With the presentation of Ozra finished, Sammy looked over to Azure, whose face was as stunned as hers must’ve been. “She did jigger the Fortuneteller the way she is,” Sammy declared breathlessly.

  “Made to evolve,” Azure commented. “I think it’s safe to say she isn’t very Ozra-like.”

  “Right. Well, she’s still an amalgamate of us, but Ozra facilitated this possibility. Improved her autonomy and increased our capacity for integration and synthesis. That’s why the FT is thicker into the future — she’s relatively newly evolved since Ozra’s time!”

  “It also seems to make for a dark and depressing entity considering the knowledge of failures propagating. A far cry from the likes of you or Ozra.”

  “Still makes me wonder about the Director. What she was like, you know? Before. Maybe I’ll make that my final fact-finding before we go in, hmm? Ozra Bosk! Tell me about the Director. Whatever details you know.”

  The image flickered on, Ozra clean but dressed down to just a big shirt with a pink heart on it, sitting bare-legged and cross-legged on a bed while writing on a notepad. She had the definitive look of having just taken a shower. “The Director.” She scoffed. “The opposite of me! And you, hopefully. Mostly, anyway. The words I would use to boil her down are ‘Conscientious Visionary Engineering Stickler.’ I believe these cycles fucked over whatever her efforts were to fix things, but she attempted to do it over and over and over through careful precision. Yeah, well, you gotta embrace the chaos, girlie!”

  The image of Ozra grimaced and tore a page to crunch it up into a ball and throw it. “At some point, her memories or perhaps her essential will itself deteriorated, I think. A strong possibility that what was happening to The Lover was too much to bear. She just retreated into herself. That’s all she wrote, pretty much. You can even ask The Lover, who’ll tell you she’s gone pecan, too!”

  Ozra sat up slightly, squinting and sticking a pencil into her mouth as she thought. “There really isn’t much information. Just her work. Hypothetically, you won’t see that, except as modified by me. Just know that it quite smoothly, beautifully, and efficiently fucked us over, even with the supposed errors. Wanna know something? I reverted the System! She made this huge patchwork error-correcting package that needed to be undone. It kind of scares me that it probably has cross-Cycle connections — if such exists — but it was necessary to have any chance at modification.

  “I really wish she was on our side. But I wonder if she is, you know? She’d probably hate everything I did. It doesn’t matter. She’s in torpor and won’t wake up. We can only speculate why, but deliberately or not, she’d deferred to us and we’re on our own, girlie.” The image winked out.

  “Figures,” Sammy muttered. “We’re starting to get her attention, though, Ozra. Now I wonder if that’s a good thing.”

  “Indeed,” Azure offered. “Something you believe in strongly? You pursue it like a maniac. I can only imagine how much of a fanatic your higher self would be. Then again, without evidence of the dynamic before Ozra, we could glean that the Director stays away due to how extra screwed up things are without her patchwork.”

  “I think I understand it, though. If you can’t change things to the way you want them, you can at least make it all work smoother. She just wasn’t the type to throw in a monkey wrench to see what happens. If it’s your baby, could you? Instead, final corrections as a swan song, and then retreating, retiring… Maybe she understood the necessity for someone like Ozra.”

  “And you, dear.” Azure smiled and put her arm around Sammy’s shoulder.

  Sammy returned the smile. “Yeah. I’m extra special!” She laughed. “Because I’m an idiot, right?”

  Azure shrugged. “If so, I know the feeling. But if you ask me, there’s a lot more going on in you.”

  “Well, you can serenade me with my upsides after this is over. Just take in the things we’ve learned about the designer of these challenges, hmm? She is not a perfectionist, she’s a tinkerer and jury rigger. Not to mention a gremlin saboteur. So don’t expect that acing things requires acing things. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I do. But things are different for me to begin with. Your reflection cast darkly, remember? That must be heeded above all: who I am.”

  “Be who you want to be, Azure, not who you think you are. Trust that. Believe in that. I do.”

  Azure looked away and nodded slowly, contemplative.

  Sammy took a deep breath and turned to the door. “Alright. Let’s do this.”

  They approached the heavy, ornate door to the Challenge Room once more. Sammy paused a good distance away, remembering the shock effect. Leaving Azure a safe distance, Sammy darted forward to put her hand on the palm reader that would open it.

  She still felt a little zap in her groin for a fraction of a second, but the door clicked and slid sideways. A black mirror portal revealed itself, its liquid-like surface casting their reflections back to them.

  Taking Azure’s hand once more, they walked through the thin divide.

  The Challenge Room greeted them, a circular chamber of wood, bronze, and copper of tremendous height, its grand design much like the inner workings of a steampunk clocktower. Gears turned continuously and there were copper tubes in every direction. Lanterns hung for light, casting everything in warm, rich yellow. The only bright colors were reds here or there, to showcase dials and valve levers.

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

  The bottom-most portal they’d once gone through, with a ‘1’ above it, was just as they left it — dead black and opaque.

  However, ‘2’ and the others above, accessible by steps, were all still covered by bronze.

  They walked up steps made of bronze panels to the covered oval portal. She noticed that around the ‘2’ was a circle symbol — a snake eating its own tail. The Ouroboros.

  Nearby, to the side in the wall, a large copper pipe had an open panel, venting torrents of steam. Sammy studied the works and concluded they were strongly connected to the portal itself.

  The open panel had a simple, red-painted lever next to it, obviously controlling the opening and closing of the panel and the steam channel. Sammy took hold of the lever and pushed it in the direction needed to close things. Her one-handed effort didn’t cut it. It wasn’t rusted, which was impossible, but evidently, it had powerful pressure holding it where it was.

  She grabbed it with both hands and pulled it with all her might — the monumental strength of a goddess. The lever finally budged and gave way, and the panel slid over the opening to trap the steam. There was a satisfying locking sound.

  The bronze cover over the nearby portal shifted sideways to disappear into the wall face, and the mirrored portal showed itself. Unlike the prior one, it was completely white instead of black, and the mirror reflection was barely discernible.

  “Huh. What do you make of that?” Sammy asked.

  “What, you flexing and strong-arming that lever? Incredibly hot.” Azure smirked, then turned to the portal to study it. “Less murky. Cleaner. Something like that. Almost feels… innocent.”

  Sammy frowned. “Really? Less murky I get, but not innocent. A design choice? Ozra’s psychology of herself for the first?”

  “Interesting interpretation. I’d guess not. Most portals are obscured and shadowy, drawing the eye for shapes shifting within, but those in this place are especially black. This is white and nearly opaque. What is the difference compared to the Hall? They show us nothing within.”

  “Mmn! True. The backdoor access entering Engineering to begin with is different from the Hall portals.”

  Azure held out her hand. “Shall we?”

  Sammy took her hand and they both faced their barely seen reflections on the portal. They both took a deep, deep breath in perfect synchronicity. “Catch you on the flip side, Blueberry.”

  “May we find ourselves and each other within.”

  “Well said! Here we go!”

  They leapt into their reflections in the portal and light took them.

  ??············???···········??

  Her name was Rallindin Peregaust and the world was bright and new. Even the universe, she sometimes felt.

  From an early age, she was inspired to come up with a new way of doing things, out on the frontiers of the great continent of Talspora, the New World, a land of endless colonial expansion, aggression, and amplifying war between five different nations. Each had its own technology to boast of, of varying destructive capabilities.

  Ralli was not particularly interested in war in her earlier days, nor in destruction. Her adoptive father had lost his legs and his will in the failed war of independence against the Hunastian Empire. The war had made the frontier of the West shrink quickly with new settlements, fortresses, and enforced ‘argute’ regions with new governors and their policies designed to suppress any new local militancy. Too often ‘solved’ from the end of one of their Disintegrator guns that turned flesh and bones into bubbling black goo.

  To Ralli, technology seemed little more than power turned primarily to destruction. She hoped for something else as the opposite, to make use of the System’s potential for true creation and transformation. She believed there was far more potential in it than anyone realized. The hints of a code. A code to the functioning of reality itself.

  Her life was spent decoding this in secret and inventing her New Way. A way that was dedication and discipline very personal and inward, even with the reflections outward. The latter was only a focus for the internal power within, bearing nearly infinite potential.

  She made her focus a language of meanings, drawing from the land of Dalustar and its varied frontiers of many dozens of cultures and languages, whose ways of living and incredible, colorful stories fueled her imagination.

  She absorbed it all over the long-lived lifespan of one of the Alabaster Kalustratti, the First People of the Jagged Canyon. She’d never met another, all wiped out as fierce rebels to the empire. At first, she was just told they were ‘rare,’ but she had begun to worry as she aged that she was the last. Some called Jagged Canyon instead the Canyon of Bones, claiming it was cursed.

  There was a book, though. One she’d been meant to have as a young Kalustrat to teach her old things of her people. Language, myth, their ways of cartomancy. It had been stowed away and forgotten in her extended infancy, but when she blew the dust off of it, it was as if uncovering the greatest treasure in history.

  It was something that she knew, she understood… shouldn’t be. A final gift from far beyond, of something that had passed on forever.

  She studied it for many years and came to understand meaning itself on a far deeper level.

  She created the first Runes when her foster parents were old and gray with her barely equivalent to a teen. They were interlaced with many layers of meaning, thereby holding within them the concentration of power. The System had to adapt as she forced the rules to change. She obtained her New Way through synthesis with the Old. And she gained a new class.

  She became the first [Wizard].

  She became snooty, superior, aloof, and grew a long beard?

  Next Chapter...

  The life of Ralli continues. Conflict is inevitable, but who shall she face... or what?

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