“I’ll get you out!” Sammy promised the terrified gremlin lady, glaring at the incensed image of Ozra in the process. Overboard much? What an abusive mother! “Come on!” Sammy picked her up to fly her over to the door she knew was to Maintenance.

  Reiki grabbed her insistently to stop her short. “Wait!” She pointed to her notepad.

  Rolling her eyes, Sammy grabbed the notepad and then flew down and to the door. The floating toolbox pretty much followed them as if on an invisible tether. The door had one of the handprint sections, so she opened it. As opposed to anything fancy, the heavy door simply made a heavy click and cracked open.

  Reiki, clutching the notepad to her chest, still groaning in pain, stumbled through the door. On the other side, she poked her head around. “Thanks,” was the last thing she said before quickly closing it shut.

  Sammy felt pretty shitty about the matter considering Ozra was a prior version of her.

  She went a bit nuts in here, for one. Plus, this might just be how her brand of gremlins communicate. I mean, shit, she definitely should have listened! Still. Ugh. Not my style, that’s for sure.

  As Sammy stalked back to the currently empty pedestal, Azure gave her a look of sympathy and put a hand on her back to rub it comfortingly. “There, there, dear.”

  Ozra’s image crackled back, returning to the exact moment before it was interrupted. The image leaned forward conspiratorially. “How did you like your first Strange Phantasm, hmm? Hmmmm? I hope it helps. Everything I’ve conspired to do is to evolve a solution. That’s the crux.”

  The Queen Gremlin slapped her hands together. “Regardless! On to the next thing. The rewards are promising and transformative, but don’t focus on that, focus on the goal of succeeding the challenge. Forget everything else. Good luck, Successor!”

  Frowning, Sammy called, “I really don’t appreciate how you handled the situation with the intruding gremlin, Ozra. That was mean and violent against an innocent person, even if she didn’t listen to your warning. Surely there was a better way.”

  The image flickered to display one of Ozra holding her hands out. “You’re expressing discontent with the way I do things. Well, tough titties! Leave, if you’re too soft! Mm’kay?” The image made a smug, mock-cheerful smile with a thumb’s up then winked out.

  “Insufferable. She’s completely insufferable.”

  “Mmn,” Azure grunted noncommittally. “Insufferably adorable.”

  Making a loud ‘tsk,’ Sammy gave Azure an admonishing look. “Come on, Azure! What happened was not amusing.”

  “It doesn’t matter, love. This is a recording, an automated spellcraft, not a person. You can’t convince it of anything.”

  Sammy sighed. “I guess you’re right. Might as well move on. Ozra Bosk! More info on Challenge Two? What can we expect for Challenge Two? Will it continue to be your life or others?”

  An image of Ozra looking dirty and frazzled appeared. It looked like she’d swam in a river of grease, her tophat was gone, and her hair was in a bun threatening to unravel. She appeared to be sitting.

  In a mechanically distorted voice laced with defeat and exhaustion, the image reported, “Challenge Two is where the rubber meets the road. Assuming I ever get this shit over the last two percent.” She stifled a yawn and shook herself. “Taps into the Hall’s basal functionality for the portal records. Not just one! No, no, no… all of them. So that the selection is the most effective. Sophisticated heuristics, of course. It’ll depend on you. Not random, because I have goals and benchmarks targeted to boost you at certain advancement levels.”

  The image of Ozra flickered but didn’t disappear. She was staring at nothing. “I’m tired. So tired.” The image finally winked out.

  Azure made an intrigued noise. “Hmm. It would seem to indicate we’re moving on from the safety of Ozra and Medrei Eth to less familiar lives. I probably should’ve expected it.”

  “I was looking forward to knowing more of those two.”

  “Clearly, the point is not understanding them, Chestnut. It’s to succeed at challenges that prepare us for the future you hope to bring.”

  “Well, I can’t argue with that.” Sammy paused as she considered what else to try asking about. More info to help Azure understand and have better chances. Hmm. “Ozra Bosk! What is your primary point to the Challenge Room? What are you trying to teach and why? Preferably without your sales pitches. We’re already going in, you don’t need to convince us.”

  The image winked on, Ozra sitting down and looking greasy, but not as tired or frazzled. She had her boots up on what was probably a desk, leaning back with a big stein of some brew in her hand. “Underlying philosophy! Real talk! You want the boiler room breakdown, do you? Atta girl! I’m glad you’re interested.”

  Ozra took a big swig of the stein and belched. “Excuse me. Okay, so, the goal is pretty simple — accelerate the basics into the intermediate into the mastery. Specifically, I mean when it comes to spellcraft and mystical understanding. Why? Flavor? Because it’s what I know? No. Because it is foundational to reality. To understand it is the greatest advantage one can hope for.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Understand it and you can bend the rules, even break some of the flimsier ones. Build new, unintended things within the framework. The possibilities are endless. Perhaps with enough understanding, you can solve the whole equation of our malfunctioning cycle. Or, quite simply, win by addition. I mix the divine and the arcane more and more because when separate, they have a balance, but power is always imbalance, you see?”

  She lifted her free hand. “The divine is by pact.” She lifted her stein. “The arcane is by rote. Understand, the arcane is technology. The inner light of the self casting outward to illumine the world. The divine is the conceptual given life and spitting back at the self, generally a lot more governed and maintained by the System. You can’t win jack shit against the System operating entirely within the rules. You have to modify it with the construction protocols.”

  “I guess she means the runes?” Azure asked.

  Sammy made a ‘kinda’ motion with her hand. “Those are just one method for spellcraft, but yes. The underlying alterations.”

  After a pause for another swig of her stein, Ozra continued, “My efforts are in rigging up the construction protocols and linking them with the conceptual. It’s the result of long, long, long study and work adjacent to the Hall. The Challenge Room is my method for encapsulating and channeling it for our posterity. All for the same goal: stopping the vicious cycle and pattern. Alleviating ours and thereby the universe’s endless suffering. There has to be a better way, eh? I’ll drink to that!” She took a swig as the image sputtered out.

  “Alright,” Sammy mused, “that must be why mostly all of the upgrades I got were arcane, or wizardly. A framework to keep building toward this synthesis we see both in me and my followers, if to different degrees. That is — or became through Ozra — the core of who I am on these planets.”

  “The Goddess of Magic,” Azure declared emphatically.

  “Which is Calrenazzod’s technology, which is thereby its hope of [Progress].”

  “Sad to think the Sage could have so easily provided this over thousands of years.”

  “No. Not so easy. Impossible, for him. Because of his nature. Society is always doomed because of that. You could deduce in Calrenazzod that it is specifically because he did not do what Ozra says is necessary — merge the arcane with the divine. He only ever denies and rejects what he is.”

  “It could simply be the immortality aspect. You captured it with ease by your nature as a goddess. He gave up his soul to attain it.”

  “There is an existing provision in the System to become immortal by becoming a part of the conceptual realm. Ascension. A true pragmatist uses all provisions at their disposal to attain their goals.”

  “And that is what you are?”

  “Eh, well… mostly. In any case, I wouldn’t ever turn down being a goddess. I guess that’s pretty obvious. Granted, I didn’t exactly do so great at first, but I was super ignorant and mundane. Basic!”

  “You? Basic? There’s plenty extra going on, I’d say.”

  Sammy winced. “Extra? Damn. You got me there, Blueberry.” She turned back to the platform. “Ozra Bosk, do you have any idea about why I was absent? Why I was outside the System’s jurisdiction? We’re wondering if it is some sort of plot.”

  Nothing. The platform didn’t so much as flicker.

  “Okay,” Sammy muttered. “Can you tell me anything about the Fortuneteller? You modified her, right?”

  The image flickered on, this time with Ozra very presentable in her formal getup, her arms clasped behind her back and facing sideways. “There’s a lot of backdoor access through the System Deck, but it was initially designed with a more impartial separation limiting its relevance planetside. I’ve managed to integrate an evolutionary protocol. The best I could manage in the timeframe I’m operating on. This should cause both the deepening of separation in the sense of synthesis with the System Deck, and deepening of synthesis with planetside personas through the Fate vector.”

  Ozra shrugged her shoulders and sighed, her eyes angled upward. “I don’t know what is going to happen, honestly. These gamey Fortune personas have potentially critical access and knowledge of the past and future, creating another link that might triangulate our success target. I know from The Lover that there is an ‘End’ that seems to warp even her perceptions and memories, possibly a cyclic reset protocol… and the personas can’t reach beyond it. Within that cycle, these… projections might reach all the way to the end. I think they do, not that they cooperate usefully. I almost feel their design was strictly to be spooky and mysterious. A kind of showy magician reflection of the Director.

  “Hypothetically, my ‘worm of rebellion,’ if you will, could ‘pop’ them out of that default programming to gain a measure of autonomy. That could change future interactions thousands or millions of years in the future and open up new avenues of strategy. Perhaps this power of evolution in such long frames is what is necessary to counter our malformed creation? The Lover is very dismissive of the ‘useless toy construct’ but I’m not so sure. If they function as probabilities, yet understand the failures leading to their end, they could see a pattern to avoid it.”

  Ozra smiled to herself. “Wouldn’t it be ironic for free will to harness apparent destiny and jerk its chain? Our ultimate challenge, our ultimate puzzle: how to jam a works from the inside, from a position of being a part of its functioning already. What more can you do than pray and summon a gremlin?”

  The Queen of Gremlins smiled and cackled as she turned forward and held her hands out. “The ultimate con, the ultimate heist! The ultimate gremlin and ghost in the machine. One that jammed the engine cycle of time itself!”

  The image of Ozra, arms out dramatically, winked out.

  Also fun at parties! *fireworks explosions*

  Next Chapter...

  A smidge more pondering, then... the Challenge Room! What will it be this time, intrepid adventurers?

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