On the first day it snowed, Bliss gathered us in the living room. The three of us sat on the couch with Bliss looking us over nervously.

“So.” She paused for a long time. “Dr. Dura is going to come over.”

“Isn’t that the scientist who abandoned you?” Anise asked.

“She had to protect herself. She’s more important than I am.”

“You always talk about how much she hurt you,” Anise pressed.

“Because I’d thought she’d abandoned me completely like all the others. There’s a difference between being expendable and being disposable, you know. After I got out of prison and she didn’t find me, I thought I was disposable, but it turns out she was just waiting for Normalcy to take their eye off me.”

It made sense to me. If my Queen came back to me with a similarly satisfying explanation, I wouldn’t hesitate to return to the Regency Monitor.

Anise, however, was less convinced. “But she’s just going to draw you into another plot that will get you on Normalcy’s bad side and we’ll all end up in trouble.”

Bliss shook her head. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep you all out of it unless you want to be involved. As for Normalcy, well, the mistake everyone I’ve worked with in the past has made was trying to change the world under Normalcy’s nose. Dr. Dura and I are going to strike Normalcy directly.”

Celeste rolled her eyes and snorted. “How are you going to do that? You don’t even know what they’re capable of.”

Bliss grinned. “By finding a way to outclass them. The Hidden World gives us access to so many resources that are so diverse that we’re only limited by our imagination. Dr. Dura explained everything. She said she read a novel where the main character control water. At first he would just take water from a bottle or something and make it dance or float in the air, but as he ran into dangerous situations he started to realize what else it could do. He could force it into someone’s lungs and drown them, he could turn a droplet into a needle that could pierce someone’s heart. Eventually he started pulling water directly from his enemy’s bodies, instantly turning them into mummified corpses. You see? An ability that simple was capable of so much. With all of the magic and impossible tech that make up the Hidden World, we just have to imagine what we want to do, and then work backwards from there. There’s something that can make it happen.”

“That’s probably how Normalcy operates,” I said.

“Exactly,” Bliss replied passionately. “And we don’t even have to be smarter than them. The universe tends towards chaos. They have to think of every possible scenario they could face and set up defenses for each one. All we have to do is find one weak point and we can destroy them in an instant. Remember, Normalcy is indescribably large, but they aren’t infinite. We’ll take away everything that restricts the denizens of the Hidden World and make the Hidden World’s wonders available to those it’s kept secret from.”

I liked the idea. It seemed unfair that most people were kept away from the Hidden World. Someone like Celeste, who wanted it desperately may have found it several times and had her memory erased. I didn’t understand why it was so important to keep it hidden and if Bliss wanted to take on the risk of trying to expose it, I saw no reason to try to stop her.

“Look, this is your house,” said Anise grimly. “I’m not going to try to stop you from bringing over who you want. But you’re only going to hurt yourself by doing this.”