Chương 92: The First Complication

Sophia Romanova had opinions about space, the type that would have any other of her six fellow crewmates aboard the ISS look at her with unblinking confusion. Space was too big, for one. At light speed, it would take longer than the entire history of human civilization to travel a quarter of the milky way, one of roughly two trillion galaxies in the entire known universe.

There were voids in between galactic clusters so large and empty, they were incomprehensible in the same way a lovecraftian god might be, but you didn't even have to go that far to experience some of that delectable existential dread ever-present between the dead hunks of stone, gas, and plasma in the sky. If the sun were the size of a basketball, Earth would be the size of a pinhead twenty-six meters away. Pluto would be orbiting over a kilometer away.

And here she was, lying in the cupola, a segment of a space station with windows that allowed her to appreciate in comfort how she would cross the Atlantic in twelve minutes where half a millennia ago that Columbus fellow had taken thirty-odd days. Heh. Slowpoke. She took a picture, then leaned back, getting as comfortable as one could in space. Today there was another meteor shower glowing below. The orphaned space rocks streaked through the atmospheric bubble with white lines.

She brushed her raven hair out of her face whenever 0G decided they needed to float in the way, and snapped another picture. Thirty days, five hundred years ago. Twelve minutes today. How fast will we be in five hundred years? Whatever speed it was, it likely wouldn't matter. Whenever Hannah, the bubbly American woman, talked to her about traveling to other stars, it deserved nothing more than an eye roll. Space was too big, too full of nothing. No drag, sure, but no pit stops either for a quick cig and chips.

If you wanted to visit even as boring a star as Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the sun, even if you did have the ability to accelerate to ninety-nine percent of light speed, then decelerate again before you missed your stop, it would take over four years to travel that distance. And light speed was, as far as humanity knew, the absolute limit. Four years. And that was just a one way flight.

Everyone from engineers to higher ups had been so concerned about the mars mission, about six to nine months of travel one way and then back again, that it had been delayed and delayed for decades. Now, of course, the reason why was a bit obvious. There were aliens and movie-monsters on Earth, and rumors of wormholes that led to stranger places, to planets in other galaxies so far away that nobody was even sure physics behaved the same way there as it did here. In just that moment, Sophia formed a new opinion.

It was a good time to be on the ISS, away from the earthly problems. If only she could stay forever. Something shook the cupola, and her world. Briefly, Sophia blacked out, and when she cam to, it was to a bleeding welt on her forehead, and the blare of a distant alarm. It was a specific one, every sound tuned to its own beat of catastrophe. Sophia recognized the blare as a warning for a micrometeor impact and hull breach immediately.

She opened the hatch to the neighboring module — and was immediately shoved aside as Hannah and one other crewmate squeezed into the module with her.

"Hey, hey, this isn't the emergency shelter module, follow protocol dammit, or… why are you crying?"

"We're dead," Hannah said, tears sticking to her face, some floating away in misshapen globules.

"It might not feel like it, but we're goners."

"Look, if you're scared about a tiny bit of decompression, I'll take the lead—" she followed the shorter girl's finger outside, where the back half of the ISS drifted into view. And drifted past, unconnected to their section, in a cloud of shimmering debris and solar panels.

"Ah." They were dead. Rockets regularly docked at the ISS, but they were neither built for nor kitted out with a module for human personnel. They were dropping altitude visibly, which meant the station was going fast. There had been a small warning about possible micro meteorites throughout the entire week, but still. Dead, just like that. Another opinion about space: it's too deadly. Not much life out there, most likely. Well, aside from the magic hullabulloo going on below. Oh well. That's life.

Sophia resolved to make her last few pictures the best. Maybe they'd be immortalized alongside her remains, if neither burned up in the atmosphere upon reentry. Except wait, we still have wifi. I can just send the pictures in an e-mail. … slightly less dramatic than I'd hoped. I'll have to make up for that with volume. As the majority piece of the space station drifted past, something else came to view. Something large, hidden in the vast darkness of space, in Earth's shadow. It looked like… a giant metal potato?

A potato with thrusters, with forests of antennae, and many blinking lights, some growing rapidly closer as they crept into the light. There was a thud. Hannah cried out. A hand crept along the outside of the capsule, five fingered and gloved in colorful yellow. Then came the shoulder, neck, and a face, an oddly human one. It noticed them, smiled, and though it was out of place, it felt soothing in a way that nothing in this vast expanse of nothingness and cruel physics should have.

"I—that's just a blue human. Why is he blue?" the third crewman asked.

"He's trying to say something. O-one second, I can lipread…" Hannah said, rubbing the last of the water out of her eyes.

"Have no fear, Fixerman is here?" The blue humanoid smiled as he glowed a comforting orange. Slowly, the pieces of the ISS reversed their direction, knitting together over the course of minutes. Hesitantly, the third crewman checked the station's status.

"... we have achieved full atmosphere and pressurization. And we're no longer on a declining orbit." Sophia couldn't care less. She snapped a picture, the smiling blue alien framed in front of a distant space ship of unfathomable size with a thumbs up, his orange glow like a halo thrown by a second sun. And within hours, it went viral across every social media platform. +++ Sam? The aftermath of the convergence event Battle Royale wrapped up sluggishly.

The dome was cleared of any and all plant life, leaving a circle-shaped scar in the landscape, as if an island-sized cookie-cutter shark had taken a bite out of it. Mochi and every other Envoy besides Trust lost their two percent of resource share, and yet, just getting out of there alive felt like a victory on its own. I sat on the ground, staring at chaos all around us. Of the saucer, nothing remained but the plushy. I gave the plushy a squeeze and a cursory sniff.

Oh yeah, this definitely needed to spend some time in the washer. [Congratulations! You have reached level 66] I was lying on my back, feeling like shit.

"Oh hey. I leveled from that."

"You leveled," Smooth Sam said flatly.

"I didn't. I missed all the action."

"Any second thoughts about a more permanent alliance?" Alex asked, rubbing his regrown foot.

"Against Trust?" I raised an eyebrow.

"I'd expect everyone to ally with her after that display."

"Fanatics don't take allies. He thinks anybody who doesn't see things his way is an idiot."

"Don't we all?" He snorted.

"Could be. Check his socials, maybe you'll get a better read on him than I will." As we parted, my concussed-ass brain played that conversation back again.

"What do you mean he!?" I asked, while Smoothie quietly sat down while checking through his socials. He called himself Trust, the magical girl, envoy of Trust, the emotion and the envoy of the same name, which was just about as confusing as things got in these parts. A boy. A magical… boy. Magical girl, parentheses male. Checking his socials revealed quite little, but for one important fact: I had once again found a Custodian who was vastly more popular than I was. Why does that bother me so much? I'm jealous.

I think. Boo. I groaned, and gave more fuel to the fire of comparison. His numbers were ridiculous. All he did was show up to convergence events, scrunch, twist, and blow everything the hell up with his ludicrous telekinesis, then maybe offer the paparazzi a cold, blue-eyed, dismissive glance before flying away. The people loved it. He does have that casual magical girl twirl down to a beat. But he barely interacts with fans, is standoffish, and doesn't care about the camera at all. Why do people like that?

Rather, why do they like him more than me? Do people not like a people pleaser? Or is there something else I'm missing?

"Gap moe, it has to be," I muttered.

"What?" Smooth Sam asked.

"What are you talking about?"

"Nothing." She gave me and Smiley an odd look. Together with Addy, the four of us limped back to the Kobayashi's, who seemed more concerned about our wellbeing than the fact that we obliterated a square mile of the mountainside. While Addy was in the shower, I got pulled aside by Aunt Nagi.

"Samantha. A word." The older woman seemed to be having difficulties in finding the right words.

"Is Adelaide doing… alright these days?" The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. I blinked.

"I think so. Define 'alright'." She sighed.

"When… when Adelaide first came to us, she was a raw scraped wound, lashing out against the world. She grew milder over time, or so we thought, but in truth, I suspected she simply learned to hide it better. It is rare that she puts trust in any one person or new idea fully."

"She's a bit stubborn like that," I commented.

"And yet, one cannot bottle up so much emotion without it affecting you in some way. She trusts few people, but those she does receive her affection with all the intensity of a divine storm. What I mean to say is, trust once earned seldom recedes even when scorned. If our Adelaide feels comfortable enough to give that trust to you, then you must become someone capable of receiving said trust. Only then will she be alright." Trust. Devotion, belief, understanding, hope, knowledge. Trust. What a heavy concept.

The word echoed in my mind until the evening, when we decided to cut our visit short. I apologized to Aunt Nahi and Uncle Daigo for leaving early, since we'd planned to return on the morning of the third day, and it was barely past five PM on the second. But they understood, they truly did. At the last possible moment, Addy turned.

"Aunt Daigo, Aunty Nagi. I… Thank you." That, more than anything, sparked tears in their eyes. There was a round of hugs and muttered goodbyes. Addy must've never told them how she really felt, always carrying around lofty self-inflicted expectations. We weren't so dissimilar in that regard, her and I. And me, and me, I thought as I felt Smooth Sam's stare boring into the side of my neck as we hiked back to civilization. No convenient circus cannoneer here, nope!

Just me, Addy, and a variety of complicated situations.

"So. You made another seven-charge double," Smooth Sam finally said. In spite of our agreement not to bring more Sams into the world. I tried not to look her in the face.

"I, er… what about the aliens?"

"Oh no, you don't get to 'what about aliens' your way out of this." She sounded indignant. I would be too, in her place.

"We had an agreement. A nonverbal, nonbinding understanding. Christ, I can tell which of you is the double from a mile away. How do you think that makes her feel?"

"Why don't you ask her yourself instead of talking about her in third person while she's right next to us?" We both looked to Smiley Sam on our left. She was busy doing her name justice, neck craning left and right at every tweet of a bird or rustle in a brush. With a hop, she suddenly skipped over to a rotten log, broke it open, and observed the insects hidden inside with open glee.

"She seems content."

"Oh please, you know we're good actors if it comes down to it." Smooth Sam started chewing her thumbnails.

"But she is awfully joyful… no, no it can't be that simple." She pointed at Smiling Sam.

"Joy." Then she pointed at me, then herself.

"Fear. Anticipation. We're separate archetypes of ourself, divided along the axis of emotions we feel most strongly. You always seem nervous and afraid, I'm looking ahead, and she is just… happy."

"Huh." We walked some more.

"Hypothetically, if you make another six-cost double, what emotion do you think they'd come to represent?"

"I dunno. Hubris?"

"You do seem quite full of yourself, as arbiter of all things good and orderly."

"Oh shush." I did, conveniently ignoring how she'd already planned our itinerary now that we were returning back to usual Custodial business. Clearing Convergence events, training newbies, going over the ledgers so we know how much money we can set aside to commission our own dollhouse… It appears she even planned some time slots denoted as 'Addy cuddle time solo' and 'Addy group snuggle time'. And the first week of solo time is already booked. Oh you sneak, sneaky spider you.

I was so busy trying to come up with countermeasures and revenge plots against Smooth Sam that I only realized Addy was humming a somewhat upbeat tune by the time we'd already reached the teleporter.

"Good mood?" I asked.

"My parents are proud of me, my girlfriends are multiplying. What more could I ask for?" Fiscal stability. No Custodian battle royales. A solution to all our problems. I shook my head as we were neatly chaperoned into the teleporter box on the Japanese side, then were practically chased out of it the moment we landed in Chicago. The line for people awaiting teleportation had only grown in our absence.

"You know, our teleporters are fascinating," Addy said with the momentum of someone ready to yap away about their favorite trivia.

"While the system helped design them, they can in theory run entirely without system infrastructure, including using normal electricity as fuel. Assuming you'd be willing to dedicate an entire powerplant to recharging of course. Soulcoins are just a lot more efficient."

"Huh. The more you know." Chicago smelled, something I noticed not for the first time. Metropolitan subway versus faraway mountain wasn't a fair comparison. The odor of wet concrete and cars idling in eternal rush hour limbo was the type of downgrade that put a neat bow on the end of our little weekend, settling us back into our everyday lives. I can't wait for the next weekend. If anyone had told me as a kid that I would be looking forward to the weekend more than any sweet or dessert, I'd have called them crazy.

Addy, practically reading my mind, said: "The weekend's not over yet. Whoever gets back to HQ last has to do the laundry." What normally was a two hour struggle by car turned into a fifteen minute high speed chase across the rooftops. Addy was having fun pouncing ahead of us, while Smooth Sam purposefully fell behind, only to yank the person in first place back with a tactically placed line of silk.

Smily Sam was a blur, completely focusing on getting ahead via spring steps of [Elasticity], and smearing her contours with [Of Many Colors] to make her a harder target. It was so fun, I was the last person to notice the thin smoldering line of smoke coming from our destination. We came to a stop at the parking lot, necks craning at a crew of firefighters dousing part of the Free Poker League HQ with hundreds of gallons of water.

Becca was standing outside in her robotic body, face morphing as she pulled at nonexistent hair. The moment she noticed us, Becca stalked up right to us.

"A freaking meteorite fell right on our HQ!" Outwardly, I blinked in incomprehension.

"Wow. That is really bad luck." Inwardly, I was more like this: Oh god, a meteor strike. On the HQ! Was someone hurt? Is this an attack? Can Trust shoot meteors? No, she'd have to pluck them out of low earth orbit. Would she do that, just to spite me? I didn't even win the damn battle royale! As I was spiraling, my eyes turned left. A Custodian I didn't recognize was fast approaching. Fast for someone without a lot of Body.

He skidded to a stop in front of us, huffing and wheezing as if there was a competition going on about most breaths taken and least oxygen cycled. For a moment, I thought he was blue due to severe hypoxia, but no, that was just how he looked normally.

"I—" He gestured to wait while he wheezed and tried to catch his breath.

"I am — wooh, man, your gravity really takes some getting used to. Where was I? Right." With a truly unnecessary level of flourish, he gestured at the HQ, shooting twin jets of ice at the smoldering building. The firefighters swore as their ladders turned slippery and their hoses started shooting logs of ice. The blue guy meanwhile outright shrieked as a bird nearby took flight, fouling his aim.

Within moments, half the street and part of the barber shop on the other side of the road were covered in a thin sheen of glinting slippery white. The fire was out. At some cost. An SUV skidded across the ice and gently rear-ended the license plate off of a Sedan. The blue guy winced.

"Shit, sorry! Sorry, I, er, mean… you're welcome, citizens of Arth! Until another day, whereupon you may call my name so that I may assist. My name. Which is… Friendzone. Away!" And then he jogged away, wheezing and huffing all the way he went. I turned to the rest of the group.

"Did we all just hallucinate that, or were we just witness to the world's most incompetent Custodian?"

"I don't think that was a Custodian, Sam," Becca noted.

"He didn't have a popup over his head."

"Yeah, well, if the wizards are finally pulling their own weight instead of trying to clobber me, I'd more than welcome it." I stretched until my back made a satisfying crack.

"Alright, lets do some damage assessment, then call up people with repair-related spells."

"He didn't have any popup," Addy muttered.

"He wasn't even an associate." She blinked, turning first to Becca, then to me.

"I… think that was an alien." +++ Ice had a tendency to melt in summer. Within half an hour, the small back alley road abutting our compound was clear again. The damage to the Free Poker League HQ, however, was rather permanent. Smiley Sam fell to her knees in front of the room-sized crater that once had been our office. Most cubicles full of personal memorabilia had been vaporized. She hit the ground with a fist, two more shaking at the big man in the sky.

"What's her deal?" Orianna, vampire Custodian and voluntary full-time secretary, noted. She had the secretary getup, form-fitting blouse, office skirt and all. She wore that all the time. Maybe it was a roleplay thing between her and Becca.

"She's… a little odd. But there's nothing wrong with that." Also, our communal minifridge was obliterated. The loss of energy drinks and dogwatah was immeasurable. And all because of one dumb falling rock. The offending object, a half melted softball-sized lump of metal and stone, was obvious right at the center of the destruction. I picked it up.

"I am putting you in a glass box, on a pedestal next to our reception desk," I said darkly.

"Your failure to do lasting damage will be commemorated, bolstering morale forevermore." Soon enough, after getting everyone situated and surveying the damage. I was sitting at a desk in one of our office cubicles. It was my desk, permanently assigned to the co-founder of the League. It barely felt like it. These past two years, most of my time had been spent running around fixing convergence events.

"We can either pay a load of subcontractors to get this fixed up as a rush job," Orianna noted, scribbling audibly on her physical clipboard, "which will take upwards of three months. Or we pay a Custodian, a sadness monocaster called La Mend, to return it to its exact state in under an hour. What with all the convergence events and the… collateral Custodian action, she's rather swamped with work, making her time eminently valuable, even in soulcoins.

I sent a poll to everyone with a system a few minutes ago, and the results are… split fifty-fifty."

"That's a lot of people who don't mind half of our HQ being a construction sight for the rest of summer."

"Sam, please," she shot me a look.

"Not everyone joins an organization because they'd sell their body and soul to its cause. A non insignificant portion of our members were simply enticed into joining by our flat contribution fee. Other Lodges, Cabals, and supe-groups charge a percentage on their members' income, which tends to end up much, much higher than asking for ten soulcoins a month."

"Would a percentage fee get us our own dollhouse faster?"

"It would put us further up the queue by years. Outside of our core membership — You, me, Becca, Addy, Parsnip, Mason — we're mostly made up of newer Custodians trying to get their footing. Exit surveys from level thirty-plus members shows dissatisfaction with training-related services."

"If we make membership more expensive, we lose the newer Custodians. If we don't, we lose the more experienced ones." I couldn't even blame them. A dollhouse was the only place where you could train to the limit of your ability as a Custodian in a near-realistic scenario. Playing heels and heroes in the streets was a substitute, but it was like training a baseball pro on softball with a cricket bat.

"It all comes down to money." From envoys to Custodians to associates and other people, it was all the same. I draped an arm over my eyes and sighed.

"What the hell are we even doing?"

"Resources need to be distributed, labor needs to be paid," Orianna opined, unhelpfully.

"Gee, wow, thanks Orianna." There was a pause.

"Wow, I don't think I've seen you angry. Like, ever. That was an angry, sarcastic lashing out, wasn't it?"

"... I'm sorry. It's not your fault." Through my lower set of eyes, I could see her grinning.

"You know, you felt a bit more approachable then. More genuine. You're always out there, running, smiling, saving the world with a quip on your lips. If you want to appeal to more types of audiences, maybe don't try to act like everything's fine once in a while?"

"Am I not supposed to?" I asked, confused as to how we got onto this topic.

"That's what magical girls are there for. We're here to spread hope and happiness."

"Ah, but there's the kicker. Is hope an emotion?"

"I…" I frowned.

"I guess not, in the strict sense? If it were, it would be somewhere between happiness and anticipation, or maybe happiness and trust. But you can't charge a spell off of two emotions at once; it'd miscast. So, we're not made to spread hope, we choose to. But… doesn't that seem awfully constraining?" She gave a wan smile.

"Becca came to the same conclusion. Why does the system use an outdated emotion wheel as its central spellcasting model? What is it trying to accomplish with us Custodians? What—" We both got a system notification at that moment. [Convergence event detected within (2. 1) miles. Estimated danger: Lvl 60] Nobody else was on standby. Both other Sam's and Addy were already out and about.

"I'll take that one," I moped.

"Nothing to do but keep on keeping on, eh?"

"Weekend's over." She shrugged.

"Back to work."

"You and Becca had a good time?" That made her stutter, moderately flustered.

"I, er… workplace harassment! But, um, yeah, we had a nice time. Rented a boat, spent a day on lake Michigan trying out some of Becca's aquatic roboforms. She's gotten… very dextrous." I couldn't help but grin.

"If my friends are happy, I'm happy."

"So go out there, and spread some of that happiness. And while you're at it, catch up on the alien news." From somewhere in the office, Clem yelled.

"They're almost as hot as elves!"

"You think everything with two legs is hot!" I shot back.

"Nuh-uh. Only if they have, like, a hot face. And a toned body. And a nice, firm butt." I rolled my eyes, geared up, and dashed out. Just another day in the office. Hopefully, that normalcy would last for a while yet. Because I so wasn't ready to deal with a second earth-shattering catastrophe yet.