In the morning, Sara doesn’t bother hiding how pissed she is. It’s entirely fair, I think, since I don’t think it’s her job to accommodate my issues and we had made arrangements to do soul work after dinner. Amber disagrees, vehemently, saying that as one of my companions Sara has a duty to… well, to help me heal, and that it’s not my fault that I was left injured by those who should have cared for me better. It… escalates.

I sit out the argument. I eat a second breakfast, closing my mind to the world and drifting in remembered joys; Amber had kicked me out of bed because my stomach was growling, and given the look in her eye, I hadn’t wanted to keep her waiting and had eaten quickly and scantly. Vonne had been there, snickering audibly, teasing me about how much of a hurry I was in, and that had been nice in its own right, an extremely comfortable social moment.

She’s still there now, but she looks a whole lot less comfortable.

The fight dies down at some point, by the time I’d finished working my way through about a fifth of a kilo of eggy fried toast with its various fixings. Sara’s not looking particularly pissed and Amber’s not looking particularly hurt, so I pretend I hadn’t been there for it and we settle ourselves down to get started.

It takes a bit. Sara readily admits that she’s having trouble getting into the right mental space to, in her words, exist in that space without effect, and I pry a little about that. It turns out that when she’s got access to my soul, once I’m not really fighting her on it, just having the passing desire to make a change could result in that change happening, and she might not necessarily even notice, much less be able to reverse it. So I’m not the only one who needs to enter a meditative state, but hers is a needle of hyperfocus where she sees only the things she needs to and lets all of her desires and wishes fall away.

My own meditative state takes some doing, too. Sara tells me she has no idea what the difference is, that she can’t see what’s going on in my head without taking undue risk, which seems like the understatement of the gigasecond. We try a bunch of things, and eventually I’m lying with my head in Amber’s lap, eyes not sure if they want to close in relaxation at the way her fingers are working at my neck and shoulders or if they want to be open and drinking in the glorious fullness of her breasts, and then it clicks and I realize it should have been obvious all along.

The state where I can convolve the membrane and the wall and let Sara in is a state of vulnerability, and the easiest way into that state is a road that winds through my traumas and fears. Saying that aloud is, well, a lot harder than listening to the earlier argument, but the smirk on Amber’s face and the way she starts to sway side to side hypnotically is rapidly effective.

The arousal doesn’t so much as persist through Sara’s work as build steadily, now that I’ve figured out what’s going on in my head. It’s not that there’s nothing I can do while in the visualization state that she insists I stay in; it’s that in order to be able to truthfully attest that she’s not doing anything I haven’t asked her to do, as I swore to myself and the universe I would, I need to be paying attention to her, which means paying attention to how much I’m trusting her and to how vulnerable I am, and, well.

I’m at least able to work with her enough to get something interesting done. She’s pruning the dead connections, more or less, but not all of them are completely dead. There are those which, despite being rotted and infested by that damned ghost, still have some flicker of life left in them. Instead of just removing these and metaphorically—or possibly literally-but-metaphysically—lighting them on fire, she reattaches to the artifact earring that has become an almost invisible and natural extension of my Conjure Visor Skill. There’s a burst of something whenever a connection reforms, something which pegs every bit of my sensorium and likewise just throws measurement errors in my interface, and then there’s no more mostly-rotted tendril of connection.

Instead, the connection between the earring and the System strengthens. That much, I can definitely tell, despite the fact that the burst of what my brain chooses to interpret as light means there’s a discontinuity in my observations of anything outside of my own soul. There’s also a change in some of the working System connection strands, and I’ve got a hunch that it’s related to Conjure Visor itself and my ability to use it, but I’m not having much luck getting any sort of model of its behavior out of the Visor’s computational capacity. Instead, what I get looks a whole lot like some sort of equivalent to a kind of encryption at work; as close to pure noise as you can get in terms of trying to understand the individual components from the past changes to the whole, and a total inability to meaningfully make predictions about the future.

I keep at it anyway, since building a working model of this would be invaluable and not having that kind of model means we can’t afford to have me performing, well, self-surgery, which is something of a horrifying notion to consider and I shudder to remember that I had suggested it so recently. The difficulty is more like an impossibility, though, and it’s probably not even my being distracted by all of, well, everything; if my guess is right, I’m running into can this be computed limits, and engaging in any sort of hypercomputation is expensive. Every trick is once-only; I’m still regretting having written the Halting Oracle on an absolute lark, just to see if it would work, because of course it worked and then the capability was yanked away.

Well, at least I still got a Feat or whatever out of it. Oracular. Heh.

She winds down eventually. The metaphysical pipe she’s stuck through my soul’s membrane-and-wall shrinks gradually and becomes sort of pliable, and at some point I get the feeling that I could actually successfully shove it out, snap it off, whatever. I don’t; I wait as patiently as I can, distracting myself with analysis and recording of what my senses are being told by my lying… whatever is giving me this visualization.

Between everything that I’d been getting distracted by and that last moment of self-control and meditative passivity, I’m not particularly able to talk or move when my eyes snap open again. Amber, stars shine on her, takes only a moment to understand my predicament, and I go from lying with my head on her lap to being on our bed before I really process that she’s gathered me in her arms.

What follows gets my head back on right, or the next best thing to it, in very short order.

We’re not particularly late to lunch. Zidanya had gone off somewhere, something about meeting with an old friend, and she’s back only a bit before we’re done becoming presentable again. Vonne is cooking, audibly bickering with Sara about whether she’s allowed to, given that she’s supposedly a guest, and Vonne points out, as acerbic as I’ve ever heard her, that she likes cooking, unlike Sara, so maybe everyone should be happy rather than unhappy, end of discussion.

I end the discussion by flagrant abuse of my agency and authority: I kick them both out of the kitchen and make the salad. We had lettuces on the Spirit, they’re a great way to get a biosynthesis of certain vitamins, and I’m even familiar with at least a quarter of the other vegetables our home’s been stocked with. They give me the names of some others that go well, and, laughing as I brandish the cucumber and celery to keep them out of the kitchen that I by all that shatters kicked them out of, and I top it with tiny tomatoes and an oil-and-vinegar dressing.

They get cheese and grated black pepper; I go without, and I debone and chop the chicken into long strips to go on top of everyone’s, and we eat.

We do more soul-work in the afternoon, Sara feeling strongly about that being a higher priority than me figuring out what the changes are to the Earring or my Visor and everyone else being more on the fence about it. Well, Vonne isn’t; she points out that there’s no reason to not frontload all of the changes and then relearn it afterwards, and thinks it’ll be more efficient, so she’s strongly in agreement with Sara, but also insists that her vote shouldn’t count. She’s only an advisor, after all, which I laugh at and everyone else takes completely seriously.

Zidanya takes over for Amber—at my request, since I don’t want Amber to be stuck sitting there all day, however willing she might say she is—and finds it bizarrely more difficult, or maybe I’m having a harder time in general getting into that headspace. I wind up on the couch, curling around her under a sheet; left arm under her neck and right arm over her side, as much of my skin pressed up against hers as we can manage. I breathe the scent of her hair and find the stillness again, and worry about repeatability.

I’m not the only one worrying, I’m pretty sure. Sara moves faster, picking up speed as she goes. Pretty rapidly she’s barely waiting for the bursts of light to fade before moving on to the next strand; soon after that, she’s testing two, four, a dozen strands at a time and doing them in batches.

When she withdraws from my soul and my eyes open, it’s with the job completely done. The damage is done spreading, and anything that could be salvaged has been.