiffany was the first, I've confirmed she's ageing normally. She was infected, not quite turning into a zombie before a God and I helped her become more, instead of less. She is the progenitor of this new type of Aetheric being and the source of the substance that cures the un-dead of their dead-nes.”

Grandmaster Loretta caved, Omega offering her what she had been seeking for hundreds of years as a monster, villain, scavenger then eventually adventurer. She had adapted to the vampiric weaknesses hundreds of years ago, the illusion larger than her true self blocked the sun’s rays, and nobody bothers to stab an adventurer with silver.

In reality for all that time, all she had really wanted was the power to finally grow up.