So.

What was our situation?

I could still access my own Interface and purchase any Blueprints that belonged to me personally. I had plenty of Money, and I could transfer it to Gavin to make purchases. Days ago, when I’d set my list of heirs, I’d also given each of the Turners and my children the right to withdraw 20 Money per day from Shop funds. I doubted Micah could access the Shop any more than I could, but just Gavin and Cassie would give us a stipend of 40 Money extra per day on top of what we earned personally.

Uh, assuming Micah and I could still earn Money personally. We’d have to check. I still had my Points. My Abilities worked. Some things still worked, and I guessed you could count the things that didn’t as “extra,” if you squinted real hard. Fighting monsters and earning Points was pretty central to this whole shebang, so I doubted a punishment would take those away. It might, though. I’d have to see. If it did, that would bring a whole extra set of problems and opportunities.

If this wasn’t a punishment, though, if this was some kind of system bug… there was no way to guess what might be affected or broken.

Even in the worst-case scenario, 40 Money per day meant that we didn’t need to be concerned about food or water. If we got home, we’d still have secure housing all ready and waiting for us. This glitch probably wasn’t a direct threat to our safety.

That didn’t mean it was okay.

I couldn’t get Messages anymore. I couldn’t be observed by Clairvoyance or Clairaudience. Some people might see that as an advantage, but I was no ninja. Me on a stealth mission was a ridiculous idea; even if I could evade their supernatural detection, normal human eyes and ears would be more than enough to spot me.

Being undetectable was pure negative from my perspective. Our communication specialists couldn’t reach out to me, and they wouldn’t be able to see if Micah or I was in trouble.

Plus, if I was undetectable, it meant other people could be. I absolutely did not want enemies to be able to get past our sentries. Even if I had no idea how to replicate this thing, this glitch or bug or punishment, I didn’t like that it existed. I didn’t like having to worry that someone else could figure out how to do this on purpose.

On top of all that, almost all the Money I was earning from taxes was locked away, inaccessible, since I couldn’t access the Shop to withdraw it. Yeah, Gavin and Cassie and the Turners could withdraw a bit, but it was pocket change. My daily earnings were skyrocketing. I’d seen well over 2,000 rations wheeled out of the Shop during the ten minutes I’d waited in line, and seven people leave carrying new swords or shields. Even after setting taxes to the minimum, I was probably bringing in over 300 Money per hour from this Shop alone.

Arguably, the lost income was the biggest and worst impact of becoming system ghosts. We could technically work around most of the other issues without too much trouble.

Technically.

I kind of hated the word right now.

“Technically” was a word that let people forget all the emotional aspects of a situation, as if only things that could be crunched down into facts and numbers were real.

Cassie and I had both told Pointy she was part of our family, and I’d heard the turtle introduce herself to the Arsenal AI yesterday as “Pointy Turtle Moretti.” I’d made a commitment to helping Pointy free herself from overbearing orders. I’d been doing my best to help her carve out a life for herself, a space for her to exist as an individual.

Now, every time I spoke or moved, I ran the risk of shutting down her thoughts entirely, or - perhaps worse - pushing them into some twisted facsimile of what she’d want them to be.

Whatever was keeping her from noticing us was far more robust than I’d first hoped. It seemed to be some sort of multilayered defense: none of her senses would pick us up, and whenever people told her she was having issues, she couldn’t seem to hear them.

When Cassie tearfully told Pointy she was “acting broken,” the turtle actually responded! But her response was… discouraging.

“I am not broken, Cassie. All my diagnostics show I am working well. Please, do not cry.”

We tried for over an hour to force our way into her consciousness, without luck.

As I’d found earlier, picking Pointy up seemed to cause her to freeze. Holding her without touching her directly had varying results: she still froze if I held her in a T-shirt held between my hands, but she remained active if I picked up the whole endtable she was standing on. The second someone asked her about the situation, though - how the endtable was moving, or who was holding it - she froze.

When Cassie asked her why she had frozen up? That froze her up.

Sometimes, Pointy would act like she could detect us. If Cassie asked her to follow her, and I stepped in the turtle’s path, Pointy would walk around me… but when asked why she’d detoured, she denied having done so.

“I took the most direct route available.”

Asking her about the past led to strange answers. Sometimes our existence seemed written out of her memories entirely. I was too integral in other memories, like when Gavin had hit Cassie with his Touch of Decay. Pointy could still describe the events, but I was simply a “trustworthy individual.” When people asked her for more details, she ignored their questions as if she couldn’t hear them talking. When Cassie ordered her to “Say the name of who pulled the Tagon!” Pointy froze for several seconds, and seemed to have dumped the entire conversation from memory before she started moving again.

Treating us as unimportant, ignoring questions, denying that issues existed, freezing up: everything we tried led to one of these outcomes.

An hour had been Cassie’s limit. Over it, really: my daughter had been extremely distraught the whole time. She could tell Pointy wasn’t working correctly, and each malfunction scared the heck out of her. The only reason I’d kept going as long as I had was because it killed me to leave Pointy like this. Even now, part of me was insisting I keep going, regarding myself in scorn for “giving up.”

I’m not giving up, I insisted to myself. I’m giving Cassie a break and giving myself a chance to think. I’ve never done well just flinging myself at a problem. I need to take the time to reason this out.

“I hope this isn’t forever,” Micah said. He was laying on the floor, resting his head on his arms as he watched Pointy with a sad expression. The little turtle was nestled in Cassie’s arms, telling her and Gavin another story.

I squeezed his shoulder. “I hope not too, buddy. The only sign that anything is wrong on my Interface is the negative current Novelty. My accumulated Novelty is still positive, so it ought to fix itself at the next reset if we can’t find a way to fix it sooner.”

I hoped it didn’t take that long, that Pointy didn’t have to spend twelve days like this. She deserved better than that, both from the Maffiyir and from me. I couldn’t stop the Maffiyir - we were all playthings where it was concerned - but I’d do my best to break its hold on her.

She’d helped us out so much, keeping Cassie focused and relatively out of trouble, keeping us organized, keeping the kids entertained. Helping keep me stable.

It was selfish, but I was really mourning the fact that I wouldn’t be able to talk with the turtle tonight after the kids had gone to sleep. I’d gotten used to our late-night chats. Pointy could easily direct her voice to only me and muffle mine so I didn’t bother the kids. Sometimes we talked about her translation work, or about discoveries she’d made about various Commonwealth species, but frequently we just talked about the books she’d read recently.

With her processing power, you wouldn’t think I’d have much to add to those discussions. Maybe I wouldn’t, five years from now, but Pointy was still very young, and human emotions were confusing. She would ask me questions about why characters had acted as they did, and then argue with whatever I told her, supporting her reasoning with copious details from the text. It was a crying shame that she’d come into existence a few minutes after the internet had died; she could have been the Goddess of Wikis. We’d had our chats often enough that I’d almost gotten rid of my reflexive denial when she mentioned parts of books that I didn’t remember. Pointy would give me a hard time if I acted like I doubted her - “My recall is perfect, Meghan” - but she was endlessly patient otherwise. She would “read” whole pages or chapters aloud to jog my memory, and she never tried to wake me or criticize me for falling asleep in the middle of our discussion, just making a note so we could pick up where we left off.

Pointy tried so hard for us.

All she really wanted was to live.

Thinking her own thoughts, not being wiped from existence when someone else’s life ended… She was asking for almost nothing and the near-impossible at the same time.

There had to be a way to help.