Josephine, Brandy, and I took a stroll through a warred and disjointed space in a very perilous, but thoroughly interesting little Server by the name of Zabyvat-Pomni-Slomay. It sometimes makes me marvel to see the kinds of worlds that the legendary Division of Cosmic Artifice were able to save. Sometimes it feels almost a little wrong. Sometimes I feel like they probably should leave some worlds to their fate. It’s like seeing someone breathe life back into a man who’s already been completely gutted. Yet, then I’d always be proven dead wrong.

I’d look deeper and then find that the Division had done some insane trick that allows that man’s insides to stay stable and perfectly separated from the outside world using spatial magic, while the parts of his guts that were irrecoverable have mutated into limbs of viscera and psychic blood. I always used these little tours through the Servers of Horologia as a learning experience and a chance to humble myself. A chance to remember that there is always a mountain beyond the mountain. A sky beyond the sky. It’s moments like those that remind me that I can still do better. I can still “be” better.

Imagine a world that was basically what you get if you broke an old television or computer. Static-y, warp, and on the verge of ceasing in the very next second. Its only remnants being the fading images that one can see on the screen. That was the kind of place “Zabyvat-Pomni” was. Their perils came more in the form of environmental threats that could toss one outside the bounds of reality and “unmake” you, than regular danger. However, that wasn’t to say that Zabyvat-Pomni didn’t have its own terrifying creatures prowling its splintered wastelands, wilderness, and ruins.

The Blighted of Zabyvat-Pomni were like cartoons brought to life. That might sound a bit lame compared to what the blights on other realities did. However, I’d ask you to take a moment and think of the cartoons you’ve seen. Especially the older ones. The more frenetic.

The ones that relied on visual gags, and logical impossible abilities. It’s not so lame now is it? In essence, the blight here essentially turned people into a new type of elder fae. This is probably fitting since 70% percent of the population of this world had been pointed-eared, possessing either fae or elven blood. Albeit, in extremely low concentrations compared to the fae-blooded, and elvish, elsewhere.

The wilder parts of the Zabyvat-Pomni were chaotic spaces of cartoony black and white, and it was only the places that sheltered sapient life that held color. Jo and I were still very much on the fence about setting up shop here because the society was strangely too advanced and too primordial at the same time. Imagine if a civilization that was on the verge of being able to make its own artificial realities suddenly collapsed. Their version of falling into the dark ages could still leave them as enclaves of “sufficiently advanced aliens”. Which in theory would allow them to rebuild relatively quickly. Except imagine if the personalities and desires of the surviving leader of that once great civilization were all dogshit. So of course they’d screw up again fighting pettily until they fell into an even worse state.

After several similar but increasingly dire, increasingly pathetic, falls, you’d eventually be left with a society like Zabyvat-Pomni’s where all the settlements and city-states wielded technologies far beyond their means. The Division had wisely removed the most dangerous tech, the kind that would allow the people here to be a problem for the other Servers. However, that didn’t mean the people of Zabyvat-Pomni didn’t have enough doodads and toys left to ruin each other’s day.

Most troublingly was their treatment of their blighted...the so-called “ink-souled”. I already mentioned that color was a sign of sapience. The people here have noticed that, and since the heavily blighted tend to be born in grayscale in Zabyvat-Pomni, they were treated as less than people more often than not. Which was kind of worrying, because here just like everywhere else in Horologia the more blighted you were, the more likely you were to become extremely powerful. Assuming of course the blight didn’t kill you first, or rob you of your sanity.

Even if you did get consumed by your blight, and lose your life and sanity, you could still make an awfully big mess as you went depending on whether you inadvertently tapped into the power within your blight beforehand. As far as Jo and I were concerned, the people here were courting death, and we weren’t sure it’d be worth it for us to invest in a world that was liable to go up in smoke any moment.

Anyway, Jo, Brandy, and I were wandering through a black and white wasteland. Hoping from disjointed island to disjointed island. The minerals in this wasteland were especially of value to me, because I’d found that by tapping into certain harmonic frequencies, I could use the minerals of Zabvyat-Pomni to augment more mundane materials from the other Servers.

Like I was splashing a fresh, more vivid, coat of paint, or “ink” onto them. Making the other realm’s materials exemplify the properties they were supposed to have. Which was interesting, but also made me suspect that I was using a computer screen as a night light. I could sense that there was even more potential in the materials I’d found here.

While I was busy playing natural philosopher, Jo and Brandy were busy fighting. They weren’t fighting each other of course. “That” was for when we were at home, and we had the magics I’d set over the training hall, suspending death, and ensuring a perfect recovery from any injuries that came from their spars. Right now, Jo was shoulder-throwing and chainsawing to death, a jittery, spring-limbed wolf. Brandy sat on the back of one of her dolls, or “war-dolls”, using the massive, vaguely humanoid bear-type golem to maul an equally large black and white cat with hundreds of noodle-like limbs.

I’m not sure, but I was pretty sure my wife was a bigger influence on the girl than I might have thought. Brandy could seem so shy and mild-mannered when you were talking to her, but put her in a fight, but she became a one-woman army that acted with brutal efficiency. Tearing apart, pommeling, and crushing anything in her path. It made me feel a bit proud. I’d never really had the younger sibling experience. Despite technically being my mother’s eldest child, I was thawed out near the middle of the pack, and even the children who were born after my thawing still treated me as a complete outsider. So, being with Brandy made me feel like I had an actual younger sister.

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Funnily enough, the other day, there was this one incident that really drove that feeling home. I’d been in the workshop doing something when my pawns came over to get me. I came out into the shop and found one of Jo’s many quantum duplicates standing over half a corpse, while Brandy soothed a very traumatized-looking child.

I quickly used data-analysis to pull information from the area and piece together what had happened, and immediately ended up angry at myself. No one bats a million, and it seemed that I’d just struck out big time. Unfortunately, I didn’t really have time to feel bad for myself. There were others who needed my attention. First, I went to see if Jo was okay. She liked being in control of her killing impulses, and when she lost control it always left her very out of sorts.

I patted her back and pulled her close and she cried angry tears into my shoulders for a bit. She was upset by the man, and upset by her own thoughtless actions. She was frustrated by the whole situation, and the fact that she’d effectively sidelined herself, but Jo quickly pulled herself back together. Then Josephine made her exit because she was covered in blood and she didn’t want to scare the child, even more. A child who would have just seen her squeeze the life out of a man and bite off the man’s entire upper-body off.

Once Jo was squared away, I went to Brandy and was so proud to see her handling the situation. Making sure the customer was calm. Speaking in soothing tones that used just a touch of psychic suggest to keep the child’s fight or flight instincts from sending them into a panic. I pat Brandy on the shoulder in thanks. Making a mental note to find some way to reward her later. Then I crouched to meet the child’s eye, before standing again so I could bow deeply at the waist.

“My sincere apologies, dear customer. Words can’t describe what nearly happened here, and how sorry we are for allowing that to nearly happen,” I said, as I bowed.

I don’t remember what else I said, and honestly, I don’t know what I could have said. I’d screwed up. I’d been cautious of weeding out all the Dalton Kanes of Horologia from entering our store, because they might have other Brandy Kanes who might need our help with them. I’d figured the many algorithmic sorting hats that curated a user’s experience within our shop would protect our good customers from those who were less good. What I hadn’t accounted for, was users like the piece of trash that Jo had snapped and ended up killing.

Before now, I would have assumed that garbage like the very dead Ivan Martel would only enter empty instances of the shop. Unfortunately, somehow perhaps based on his own twisted expectations, he’d entered an instance with one of the children our shop’s arcade area caters to, in it. Ivan Martel was many things, a bully, a predator, and would-be serial-killer, were amongst the most concerning of those things. He saw a mostly empty shop, and a lone child, and being a noble who’d never been called out on his shit before, he did what I assume he’d always done in those situations and tried to attack the other customer.

I can’t tell you how many times I had to stop Josephine from trying to fight my family when they trampled me in ways big and small. There’s no way she could sit still when something small and defenseless was in danger. It literally went against the grain of what she’d been born for. Nor am I entirely sure that I wouldn’t have killed Young Lord Martel myself, had I been in the store when he was attacking the child. I know I took no small amount of satisfaction, shredding and consuming the sniveling trash’s soul when I found it lingering near the entrance of the shop, trying to escape, later on in the day.

Anywho, in the end, things were settled with a slight memory erasure to remove the traumatic associations created by the attack from the child’s mind. I also granted the child 1500 years' worth of store credit. Giving the child the right to freely acquire three lifetime's worth of items and products because my negligence could have cost the child their life one way or the other.

I spent the rest of the month making modifications to the algorithms and spell-systems that controlled the shop and customers’ experience with the shop, closing the gaps that allowed wolves and sheep to enter the same proverbial pen. I put special focus on protecting my younger customers, and increased security around the most troublesome customers, and the most vulnerable customers.

I also heightened the vigilance of my figments. Putting extra teeth behind the rule that customers in my shop were not allowed to attack one another. From now on, any inkling of ill-intent would draw a response. Especially when children were involved. Everyone was very stressed out by the end of that month, which led to us leaving for this little hunting trip.