Book 3 Chapter 7
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  Eri Kouno picked up her school bag and tapped her shoes firmly onto her feet. "I'm leaving for school." Eri announced at the door.

  "Have a nice day." Mother replied distractedly, concentrating on her smart phone. "My, my, all our stocks went up again. How lucky."

  Eri smiled and went out the door. For the first time in her life, she knew the inside joke her Mother had been saying all these years. She felt like her parents had acknowledged her now, that she was one of the Moral Aristocracy, albeit an apprentice. Sure, their secret had only been revealed by accident, but her parents baring all their plans and explaining everything after that had been their own choice. It had been based on their trust in her. Ever since their family had won the lottery three years ago they had been living well without having to work. But now she knew why her parents had retired -- they had more important things to do, like hunt Corrupters -- and their family's luck was invincible when it came to financial security, so work was at best a hobby for them anyway. If there were any other hobby more worthwhile, why work? For social status? The problem is who wanted social status from Dead Enders when you'd already received the highest praise possible from immortal super-advanced future-wise wyrds? They had the status they cared about from the people who mattered -- their fellow Choice Givers in the Moral Aristocracy. Everyone else's opinion was invalid before they even opened their mouths anyway, so it really didn't matter what they thought. They were too stupid, ignorant or evil to consult about anything.

  There was only one girl whose opinions mattered to Eri now. Saki Sakai, who had also been acknowledged by the wyrds. She couldn't wait for lunch period so she could discuss the entire situation with her best friend. So much had changed since their disastrous birthday party, and all of it for the better. It was a wonderful time to be alive. Aliens had come down to Earth proffering supertechnology to a chosen few. It wouldn't be long now until the entire world changed forever. The whole past was going to be wiped away and replaced with a fresh New World. There was going to be a moral renaissance that would totally sweep away the cobwebs of dusty obsolete minds that had prevailed for the last two thousand years. Her parents were the leaders of the most powerful organization on Earth, and were making steady progress towards achieving their united dream. And she would inherit it all. Queen of the New World. That had a nice ring to it.

  “I suppose that makes me Princess of the New World right now.” Eri giggled happily.

  “Minus five points for delusions of grandeur.” Sapphire glowed a deep pure blue.

  “Ehhhh?” Eri blanched. “Come on Sapphire. It was just a joke. Look, I apologize. I’m sorry. Don’t take away five points!”

  “Minus five more points for apologizing without repenting for your sins in your heart.” Sapphire blinked again.

  “Oh fine. Take all my points. See if I care.” Eri hmphed. “Just remember Sapphire, no blinking, floating or talking at school. Stay in my bag and scry or something. Come to think of it, what do wyrds do to stay entertained?” Eri asked curiously.

  “We don’t get bored. We evolved away from worries like that when we became nigh-immortal. We can just patiently wait for the next event, whether it’s a week or a century from now.” Sapphire floated on to her shoulder to whisper privately into her ear as they walked.

  “Sounds so nice. Never having to be bored at all. Do wyrds get hungry?” Eri asked.

  “Yes, but we can eat via osmosis whenever we want by just sucking in the nearby magic out of the air. Magic is a right in the etheric plane, it’s everyone’s property equally, so we can never go hungry and everyone, even babies are competent enough to feed themselves.” Sapphire bragged.

  “So nice! What about waste elimination?” Eri asked.

  “We reradiate excess magic back into the atmosphere.” Sapphire said.

  “You wouldn’t believe what we have to do.” Eri complained. “Wyrds have it so good.”

  “That’s nothing. In the etheric plane, everything is better in every way.” Sapphire glowed happily, reminiscing. “Take the government. We don’t have elections or the right of primogeniture. We scry out promising candidates who display interest in the field and each senator takes on an apprentice to groom as their replacement. When a wyrd dies or retires, the apprentice becomes the next senator and the Parliament’s work carries on as normal. Soon enough they choose their own apprentice and train them to the job, in an endless cycle. We’ve had a peaceful transition of power for. . . a long time. While you were still knapping rocks and chewing hides, I suppose.”

  “We’ve had that system before too. In the Roman Empire, they would adopt a promising new leader as their son and heir, and their adopted son would serve as a sort of junior Caesar until the senior Caesar retired or died. Then the junior Caesar became senior Caesar and adopted a new ‘son.’” Eri retorted.

  “And how long did that last?” Sapphire asked, interested.

  “Five emperors. They were the five good emperors: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. Their golden age lasted almost a hundred years.” Eri reported proudly.

  “Oh, almost a hundred years?” Sapphire glowed with barely restrained laughter. “And what became of it?”

  “Marcus Aurelius broke the pattern by making his own son, Commodus, the next heir, who then spent his entire reign debasing the currency to fund extravagant parties and participating in gladiatorial combat in front of the entire Roman people for his own personal pleasure.” Eri sighed.

  “If Marcus Aurelius was so wise and good, and the four previous emperors had all chosen so well via adoption, including he himself who had benefited most from the system, why did he make his own biological son the next heir?” Sapphire asked in puzzlement.

  “Why indeed?” Eri held out her hands and shrugged, sending Sapphire floating. “I guess parents just can’t help it. They’re just too hard wired to do what they know is right and end up favoring their kids instead. We even have a word for it, nepotism. It’s just one more failing on top of all the others.”

  “Nepotism huh.” Sapphire blinked, pondering this ridiculous new quirk of human culture. “So like with you.”

  “What? No!” Eri blushed. “I earned my parents’ trust by being a bright and beautiful follower. Just like I’ll earn yours!”

  “Not at this rate.” Sapphire laughed. “Negative ten points within the first hour.”

  “You mean I started at zero? Boo.” Eri put her mouth into a perfect circle of discontent.

  “Where you start is arbitrary, the only thing that matters is where you end up.” Sapphire replied.

  “I know. But it still feels better in school when they let you start at 100 points.” Eri pouted.

  “Wyrds don’t have schools either. We’re given an information dump at age five or so and instantly know everything there is to know about the world. From there it’s just finding what you like to do and who you want to be.” Sapphire blinked, settling back onto her left shoulder.

  “Must be nice.” Eri sulked.

  “Oh, and we don’t have to work either. Since all goods are built automatically by machines and magic is so powerful we can accomplish any service we want almost instantly with our own power, we don’t have to rely on others by trading with them. Our only economy is hobbyists trading the products of their skills, like athletes and artists.” Sapphire pointed out.

  “Must be nice.” Eri sulked.

  “Plus the people you meet are much more beautiful. Everywhere I float all I see is the same thing, it’s like walking through open sewage. I’ve scryed so many Dead Enders I can’t even grasp how bad they are anymore. I didn’t know there could be this many Dead Enders in existence. In the etheric plane, people pay attention to their souls and take care of them. They don’t just let everything go and become public eyesores.” Sapphire lectured.

  “But we can’t see the ugliness in each other’s hearts.” Eri answered quietly. “Not even the ugliness in our own.”

  “Plus two points for a good line.” Sapphire glowed.

  “Ehhhhh? I lose five points for a joke but only get two points when I'm wise?” Eri whined.

  “Minus five points for questioning the referee.” Sapphire glowed.

  “So I lose three points overall????!!” Eri cried out in amazed anguish. Negative thirteen before school started? How could she ever form a contract with Sapphire?

* * *

  When Saki arrived in class, Eri was already seated in the desk next to her, writing into her notebook with a look of intense concentration. Saki didn't know how to approach Eri now that she was a magical girl. Should she try to keep everything secret? Even though Eri saw it all with her own eyes? That was absurd. There was only one solution. Just act normally. Normal was fine.

  "Studying for the test?" Saki leaned over Eri's shoulder to get a view, placing her bag on the hook to the side of her desk.

  "Good morning Saki." Eri paused, looking up to see Saki's face who was looking down over her.

  "Good morning Eri." Saki replied, smiling warmly. She sat down in her chair but kept both her legs on one side pointed towards Eri so they could keep eye contact.

  "I arrived really early today. I was too excited." Eri laughed.

  "I suppose you have a lot of questions." Saki nerved herself up for the gauntlet.

  "I do?" Eri asked, confused. She tilted her head to the side, bouncing her giant red ribbon that added an extra half foot to her height.

  "It must have been quite a shock, seeing me in full plate." Saki commiserated.

  Eri laughed. "That's true. It was all black except for your wyrd! And spikes? Why spikes?"

  "To be more menacing. . ." Saki blushed.

  "Isn't it heavy?" Eri asked. "My armor's going to be super light. I already know what it will be."

  "I imagined my armor and weapon to be weightless for me. The hammer's only heavy to the people I hit." Saki explained. Then she did a double take. "Wait! You know everything already!"

  "Of course! My parents couldn't keep it from me once it all blew up in our faces. Listen, Saki," Eri held out her arm in a straight line and stabbed her finger towards Saki's face, "I admit the Sakai line is special. You have three wyrd contracted sisters after all. But the Kouno family is even more special than you are. We have three wyrds too, and I'm going to overtake you in no time, mark my words."

  "So in the end this is a competition too?" Saki asked, bemused.

  "Kounos or Sakais, whichever of us becomes the better magical girl will decide our family's honor. It's all tied up except for us!" Eri repeated passionately.

  "It's nothing that great," Saki tried to clear up the misunderstanding. "I didn't actually earn the right to bond with Capri. It was just an emergency so we ignored the rules this one time, and even then I was no use at all. I'm sure Capri regrets it now, but it can't be helped, we're bound together for life."

  "I don't regret it." Capri blinked a light blue from Saki's school bag. "When I scry you -- "

  "Ora!" Saki hissed in a panicked whisper, hastily squeezing her bag shut. "Not in class, Capri! I knew you shouldn't have come!" Wyrds always accompanied their masters so that they could transform at a moment's notice and alert their masters of incoming danger. Capri had even moved into Saki's room and abandoned her human body just to protect Saki. To Saki it sounded like an enormous and unwarranted sacrifice, but Capri assured her that small things like this didn't matter and she'd be a teenage girl for centuries to come anyway. It always boggled Saki's mind to realize what it meant to live so long. Capri's entire lifetime contract with Saki would just be a tiny sliver of Capri's life, like a human going out to watch a baseball game or visiting a museum over a weekend. But Saki's lifetime contract with Capri would be one of the most important relationships in her life, dominating everything she ever experienced from here on. The two versions of the same event were just too far apart to grasp.

  Saki's train of thought was interrupted by the teacher's arrival.

  "Stand! Bow! Take your seats!" The class representative called out in a clear formal voice.

  "I'm taking attendance." The teacher started her normal routine.

  "Ando?" Their teacher began.

  "Here." Ando replied.

  Saki couldn't help it and leaned over to whisper with Eri again. "But why do you have a wyrd? When did this happen? Don't tell me you've been a Choice Giver all along?"

  "I'll tell you during lunch." Eri leaned towards Saki conspiratorially. "I have so much I want to talk about!"

  "Kouno?" The teacher reached Eri's last name.

  "Here." Eri raised her arm politely.

  "I hear you two were caught up in the chaos at the amusement park. I trust you're all right?" The teacher asked. The rest of the class turned in a buzz of excitement to learn about what happened.

  "Those dastardly hackers. Blowing up a Ferris Wheel and creating the illusion of a dragon in the sky." Eri laughed nervously, putting her hand behind her head. Saki died a little inside. Eri, you're the worst liar ever!

  "We ran away with everyone else right when it started, teacher." Saki quickly rushed to her rescue.

  "Good. I wish these hackers would leave Inazumu alone. This is just like that publicity stunt where they stuck a bunch of girls on wires in a box and then had them 'fly' away after a crowd had gathered." The teacher sighed. "You'd think they'd have more interest in Tokyo or Osaka than our sleepy little city. . .But nevermind that right now. Back to attendance. Machida?"

  "Here." One of the prettiest girls in the upper right corner lifted her hand. Class was about memorizing a new set of kanji and learning how to draw them right. The girls in class were much better at it than the boys, so the lesson was pretty quiet and relaxing. All you had to do was keep the spacing and stroke order in mind and you could recreate the same figure over and over perfectly. After that the teacher had the class read together from a book of classical Japanese literature. It had a lot of tough kanji Saki had to concentrate on to bring up the word from her memory, and a lot of her classmates would stumble and stutter halfway through their called upon paragraph. Listening to the slow and broken message about dogs and boats and how they related to the sky and death, Saki wondered why anything old was automatically a 'classic' and wished she could read Aiko's book to class. She could show them what a real writer was like, who wrote about stuff that actually mattered in a way that was actually fun. These people had no idea what true classics passed them by every day for lack of recognition or fame. People a million times as talented as Shakespeare or Beethoven who just never got attention or ran out of funding, people who should have made it big if everyone weren't too busy buying and reading 'classics' to try out anything new. Revering the same old people forever and ever no matter how obviously boring and dumb their works really were. It was so like Dead Enders.

  After that, they had a period covering math. It was simple arithmetic, something adults relied on calculators to do at all times, but children had to learn by hand and do in their heads. It made no sense. Even if people could do arithmetic, they'd inevitably make a mistake if they did it by hand. Sooner or later their concentration would lapse and they'd add two numbers wrong, and then the whole job would have to be redone from the start, because they wouldn't know where they had made their error. No business would ever rely on hand-done calculations, even mathematicians couldn't add and subtract as reliably as machines, so what was the point? Saki grumbled in her head the whole way through her exercise in long division. The only reason school was set up the way it was, Saki thought, was because the people who ran it never had to experience it. There was a complete disconnect between the policymakers and their policy's consequences. How could society be so stupid? It would be like making a snack company where none of the workers ever ate their own snacks to see if they were good, or a car company where none of their employees test drove their own cars. How could you design any good product like that, completely blind, with no practical experience at all? The minister of education should be a child. A smart child who was actually suffering the consequences of her own decisions. Then everything would change overnight.

  Then the bell rang and the morning session was finally over. There was a gasp of relief and groups of children started grouping up and chatting for the most fun part of the day. To save time, lunches were served in the classroom, and students were selected by a schedule to serve out the meals to everyone else. Today was Saki's turn. As she carefully balanced serving trays with bread, milk and tempura vegetables with tempura shrimp, her classmates interrogated her.

  "Did you really see a dragon?" Ando asked.

  "Yes, but it was just a projection. There's no way dragons could really exist. I mean, the police didn't find one when they arrived, right?" Saki lied.

  "Were you scared?" Uemeda asked.

  "Terrified." Saki told the truth.

  "Your face is bruised. Are you really okay?" Takahashi, the quiet girl who sat behind her asked concernedly.

  "For that matter Eri has a cut on her shin!" Uemeda followed up.

  "Could it be you both really were attacked by a dragon?" The class gathered up excitedly.

  "Eh-he-he. Here's your tempura shrimp." Saki waved her tray-carrying arms to get their attention. She had worried all weekend about what to tell Eri. She hadn't even thought about what she'd tell the rest of the class.

  "Actually, I was the one who gave Saki that bruise." Eri intervened. "We went into a haunted house, and I got scared, so I ran and tripped over a well. Then I punched Saki because I thought she was a ghost when she tried to help me up."

  "What? Is that all?" Uemeda sighed, completely let down. The class laughed and the danger passed, to Saki's great relief.

  "But why were you two at the amusement park?" Machida asked curiously.

  "It was my birthday this Friday. I invited Eri." Saki bragged happily.

  "Oh, really? You should've said something!" Machida clapped her hands together.

  "It's nothing special. Everyone's born on some day." Saki kept passing out her platters of food.

  "Everyone, let's wish Sakai a happy birthday." Machida stood up and addressed the crowd. "To make up for her busted party, even if it is three days late."

  "You don't have to do that." Saki blushed furiously.

  But the class ignored her protests and shouted together, “Congratulations on your birthday, Sakai!" Then there was a round of applause that followed after. Even the teacher smiled and clapped a few times for her.

  "Thanks everyone." Saki bowed. "Congratulations to all of you when you're born too. I mean --"

  The crowd laughed, and one of the boys slapped her on the back in what she thought was a compliment. Boys never made much sense in what they did and why.

  "Sorry everyone, but Saki's mine." Eri grabbed her wrist.

  "Oooohhhh!" The boys whistled.

  "Mooh. It's not like that!" Saki complained even as she was dragged away. Boys! Again!

  "Listen, you can't make friends with them. They're just Dead Enders." Eri whispered hotly when they sat down back at their pushed together desks with their own food.

  "I wasn't particularly. . ." Saki objected.

  "Promise you won't leave me. You're the only one I can talk to." Eri pleaded.

  "Of course I promise." Saki replied concernedly.

  "Okay then." Eri relaxed, the tension leaving her face. "We have around thirty minutes left of lunch period. Where do we start?"

  "Itadakimasu." Saki put her hands together politely, splitting her chopsticks. It seemed like a sensible place to start their lunch, all in all.

  "Itadakimasu." Eri repeated after her, taking her first bite of fried green beans. "So good. Japanese cooking really is the best."

  "Isn't it?" Saki agreed happily, digging in herself. "Where do we start, hmm? How about, what were you writing before class?"

  "Oh, I forgot about that. It's homework my mother assigned me. I have to brainstorm up all the existential threats to mankind, the ones worth using force to stop. You know, right, what being a Dead Ender means?" Eri asked.

  "Someone whose choices, if copied by the whole world, would lead to stagnation or extinction." Saki repeated verbatim from Aiko's lesson over the weekend.

  "Right. So the question is, what makes someone a Dead Ender? The wyrds can't tell us why in particular someone's choices are dooming the world. It's up to us to find out the underlying problems. Like, take theoretically some smoking guy. He's a Dead Ender, Capri can tell you that." Eri suggested.

  Saki nodded, following the example.

  "But does that mean the world is doomed to stagnation or extinction if everybody smoked?" Eri asked pointedly.

  "That can't be right. Sure, smoking leads people to early deaths, and it smells, but lots of good people have smoked for centuries, sometimes even the majority of the country. No matter how dumb it is, smoking shouldn't destroy the world." Saki said.

  "Right. That's the thing. Smoking isn't what makes him a Dead Ender, because there's nothing innate to smoking that would deter our human potential. Therefore, it wouldn't be right to ban smoking in the name of Choice Giving. To be good rulers, we need to make sure we are only forbidding the true crimes of Dead Enders, not neutral side issues. I could think of a lot of things worth banning -- loud music -- polka dots -- using the word 'baby' in any context -- but that wouldn't be benevolent of me. I have to be careful when I classify things or I'll turn evil." Eri explained.

  "Classify things?" Saki asked.

  "It's like Islam. Islam had the right idea, only the religion's all lies so of course it went wrong. But morality definitely consists of three things: The obligatory, the forbidden, and 'everything else.' The question is what are those things? It's so vital that we get them just right, because if you leave something that's obligatory out, the world stagnates or goes extinct. If you leave something that's forbidden out, the world stagnates or goes extinct. But if you forbid things that are actually okay, or make people do things that are actually bad, your society will be miserable, and rebellious besides. It's a knife edge! It's got to be the toughest question on Earth." Eri explained.

  "I see your point on the forbidden stuff. We wouldn't last long if murder and theft were okay." Saki took a gulp of milk. "But is anything really obligatory?"

  "It's an if-then statement. Nothing's obligatory or forbidden in abstract, but if we want a world that doesn't flatline, then we need to set certain moral laws, both obligatory laws and forbidden laws. I don't want the world to flatline, so it's morally obligatory, it's just logic, to decide from there that it's okay to force people onto the right track. Here's an easy example. Is childbirth obligatory or optional?" Eri asked Saki.

  "Optional?" Saki replied timorously.

  "Nope. It's obligatory. Take the Dead Ender from before, Mr. Smoker. Suppose he's also a determined believer in abstinence for life. If the whole world copied his choice --" Eri started.

  "Then humanity goes extinct." Saki realized.

  "That's when we've got him. He can smoke or not if he wants, but deciding to stay abstinent is unforgivable. As Choice Givers, we can't just look away from a decision like that." Eri said.

  "But it's more complicated than that." Saki countered. "What if he has some sort of system of choices where depending on the circumstances he'd change his behavior? Then if everyone copied him, they wouldn't all necessarily stay abstinent."

  "Right. If wyrds couldn't keep track of that, their scrying wouldn't be worth much. I mean, you come from a family of three, and I'm an only child. If everyone copied your family, the world would become a black hole from the sheer mass of people in time. If they copied mine, eventually there would only be one person left on Earth and he wouldn't be able to find a mate, so 'The End'. On the surface, it looks like both our families should be Dead Enders." Eri explained.

  "So why aren't we?" Saki asked, happily following.

  "Because of situational thinking. My parents only had one child, but that's because they are living in Japan, one of the most crowded countries on Earth, in a world of seven billion people and rising. There's no emergency when it comes to needing more children right now. Likewise, your parents wouldn't have had three kids every single generation, not stopping even if the world had a trillion people milling about in an ant-like mass on the surface. They'd stop at some reasonable point before it became that overcrowded. Wyrds realize people's choices are underpinned by even deeper meta-choices, and keep track of why we make our choice before they judge. So both our families get a pass, because they know at heart we'd adjust to circumstances appropriately and not just blindly repeat the same patterns everywhere." Eri said.

  "So childbirth is obligatory, but only under certain circumstances." Saki said.

  "Right. And those circumstances are always the same -- when the world would stagnate or go extinct otherwise. It doesn't apply if the person would change his behavior if the population started rapidly shrinking. Basically we need to view everything backwards. There's only one 'obligatory' in our moral law, saving the world from a flat line. Everything else is just a logical extension of that main point. So whatever saves the world from a flat line is obligatory, whether people like it or not, because their feelings don't matter as much as our survival. For instance, global warmers could argue that whether people want cheap energy or not, it's obligatory that we all stop polluting the atmosphere because we're all going to die otherwise. They don't have to care about people's rights. The crisis is just too severe to give a. . .well. . .a mouse. . .about it." Eri stumbled over her sentence.

  "Maybe that's it. The whole world is full of Dead Enders because we're ignoring global warming?" Saki asked hopefully, quickly covering for Eri's close brush with imperfection.

  "Are the Choice Givers you know eco-freaks?" Eri asked.

  "No. They don't mention it at all." Saki looked down in disappointment.

  "Same here." Eri said. "If global warming really were going to destroy the world, that would have ruled out my parents, who burn fossil fuels quite happily and without a pang of conscience about it. Maybe it'll flood the coasts or something, but wyrds don't care about nonsense like that. They care about existential threats. We're Dead Enders for something else. But what?" Eri asked.

  "This is really hard. If we knew what really was threatening humanity's future, we could just ban it, or make people do the opposite, and save the whole world in an instant." Saki blinked. "But it's nothing obvious at first glance. I mean, I could see a suicidal person's reason for being a Dead Ender. Or even a drug addict's. But what about everyone else?"

  "Both of those examples are no good either. What if the suicidal person wouldn't commit suicide except for his exceptionally rare circumstances that he was involved in beforehand? If everyone emulated or followed his decisions, most would never come across those circumstances, and so they wouldn't commit suicide either. What if the drug user is only taking drugs because of something that impelled him down that road, and ordinarily he would've lived very differently? If everyone emulated or followed his choices, that doesn't mean they'd ever come across his circumstances, so the results would still be different. Even suicidal people aren't necessarily the problem. So what is? What's imperiling our world?" Eri repeated. "That's my homework."

  "I'll think about it." Saki promised, not having a ready answer. It really was a difficult question. "Now tell me about your wyrd. Since when did you get a wyrd?"

  "Yesterday." Eri grinned proudly. "His name is Sapphire. He isn't a child like yours, he's a real expert who was sent down to bond with my father."

  "If he was sent down to bond with your father. . ." Saki started.

  "Then why do I have him?" Eri finished the question. "A fair question, but the answer is actually quite simple. It was all due to hyperdimensional travel."

  "In Japanese?" Saki asked hopefully.

  "The etheric plane hadn't originally planned to fold Tangerine down to bond with father. Their first choice was Sapphire. But after he folded, he didn't appear on the other side. After a week of this they agreed something must have gone wrong and it wouldn't do to leave Father unprotected. You see, Corrupters are always targeting Choice Givers, they can scry their bright lights from anywhere on Earth, and Choice Givers are helpless without magic to protect themselves."

  "Corrupters? You mean dark wyrds?" Saki asked.

  "Dark wyrds?" Eri laughed. "That's such a great name. But yes, by Corrupters I mean dark wyrds."

  "Sorry I interrupted." Saki blushed. So dark wyrds sounded a little childish. It's not like she'd made up the term.

  "Okay, so Sapphire had disappeared, and Father was in grave danger. That's when Tangerine volunteered to come down next and try the bond again. He folded down like a charm and ended up being Father's partner for life. But then, a year later, Sapphire appeared, having felt no gap in time at all since he jumped into the folding device. You see, the folding device doesn't just fold space, it folds time too. It has to, because our planes aren't on the same timeline. It's all very complicated, but space and time are really one unified substance and its impossible to act on one without acting on the other. So Sapphire popped out, all ready to form a contract with Father, and there was Tangerine who had already cut in line in front of him. There weren't any other spare Choice Givers lying around either, so Father asked if Sapphire would like to stay in their closet and wait. He's been living with us ever since. Like everything else, I was kept completely out of the loop. But this weekend when they told me everything, they asked if Sapphire could bend the rules a bit, since their daughter was being targeted for assassination, and form a contract with me. It seems I'm not the only one either. All across the world really good people are being killed because the Corrupters hate them, but the government doesn't recognize them as worth saving. Just because we're only followers and emulators, we're being abandoned to the Corrupters' mercy." Eri continued.

  "That doesn't seem fair." Saki opined.

  "I know, right?" Eri said. "But Sapphire is totally stubborn. All he would say is he'd 'consider' it. He wouldn't have even done that except he can't get in touch with the government above so he has to improvise based on changing circumstances observed on the ground based on what he thinks they would tell him to do if they could. So starting this morning he's been testing me, seeing whether I deserve a wyrd's lifelong loyalty and power. And he won't say when the test ends either. I have to be nice to him until he agrees. It's like Santa's on a vigil watching at all times whether I've been naughty or nice."

  "But that's better than nothing right? I mean, think about it. You must be the only emulator on Earth a wyrd would even consider bonding with." Saki said hopefully.

  "The only?" Eri arched an eyebrow.

  "Like I said, it was an emergency! I didn't pass a test or anything!" Saki deflected the undeserved praise once again.

  "The first emulator ever chosen by a wyrd was you, Saki." Eri corrected Saki cheerfully. "But I'll be the first follower ever chosen by a wyrd. I trust my parents, and that's enough for me. We won't lose to you. Kounos to Sakais, or Followers to Emulators. I'll pass Sapphire's test in no time, and then we can go on adventures together."

  "I wonder if they'll let us?" Saki asked excitedly.

  "While we're still in elementary school? I'm guessing no." Eri smiled. "But we're going to be friends past elementary school, right?"

  "Right." Saki nodded vehemently. That, at least, would always stay the same.

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