Lena

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Congratulations, Design Lead! Your first creature is ready to be created!

Research into creature ??? has unlocked the Computer Golem.

This creature is a Monstrous level Construct that will only function while under contract to the Studio of Capricious Dreams.

Updating Zone Core with Creature Pattern …

Error: No Zone Core located.

Creating first Computer Golem to act as Zone Core (Research) …

Zone Core (Research) has been created and assigned to Standard Monstrous Zone Guardian Contract.

Updating Zone Core with all Research Progress…

…

Research Progress updated.

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Congratulations, Design Lead! You have unlocked Computer Golem restricted variant Zone Core!

Zone Cores may be assigned to manage specific Zone Management functions, resulting in increased efficiency of assigned functions. A Zone Core (Research) is required to store complex pattern information.

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40% progress made on Design of Management Strategist.

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Congratulations, Design Lead!

Due to increased efficiency by the use of a Zone Core to manage Research:

• all unlocked Environmental Materials are now available as Exportables

• all Research projects have accelerated completion status estimates

• active experimentation will have a greater ability to unlock new Research paths and to advance existing paths

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Lena blinked at the influx of information. She stared dumbly as something that looked like a crystal appeared on the ground in front of her toon. On closer inspection, she realized that it wasn't *a* crystal so much as a composite of gem quality minerals streaked with thin traces of metals. Slowly, the implications of all those alerts sank in. Diving into her menus, Lena extracted all the information she could about Zone Cores and Computer Golems, growing more and more excited at the possibilities.

Jason was bunking in Rob's territory at the moment, too much of his attention focused on the negotiations with Lotrot to spare for managing a territory. After their discussions, during which Lena called in Aaron as soon as she was sure it was safe to distract him, the guys had familiarized themselves with the bath house and kitchen levels then headed to bed. Candy was still in some kind of weird trance with her [Physics Lab] experiments. Lena knew better than to poke at her before she left her lab.

Alone for the night again, Lena had been working on the renovations when that notification interrupted her. The level portals for the individual territories all led to the bath house level, and the kitchen had been added to that level. In Lena's mind, it was already more of the common living space.

Where the kitchen had been, Lena had created a staging area for Jason's territory, for when he had the time to set it up. Now, she moved the Zone Core (Research) to that level and created a long display pedestal. She placed the Zone Core in the center, and created two more Zone Cores, one for (Guardians) and one for (Structures), which she placed to either side of the (Research) core.

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Congratulations, Design Lead! By assigning a Zone Core for Guardian Management, MPR costs associated with Zone Guardians are reduced and the number of Zone Guardian Contracts that can be maintained has increased! Check [Zone Management] for specific effects.

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Congratulations, Design Lead! By assigning a Zone Core for Structure Management, MPR costs associated with maintaining Structure are significantly reduced! Check [Zone Management] for specific effects.

For further efficiency improvements, one Zone Core per level may be enslaved to the Zone Core (Structure).

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Excitement tingled through her. Lena did not like the "enslaved" phrasing, but as she understood things, these Computer Golems were a different type of computer from her laptop or cell phone, but essentially the same: inanimate and nonsapient. She quickly created one more Zone Core and assigned it to the Zone Core (Structure) to manage the Entrance Hall level.

She brushed aside the confirmation notices and shifted her attention to her first level. She projected the shape she wanted the first trap to take to the level's (Structure) core and then watched as her concept became reality. Next, she directed the core to duplicate one of the traps Aaron had worked out. When that, too, began to take shape, she quickly worked her way through projecting all the renovations that had been discussed with the guys.

According to the system, the cores would continue to grow in capacity as time passed. The (Research) core would grow considerably more mineral formations as room to hold more patterns while the cores focused on managing the flows of mana would focus on growing more metal formations to improve their processing power. They would still increase their mineral components, but only to hold the patterns applicable to their sphere of influence.

The best part of handing the implementation over to the Zone Cores was that they auto magically balanced the outflow of MPR to the inflow, which meant Lena no longer had to wait and watch her Mana Pool trickle fill when she ran out of MPP. The slow and constant approach also meant that it cost less, almost down to the original maintenance costs.

Satisfied that her desired changes were well underway, Lena went back to her Research options.

She had a new "???" entry under Creatures, as well as in the Plants and Techniques categories. The Environmental category had divided into subcategories.

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Mineral

Stone ✔

Crystal ✔

Clay ✔

Metal

Iron (90%)

Silver (92%)

Copper (99%)

Tin (83%)

Gold (68%)

Lead (35%)

Organic

Soil ✔

Wood (99%)

Char (43%)

Fluid

Water ✔

Air ✔

Mana

Light ✔

Temperature ✔

Portal ✔

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While looking over the new structure, Lena saw Wood and Copper go from 99% complete to unlocked, a small check mark replacing the completion percentage.

Now that created some interesting possibilities. Plumbing, yes, but wooden floors, beams, fireplaces! And char was a new option. She would have to see if that was simply charred wood or something that could result in charcoal or coke for a forge.

Before Lena got a chance to really fall into her plotting, Candy stumbled out of her [Physics Lab]. She looked exhausted, and her clothes were in need of a change.

"Wow, look what the cat dragged in," Lena said.

"Fuck off," Candy said, smiling. "What did you do here? And where is everyone?"

Deciding to answer backward, Lena said, "Sleeping, and I'm making this the central living space. I figure it's safer to move private doors to a restricted area rather than have them where anyone just getting through the front door can find them. And, girl, you need a bath. Let me show you to the private stalls."

She walked her toon toward the bath house portion of the level. Candy followed on autopilot. Yawning, she asked, "Why the change up?"

Lena froze her toon mid step, then swiveled around to face Candy. "Did you not just hear me?" Lena asked.

Candy set her hands on her hips and gave Lena's toon a flat look. "I heard you, but why are you worrying now?"

Lena let her toon slump, hunching over a little with a fierce expression on her face, imitating Mamaw at her most obnoxious. "Are you that stupid!? We had a *dire cat* come through the last entrance I made, and we've got strangers with completely unknown motives and culture for neighbors now! If we didn't need to know what happened to Brad, I'm not sure I'd be this fruiting nice with them!"

"Hey, Kargerran's a nice guy!" Candy said, her jaw jutting forward.

"So far, sure. We haven't seen enough to know if he's just polite, and, news flash! He is *not* the guy in charge! Being socially adept does not mean inherently nice or good!" Lena made her toon straighten up and threw her hands into the air. "Wait, I'm talking with Ms. 'I'm an engineer not a diplomat'!"

"Fuck off!" Candy said, but with more of a grumble than a roar.

Lena sighed, then said, "I'm sorry. That's was a low blow. I'm scared, Candy. I am freaking terrified and feeling spectacularly guilty for enjoying this place at the same time. I shouldn't be taking my stress out on you."

Candy locked gazes with Lena. The silence held for several minutes while she considered. "Apology accepted. You mentioned a bath?"

"Yeah, this way," Lena said, leading the way again.

*~*~*

Lena had modeled her bath house on American public pools and her vague impressions of Japanese hot springs, with some consideration for the modesty of her friends. More remodeling was in order now that she could produce proper plumbing, but that mostly involved upgrading the existing features.

With the kitchen moved to this level, Lena had created a circular main room for the levels to exit into. Counter-clockwise from the level portals, she placed an archway leading into the baths (the kitchen was entered via an arch just clockwise from the level portals).

Through the bath house archway (still to be adorned), hallways diverged for male and female changing zones, to the left and right of the arch respectively.

"Why?" Candy asked, pointing to the male and female signs marking the hallways.

Lena said, "Jason."

Candy frowned at her. "You did make private changing stalls, right?"

"More like the open areas you'd see at a gym."

"Why?" Candy asked again.

Lena shrugged her shoulders. "It made sense at the time."

In the ladies changing room, the texture of the floor roughened, adding enough bump to give good traction without being uncomfortable to stand upon. Three shower stalls lined the left side wall, glass doors with a frosted finish set on rollers (to be upgraded) serving to provide privacy.

The left side wall was left as an open corridor leading to the ladies springs and the communal spring beyond.

The near wall held toilet stalls, and the far wall open faced long lockers, with the column nearest the springs converted to a series of shelves to hold terry cloth cotton bath sheets.

"While you're in the shower, hang up your clothes in one of the lockers," Lena said. "I got a technique that cleans clothes, and I've put it in the lockers. Oh, and I'll get you a robe."

Candy sniffed, stripped and hung up her clothes. "Got soap?"

Lena shook her head. "Just water and wash cloths for now. I'm hoping we can trade for things like that with the folks of Lotrot, maybe see if we can get some of their alchemists to share some herb lore in return for some herb trades."

"I thought you don't like the guys from Lotrot?" Candy asked as she headed into a shower stall. "Hey, where's the off switch?"

"I just got copper unlocked. I'll add the upgrade soon, but the Entrance Floor has priority until all the traps and triggers are set up. Don't worry about the water; we're not in California anymore, and the same [Purify] technique works to make the water sanitary as it does for clothes."

Candy paused, then finished walking into the shower, drawing the stall door closed behind her. "Start at the beginning and bring me up to date."

By the time Lena felt she'd shared enough, Candy had finished her rinse and moved to the ladies hot spring bath. The stone and crystal imitated a natural environment for the bath, and the water temperature varied by position in the bath, with the hotter sections closer to the wall dividing the male and female baths.

While Candy mulled over what Lena had told her, Lena started work on designing the various valves and pipes she would need for all of her plumbing upgrades. Being able to store the designs in her new Zone Core (Structure) meant that all she really had to do now was create the plans for what she wanted and let the cores do the work of implementing her designs.

Candy interrupted Lena's thoughts a few minutes later. "Okay, I can see where your paranoia is coming from. I'm not sure I agree with it, but I can admit that I'm a dunce when it comes to political stuff. But, traps? How are you going to make sure no one gets hurt?"

"Even before getting the Zone Cores to help manage them, the traps that we all came up with had safeties built in by using the [Force] fields to prevent the mechanical triggers from engaging. Now that I have the Zone Cores, I was able to simplify things by designating all of y'all as 'safety first' peeps, and everyone else as '*our* safety first'. Aaron's done a lot for trap design, and once I hand him a core to play with, I think he'll make a lot more progress with the [Trigger] technique."

Lena paused, pursing her lips and feeling disgruntled. Candy gave her an expectant look and remained silent. After a moment or two, Lena said, "I really don't want to hurt anyone, but most of all, I will not tolerate jeopardizing your safety — you and Jason and Rob and Aaron — all of you. You mean a lot more to me than strangers, so if I have to kill to keep you safe, I will."

Candy rubbed a hand over her face. "Shit on a stick. Alright. Maybe I can help you come up with some non-lethal stuff. If people keep coming after they've been warned, well, that's on them. Tell me more about these techniques you've picked up." Candy held up her hand. "No, wait. Better yet, give me access to these techniques. The system's much easier to understand than any human I've ever talked with."

"Really?" Lena asked. She saw no reason to hold anything back so even as she continued to talk with her cousin, she granted Candy as full access to her unlocked resources as she could. She also had the core handling Guardians make that automatic for all of her Territory Managers, so that she wouldn't have to provide that access at a later time.

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Zone Cores may only be spawned by Arbiters.

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That was fine with Lena.

Candy's gaze unfocused even as she nodded and said, "Language is imprecise."

In the time that Lena watched Candy delving into her newly available options, Lena created Zone Cores for every level still lacking one, and then established a level for Jason, using her last level portal so that he had as much privacy as the others.

Unlike for the others, Lena considered that Jason might prefer to not put a lot of thought into his Territory. He was a far more social being than the rest of them, despite Rob's ease with social situations. Jason had a habit of staying as much in the background as he could, but he always chose to be around people over being alone.

In consideration of this as much as his focus on the negotiations, Lena decided to put together a simple room that he could build out from, if he didn't completely tear it down to create what he wanted. She added a Zone Core for this level, too, and considered what she knew of Jason's likes and dislikes as she designed the room.

Color-wise, Jason liked darker woods, blues and grays, with greens and purples making for pleasing accents. He liked a neat and orderly environment, but was far from a minimalist. As much as Jason appreciated the aesthetics of Chinese and Japanese art, he preferred bar seating to floor cushions. He enjoyed heights and taller furniture, and loved the humidity by the ocean. Lena recalled Jason sharing a story about his sinuses drying out on a training mission, something that came up when he and Rob were arguing about the worst climates to work in. Apparently, growing up around Mobile Bay had made dry climates particularly painful for him.

Lena ran through a few experiments with the wood environmental material, discovering that what she had access to was more like particle board than planks. Deciding that sucked, Lena set aside working with the wood material for now.

She decided on a space 3 m wide by 4 m long, and 4 m high, lined by her glow rocks, as she thought of the crystal embedded granite like stone. The light would be akin to what would be found out in the country on a new moon: the sky ablaze with stars being more defined than the ground hidden in shadows under one's feet. Lena thought Jason would appreciate a privacy wall in front of the portal and settled on a floor to ceiling, pale blue, cloudy crystal sheet 1.5 m wide with an average thickness of 8 cm. A platform in the far corner to support a king sized bed finished off the design. She would put in the bedding once the level's Zone Core notified her that it was done with the shaping.

Candy was still giving every sign of being mentally absent, so Lena went back to working on the designs of her pipe fixtures and various types of building materials. She had moved back to playing with the structure of her environmental wood when Candy stretched and said, "Okay, I've uploaded patterns for a couple non-lethal shock traps to the (Structures) Zone Core, as well as some force and cage traps. I need to get my hands on a mage or experiment a lot to see if I can come up with any decent mana-suppression fields, but I'd prefer the mage."

"You seem like you're more willing to believe that this isn't a brain damage hallucination. What gives?" Lena asked.

Candy grinned. "I got answers. More questions, naturally, but I was right, too. We were not transported between dimensions, bodies and all. We're copies of our original selves, recreated from the echos of our energy signatures." Her grin died and a more sorrowful look took its place. "At least our family isn't stuck wondering what happened to us, because the original 'us' is still back home, living our lives."

"What. The. Fruit?" Lena asked, her mind stuttering to a halt.

"We're clones, Lena. There is no way back to Earth or the lives we remember because these bodies never lived there." Candy held eye contact with Lena's toon for as long as it took her to suck in a breath. Then she looked away, raising her hands to wipe tears away that just kept streaming.

Clones. The word reverberated through Lena. "What makes you say that?"

"The system showed me," Candy said, her voice even despite the tears.

"What?"

Candy's head fell back as she looked up at the ceiling. She swallowed. "Fuck, but language is so imprecise! … The Tapestry system exists to put patterns to unstable mana, making it safer to be around. It gets those patterns by stealing them from other places, other universes. Mana, it's part of a fifth force, something that is nearly non-existent in our universe. Or too dispersed, maybe. That force makes it a lot easier for matter and energy to exchange states without nuclear explosions and shit. And the only thing that can pass between universes is energy. It has to be a balanced exchange. The spy cameras that mages here have put out to other universes have been hijacked by the Tapestry to find these new patterns. The biometrics that we were gathering with the Dream Catcher, they're exactly the kind of thing the Tapestry is seeking."

"So, how many of us are going to get put here?" Lena asked.

Candy shrugged. "I think we're it. The Tapestry system is programmed to seek a contained diversity, and it already has us. Other people, yeah, they're likely, and I've already tried to prioritize them … instantiating near us. It's a complicated process, and I have a feeling that well take a lot more time to get right.

"But, holy hell, Lena! I could finally talk with another being on multiple levels, have five different conversations with the same being at the same time and it all felt … natural for the first time! I didn't have to slow down at all! I kind of feel sorry for the me that was left behind."

Lena latched on to the distraction of her cousin's unprecedented bliss, shelving the implications of Candy's revelations about their states for a later consideration. She ran through the trap designs that Candy had come up while her cousin continued to babble in her delight, then updated the development plans for the Entrance level. A part of her wanted to see how the Rangers would react to the new obstacle course of the first floor.

*~*~*

Dibbs

"Please speak your name for the recording stone."

"Casper Dibbons, Mage Graduate of the School of Arcana." Nerves wanted to make his voice shake, but Dibbs was made of sterner stuff. He hoped.

He sat in the Petitioners Office of the Arcane Asylum's Council of Magi, an opulent room of gold-toned wood, richly colored spider silk tapestries and magically hovering furniture.

The Examiner, an archmage Dibbs had never met before, nor been introduced to, glanced down at a scroll box and made a note, using an everlasting quill. A spherical carnelian Memory Stone occupied a space on the goldwood desk between them. "Explain the details of your Astral Summoning of the demon Bradford Ajput Singh."

Placing his focus on the minutia, Dibbs' response took nearly an hour. The Examiner made notes, but did not interrupt. He waited a moment to confirm that Dibbs had finished speaking before asking, "What signs did you have that this was not a normal summoning?"

Dibbs said, "My apologies for not understanding the question, but I've just explained to you what I noted and witnessed during the summoning. The only oddity was the particular clarity, and hence why I used my best Memory Stone to capture the details of the summoning for later review."

The Examiner made another note, glanced up at Dibbons again, and then wrote more down on his scroll box. When he looked up again, he sighed. "Why did you bring this to the attention of the Council of the Magi?"

Dibbs held out his hands. "I don't know what to do. Discovering a demon with a human mind, I didn't know it was possible! And to have placed that into a golem, that may be the accepted procedure for other types of demons, but one with an Aware mind? This is a huge ethical quandary! I'm hoping that by seeking the assistance of my elders I can learn enough to limit the damage that I've already done. If that is beyond my capabilities, then I must seek the aide of those greater than myself. I understand that this places me in debt to the Council, should they choose to accept my petition."

The Examiner snorted out a breath. "Do you now? What do you expect, Mage Dibbons, from the Council?"

"At the least, ethical guidance. The most effort I can see being required would be if they decide that the most ethical path is to trans-substantiate the golem body to a human body, at which point I fully expect to be indebted to the Council for the rest of my life."

That gave the Examiner pause. "Well, at least you do understand the stakes. The next meeting of the Council will not be held for several days, however I will forward your petition to the Council members that they can best determine whether to advance their meeting date to debate this matter. Your sponsor shall be advised of the Council's decision, assuming you are not summoned directly. Good day."

A part of Dibbs wanted to howl. That was it? But it was better than an outright refusal. He bowed his head, rose, and left.