To my surprise, I found the brothers already sitting with two giant plates of food in front of them. I had half expected portions of the previous day to have turned out to be figments of my addled brain. But no, there was even a third open seat for me, and what looked like a menu was sitting in front of it. I quickly sat down as my stomach made even more noise.

  “Do they have eggs, by chance?” I asked, looking at the menu. They did, actually. Under breakfast options, it listed fried eggs and toast. Finally, I could make up for my lost breakfast of the previous day.

  “I think they just have everything. Somehow, our mom’s famous glorintaraj is on their menu, and it’s amazing,” Cecile answered.

  “For once, he’s possibly underselling something. This really is great. It’s like a slice of home,” Elicec added as the waiter appeared at the table, quite literally. They didn’t walk up and surprise me. One second, the space next to the brothers was empty; the next, a six-armed man was standing there holding drinks.

  “Can I interest any of you in tonight's special? It’s a wine from the Caves of Terunda. We haven’t had any in quite some time,” he said.

  “Yeah, I’ll try a glass I guess. Could I also have some water, fried eggs, and toast, please? Over easy if you could,” I asked as a nervous smile played across my face. Finally, something I understood: breakfast.

  “Of course.” My drink and food order appeared in front of me instantly. Apparently, cooking time wasn’t a thing here either. “Does everything look good?”

  “Yes, I think so, thank you." The moment I finished speaking, I dipped my toast in a yolk. I don’t know if it was because of my day, but the food really was amazing. Somehow, the eggs tasted better than almost any other egg I’d had in my life.

  “Dave, did you check your terminal and get your quest to form your core?” Elicec asked after taking a drink of the wine.

  “Should I have gotten that? All I got was a quest to read a book. Also, the System keeps giving me an error when I try to check my level. Any idea what might cause that?” I asked between bites.

  “Uh, as far as I know, everyone’s first quest is to form their core, I guess, unless they already have. Do you have a core already? Did you try socketing a mana orb in it? As for the level thing, no idea. I guess you could ask the librarians, or hope it just resolves itself. Maybe it’s because you’re from an unincorporated world,” Elicec answered, not looking overly confident in his guess.

  “Don’t really see how I could, but I guess we can try socketing an orb in. How do you do that?” I asked as I realized I had left the orbs back in my bedroom. “Oh, and do either of you have a mana orb?”

  “Here, hold it up to your chest, and just kind of picture it melding into your body,” Cecile explained as he passed me a small green orb.

  “That’s it, just picture it?” I asked, a little surprised that was all it took.

  “Yep, if you’ve got a core, it should go in,” Cecile answered.

  So I tried, and nothing happened. It just stayed pressed against my chest. “Yeah, I think this proves I don’t have a core, guys,” I said. So that left the question of why my quest was unique, not to mention why my levels keep reading as either negative or error.

  I decided that tomorrow, I would read that book. Mostly because I was at a loss for anything else I could do at this point. While I was at it, I could take a look for some introductions for dummies type of books.

  We spent the rest of the day making small talk and trying random dishes from the menu. I got a strong feeling they were doing this to help me get acclimatized to this new reality, almost like you would a fish in a new tank. I told them stories from my home, and they told me stories about theirs.

  Apparently, the two-headedness was entirely normal there. Their people were called the twinoges, and they had spent several generations saving up to send a representative to the Spiral in hopes of winning their freedom from a particularly cruel faction of dwarves. In turn, I told them tales about my family and my life before this happened.

  They seemed to particularly enjoy the story of how my ex-wife and I first met. Apparently, in their culture, the idea of embarrassment leading to romance was not a remotely common experience. We had met after she had watched me walk straight into a fountain on our college campus. I had been reading a book and walking at the same time, something I had stopped doing after this incident. I didn’t see the signs warning me away, and by the time I realized what was happening, I was already falling face-first into the water.

  After several hours, even more drinks and stories, I was well past ready to climb into bed. I was glad the elevators here just brought you directly to your room, as the idea of stairs sounded like a nightmare. I set my cracked glasses on the nightstand by the bed and crawled under the covers. The stress of the day finally fully caught up to my mind, and I fell into an anxiety-induced drunken slumber.

  The next morning, whatever had managed to hold me together the previous day had entirely worn off. I woke up in a cold sweat. It turned out that nearly being killed by creatures you had no idea really existed, after goodbye texts from your kids, all in the same day, could have a lasting effect on your psyche. Which, in reality, was not that much of a surprise.

  What was surprising, though, was that the pair of glasses I had set on the nightstand the night before were gone. They had been replaced with an unbroken pair while I slept. That didn’t remotely help to settle my brain, but it would let me see things better, which, in turn, should make it easier to read the book my quest assigned.

  I forced myself back into my routine, hoping maybe that would help settle me. I guessed it was likely a combination of adrenaline and whatever that pill was that let me function as long as I had, but that had faded the night before. Now, I was fighting a losing battle to push away my imagination’s ideas of what had already happened on Earth and what would still happen if I didn’t find a way to help.

  The food was as good as the night before. With no sign of the brothers so far today, I was forced to dine alone. That added to my routine and helped center my sense of reality. By the time I finished my breakfast, I had some of the anxiety under control, at least so much that it wasn’t threatening to overwhelm me and potentially cause a breakdown anymore. I assumed the brothers were either sleeping off the effects of last night or working on their own quests, so that meant it was time for me to try hunting down a book.

  Reading, especially reading entirely new concepts to me, had always been something I could lose myself in. I had high hopes then that once I started to sink my teeth into practical information about mana and cores, I could further shake off some of the fears that were plaguing my brain. At the moment, they did nothing but fuel the panic inside me, which would only slow down my mental processing. I needed to find a way to get that back to where it had been during college. I needed to devour this archive, which meant multiple books per day.

  In my solitude back home after the divorce, I had let myself slow down on the knowledge consumption front, and that seemed to be proving to be a real issue for me. It may have taken years, but it was now coming back to bite me in the ass. I couldn’t count on finding anything to deal with my aging issue, but that was another problem I had to try at least to solve in the archives. If I had to fight an army somehow, I needed a body that didn’t break at the first fall I took, and the existence of those healing pills gave me hope that it wasn’t a futile goal.

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  All of these thoughts raced through my head on the very short trip back to the reference desk. The same two librarians appeared to be working as the day before. I caught a glimpse of the nametag of the one who had greeted us yesterday. Her name was Elody. I wondered what kind of species her people were. Did the extra eyes increase their ability to ingest information? Was that why they seemed to be the only ones working the archives? These were questions I could look into later when I had more time.

  “Hi, I’m trying to find a book. I’ve got a quest to read Karlinovo’s Guide to Core Creation. Any chance you could point me in the right direction?” I asked her. I assumed there was some sort of organizational structure to the shelving system, and that was something I added to my list of things to learn, but first, I wanted to get this quest under my belt to see what happened. Since the brothers considered core formation so important, I needed to understand why that wasn’t my first quest and how I could do it anyway.

  “Oh, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time, kind of a strange target for a quest on core creation. Most of his theories have been abandoned for quite some time now. I believe the issue was that the energy expenditure for his core model wasn’t feasible in the long run, but who am I to argue with a quest? Core creation should be in the seventh archive, the twelfth wing. From there, it’s alphabetical, based on the author's last name. If you decide to take the book with you back to your room, make sure you see us at the reference desk; otherwise, the elevator won’t let you in,” she answered, her smile never wavering.

  “Thanks,” I said. I noticed that while her bottom set of eyes stayed focused on me, the top set seemed to roam over the archive behind me. Did they see in the same spectrum as humans did? I hadn’t considered that before. Human vision was surprisingly limited even on our own planet compared to some other animals. It was entirely likely that many of the different species I had encountered could see things I could not. I filed that away as something else to look into, possibly a reference book on the different peoples of the Spiral.

  As I followed the various signs to my destination, an earlier thought came back to me as another thing to look into. How was I reading and understanding everything? Language was not remotely a universal concept. Was it an effect of their System, or was it some other magic at play? Just how much power did the Master Spiral Control System have? I knew that I needed to focus my mind on the task at hand; otherwise, I’d end up trying to chase down the endless questions that kept forming, but that was something I had always found easier said than done.

  The other big distraction during my walk was the multitude of different varieties of people I saw. While there were plenty of forms I could compare to animals or fantastical things I knew of, there were other, more abstract species. At one table, I saw what looked like a small dark cloud turning pages with gusts of wind. Another table had a group of scribbly lines in each chair, loudly arguing over the philosophical principles of someone named Groltris the Unwise.

  To the Librarian and the archive’s credit, the book was exactly where it was supposed to be. There was something about a well-organized library that appealed to me. It screamed that it was a system meant to help people instead of discouraging them. Well, usually that was what that meant. Organization systems could be and had been designed in ways to oppress people further before, but generally, that had more to do with how the creator decided to classify things they didn’t like, instead of basing the system on a more objective reality. Problems always arose when factual information was forced to conform to someone’s subjective beliefs.

  I found the nearest table, plopped the heavy book down, and blew off the layers of dust. It seemed the librarian hadn’t been exaggerating about its disuse. I spent the next several hours digging into the text. A core was, as the name implies, the core of how everything worked when it came to mana orbs and magical abilities. The vast majority of people, upon reaching a particular biological stage of growth that lined up with their species' completion of puberty, were able to form a construct inside themselves. You didn’t need a quest to do so, and in fact, that wasn’t how most people formed theirs. Quests were only given to those who registered with the Spiral. Most people formed their core with the ambient mana of their home, and this apparently meant that the cores they produced were generally weaker.

  This wasn’t universal, and a core formed somewhere with a notably stronger ambient mana flow could be much stronger than usual. It seemed that all a quest guaranteed a person was a shot at a higher graded core. I couldn’t back up my thoughts on this yet, but I had a feeling I knew what that meant. Just like everywhere else, the rich and powerful would get their usual head start in life. Some things never seemed to change. They were universal, pun intended. Not much of the book was dedicated to this part, as the author seemed to assume readers would already know this. The book didn’t even seem to contain what a weaker versus a stronger core actually meant.

  The book did cover, in great detail, a series of drawings that reminded me of a basic circuit. The main idea was how to socket more than one mana orb into your core and through a series of what the author called mana switches, but to me, it looked exactly like a binary circuit with on and off as the only options. The author theorized that with a more complex pattern, it would be possible to expand beyond two orbs. Once I understood the math that was being described, I entirely agreed with him. To me, it seemed like all he was describing was an early circuit board design. Was this how cores looked? I wondered why the librarian had said his designs had been abandoned.

  I read through the book twice, as the quest had suggested, and I was reasonably sure I understood it. The main problem was that I needed some foundational information to make it all click. I placed the book back on the shelf and grabbed three texts that looked dust-free. Each one was titled “A Very Basic Introduction to Cores,” all by different authors. They all agreed with Karlinovo that weaker ambient mana flows produced weaker cores. What they disagreed with, though, was exactly what that meant. One of them emphasized that a starting weaker core didn’t mean anything in the long run. Others consider it a disaster and an end to any potential Spiral career.

  Reading between the lines, I thought I had figured out what was happening. Cores were measured in grades just like seemingly everything else, with F being the lowest. Virtually no one started with anything above a C, as your body needed time to grow and adapt to handle the kind of power that came with higher grades. This meant that the grade of your core could be increased, but most people who started with a weaker core wouldn’t have access to the resources needed to strengthen their core. Correlations were being treated as facts by two of the authors, which explained why there were so many competing books on the various topics. What does that mean for any kind of centralized education here?

  I spent the next several hours cross-referencing more books on the topic until I felt confident in my understanding of cores. The real reason Karlinovo’s works weren’t favorably looked on was as the Librarian had suggested. Very few people had the energy reserves to build something as he described, and even Karlinovo himself considered the work all hypothetical at best. Some people were able to sustain multiple cores, usually those who belonged to species housing multiple souls, such as the twinoges. Still, there was also a class of specialists capable of increasing the number of orbs a single core could fit at a considerable cost.

  Most people, it seemed, had a single core that only housed one orb at a time. And while these could be switched, the orbs grew in power themselves the longer they were in a core absorbing mana, so there was a trade-off in doing so. Mana was the energy that powered everything, and the more of it that was absorbed, the stronger an orb became. Most basic items were stuck at the grade they were created at, but anything tied to a person had the ability to grow with them. It was a fascinating concept, and before I knew it, my stomach had started grumbling again.

  I had no idea how long I had spent reading. I couldn’t find any clocks on the walls. Finding a way to keep track of time was something else I would have to add to the list. I put the current books I had back on the shelves, grabbed one on quests to look through tonight, and made my way back to the reference desk.

  “Checking something out, I see? Did you find what you were looking for?” Elody asked me as I approached the desk.

  “I did. Thanks for all your help so far. And yep, I wanted to check out ‘Quests and You’ for some further reading tonight,” I said, putting the book on the counter in front of her. Her second set of eyes moved to the cover, blinked, and went back to watching the room.

  “All registered. It’s our pleasure to help those seeking knowledge. Enjoy your night,” she said with a polite smile.

  “Thanks again,” I said before hopping in the elevator. The day had been productive. I didn’t feel totally clueless about this new world anymore, and that was doing a lot to fight off the existential dread that was constantly looming.

  Twinoges are one of the newer races incorporated into the Spiral in the last System expansion. Due to their dual soul nature, they are able to host two cores within a single body, something extraordinarily rare amongst the ever-growing diversity of the Spiral. With their planet currently in the possession of the Wrenderling Dwarves, it is unlikely that we will find out just how far this potential can go any time soon, but if Orgo Lemoire is any indication, we can expect at least one champion Arena climber from them one day.

  Peoples of the Expansion of Spiral: Year 2.981.34-PT

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