Randidly’s mind stirred. Dreams came wrapped in other dreams, a series of Russian dolls unleashing complex and confusing sensations, warnings and spikes of adrenaline, a spikey maw of mauve, a horrible wave of silver flames, before shattering and letting him sink even deeper.

This time, Randidly didn’t proceed directly from waking from his restful coma down the dream ladder to that strange cavern with the doors locking away his hidden emotions. Instead, his consciousness shifted down to his Nether Core. Empowered by the two Authorities he had already discovered within the nucleus, the central piece of his existence spun and knitted together a continuous flow of Nether that glittered with his significance, shoring up all the inconsistencies in its substance he hadn’t even noticed previously.

Randidly’s awareness floated underneath his Nether Core, new generated Nether undulating outward like some sort of shadowy-yet-reassuring blanket. The dim light and the dreaming made the motion hypnotic. The curved topography of the freshly birthed energy seemed almost random while also being completely natural. Endlessly it flowed, filling up the available and thirsty spaces within his body.

This Nether… Randidly narrowed his focus, trying to urge his lazy awareness to acuity. The process of depleting the Nether Core obviously has a powerful effect on its improvement. Could my Nether Core be related to a certain form of masochistic space monkey?

But amusements aside, Randidly felt pleased to see his energy showing such immediate improvements as it stabilized its rotation. The speed of production hadn’t increased-- that appeared to be limited by his steadily accumulating Influence-- but the energy would be much more efficient in the future.

For a while he continued to study its genesis, occasionally pushing his awareness up so he swam through the cool waves. But eventually, he pulled his awareness back to his body. He adjusted his position in the dimly lit core of the Kharon Academy Labyrinth. The sigils of his own foundation glittered on the heavy central pillar. At this point, about a score of students had made it down to this central place, being baptized in the dense energy Randidly accumulated here and leaving their Scrawls as proof of their accomplishments.

Randidly smiled around. His Nether began to move. Since so many people have started making it down here, maybe it’s time to up the difficulty a bit.

He pulled out his Alchemist’s Passport to forcefully adjust the space, using the extra dense Nether to anchor the extra volume to this room. He adjusted the core area to be a twenty-three-layer pyramid, with the densest Nether at the top around the pillar, but each level applying additional pressure.

Right now all the Scrawls were moved to the bottom, but the individuals who placed them there could come back and avail themselves to the pyramid steps. Their Scrawls could show the height to which they could climb, demonstrating how well their bodies had acclimated to the presence of Nether.

Then, finally, Randidly sighed and turned his attention inward. Weirdly, addressing his own problems seemed like the easier task of figuring out what to do about Fiona. That simmering pot he would let bubble for a bit longer before he took off the lid and peered inside.

He sank into that dreamspace, ready to face some of the monsters that prowled at the core of his soul.

Or at least, that’s what he told himself.

Randidly opened his eyes. In his childhood bedroom, the floor again heaved beneath him. The bed bobbed and tilted, adjusting on the fly to the fickle grade of the ground. Randidly stared at the still damaged ceiling for several seconds. Then he huffed out a breath and pushed himself to his feet.

The first thing he did was produce the card that had dropped when his defenses had snapped back into place. The Origin of Enmity’s Tongue retained a rather sinister curl even in its 2D jail, ready to whip outward and pierce through Randidly’s body. The description didn’t clear up the situation much.

Origin of Enmity’s Tongue: A severed piece of the Origin of Enmity. Contains some of its instinctual hunger. Can be consumed several times, to more quickly acclimate the user to certain negative effects.

Pursing his lips, Randidly reached into his strange inventory and brought out another item: the memory given to him by Sydney. He released another long sigh as his fingers closed around the warm bead. Alright Sydney, it’s about time I start looking at how you saw me.

Or really… how you saw my mother.

His fist squeezed. The bead cracked with an exhale of relief. A world bloomed around Randidly, washing away his swaying bedroom. The picket fences painted themselves into existence first, then the asphalt and driveways, until finally grass and cars and cookie-cutter houses were slapped into the large voids left by the more beige materials. Randidly idly watched the tall oak tree between his and Sydney’s property being rapidly branching out to fill the sky. He narrowed his eyes; it was odd to him how large it was.

But Randidly supposed it was Sydney’s memory from childhood, so the oak seemed to tower over everything in the neighborhood.

His own observational body flickered and he stood behind a young Sydney, who pressed her nose against the glass window of her bedroom. She looked out across her yard to the front porch where Randidly and his mother lived. A young Randidly sat alone on his front porch, periodically kicking his legs. Based on the ages, this must have been quite recently after the divorce.

Sydney looked from Randidly to the road to the sky to the oak tree and back to the road. Time flowed steadily past. Occasionally Sydney toyed with some action figures she kept on her dresser, but soon her gaze drifted back toward the window. The sky darkened, but even the light’s departure didn’t cause her gaze to waver.

Eventually, the familiar tan sedan pulled into the driveway. The headlights generated a monstrous shadow from Randidly’s hunched and squirming body. A tall and slim woman stepped out and walked up the paved walkway with her head lowered. It took a while for Randidly’s borrow memory awareness to adjust to her, moving in the darkness. She didn’t seem to breathe at all as she moved; the only evidence of her presence were her heel clops and long, wispy shadow that faded along its edges into the twilight.

With a buzzing ping, the streetlamps began to shed harsh light along the paved road. The scene was set. Sydney leaned against the window.

As she drew upon the hunched eleven-year-old on the porch her head snapped upward, an expression on her face like what she had found waiting for her was dog shit dyed bright teal and not her son. “Rand? What are you doing here? Don’t you have school?”

Sydney’s young thoughts floated into Randidlys head through the memory, tinged with a sour note. Mrs. Ghosthound is ditzy pretty.

The boy half shrugged, looking desperately at his mother while very clearly trying not to seem too needy. “School ended hours ago. I was thinking- maybe I could make dinner-”

“Honey,” Emilee Ghosthound released a long sigh and Randidly flinched like he had been struck. “Look. I just had a really hard day. And obviously I’m your mother and I’d never want that to change… but I just need a bit of me-time, you know? So why don’t you play around outside for a bit- I need to unwind. Grown-up time.”

The ditzy-pretty Emilee Ghosthound walked past her son into the house and closed the door. After sitting still for a while, young Randidly got up and went into the backyard. For about an hour, he just threw a red-plastic Wiffle ball at the oak tree and chased after it when the pitted bark of the tree kicked the ball in seemingly random directions.

The sky continued to darken. Because of the house blocking the luminance of the streetlights, the child Randidly had to judge the direction of the bounces only by noise. When that failed, he got on his hands and knees and felt through the grass.

Child-Sydney watched until Randidly was invisible. Only the intermittent thwap of the ball against the tree bark proved he hadn’t vanished.

Randidly felt something like a growl curling tightly in his stomach. Rubbing his eyes, he shrugged his shoulders. Around him, the memory was already dissipating. “So what? I’ve always known she wasn’t the greatest mother. Or even… very good at all. But everyone has their own circumstances and this happened years ago. What am I supposed to do after seeing these things?”

Child Sydney didn’t answer. Neither did the adult version. Randidly was alone with this almost-inane memory.

Randidly found himself back in the cavern. The rocky ground gently swayed beneath his feet. He pulled the Lantern of Harsh Truths out of his inventory and lifted it to look around at the surrounding doors. But before he could choose another one, a notification popped up in front of him.

Applause! An adjustment to your dream has been made by the Pantheon! Please listen carefully to the following explanation.

Instead of another notification, however, the air shimmered and a figure appeared in front of Randidly. His eyes widened slightly. “You… are helping structure this?”

Alta Bounty stood in front of Randidly, her lips pressed tightly together. Her body was in a form untouched by the horrifying heat she buried in her own chest, after taking it from Randidly in his Soulskill. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, seemingly just as uncomfortable with her presence as he was confused by it. “Yes. Because your body and the Alpha Cosmos are one and the same… the Pantheon has been struggling recently, in the wake of you creating the Nether Sense Ritual. It’s tying together influences more quickly than we could keep up; so we made the decision to begin building this structured space so all the influences coming directly from you were gathered in one space, isolated from the Alpha Cosmos. To keep the monster inside of you from lashing out.”

Randidly opened his mouth and then paused as something occurred to him. He saw again the hungry face, the unspooling tongue, the stretched neck. More than that, he remembered the feeling of fear and insufficiency he had felt when he had faced it. Obviously, he had been exhausted at the time, but still-

A frown crossed Randidly’s face. He raised his gaze and looked at the structure of this place, seeing how densely the lines of Nether flowed into this dream. “...I guess I haven’t thought much about it, but it doesn’t make much sense that this… history with my mother became so powerful on its own, does it? The shadow cast on me from my childhood should not be this long.”

He pictured the horrifying grey monster emotional violence which had ripped open the ceiling in his dream room, of the intensity that Randidly had only seen from Devick and Elhume.

“Trauma isn’t such a blessing as to endow all the afflicted recipients with power,” Alta nodded. “Our scars do not usually become convenient weapons. At the same time, this relationship with your mother always meant something to you. You would have been able to accomplish certain things by facing this repressed emotion, but that monster, the Origin of Enmity-”

Randidly’s mind raced. His lips parted in a realization. He rocked back on his heels, suddenly feeling a tickle of alarm. “It’s not me. Or at least I’m just an insignificant part of it. It’s the people of the Alpha Cosmos.”

Alta squinted at him. “I’m surprised you realized so quickly. But yes. Your body is the Alpha Cosmos. The shape of your psyche becomes part of the pattern of energy flows. Aether doesn’t clump as easily, but now that you’ve added Nether… That comes with some extra consequences. But hey, we’ve set it up to be as fair as possible. If you master all that suppressed meaning, you will obtain a great power.”

A strange thought occurred to Randidly then. His lip curled into an expression resembling a snarl. He had possessed Reign of the Eidolon Crucible and now the Spirit Realm of Marshaled Endeavors for quite some time. It has always struck him only as a way to train his subordinates up to the exacting standard of Willpower in the Nexus, while also netting his PP in the process.

But now, he felt silly; this whole he was the one being honed.

To eventually fight and slay the monstrous and caustic subconscious of an entire universe.