-Mita Orono-

It’s been a week since the whole Vraglix basher affair ended: all the loot had been compiled and stored or turned into cash and mana crystals. Now it finally time for a proper reopening gala for the Old Fashioned that doubled up as a celebration for the fact one of our side projects was coming to fruition: the wellbeing and vitality improving sub-features for the sweet tooths. We managed prep eight of them and were giving them to four new sweet tooths to test their efficiency: one of the locals who was going to take a gap term to study magic in Witch Synthia, Wes Chaput; the cousin of one of the Glyirian sweet tooths, Loria Von Pella; the masked procyon of a spellman, Jean Tevera; and finally a fellow Penobscot that was going to help me and the Glyirian government with the future expansion to reclaim tribal lands back on Griffin-13, John Bear Loring. It would have been nice to not have spent so much after we just got a small windfall… but between the four new sweet tooths, the eight sub-feature mandala inscriptions plus continued research, the pair of phylacteries for Sous and Umi cause their shared one is still broken and proving difficult to rebuild, and continued cost of recharging the dungeon core restoring Aux cores and charging the autonomous blackzone generating ones and waiting for them to work… Well we were basically back where we started. 

Would have been nice if they left some extra for me, I internally sighed as I watched the others party from where I was sitting at the bar. With all the book keeping I was doing, I didn’t have time to raise my tier like the others or get the good graces with powerful figures like Reagan Road or Johari Vogt, leaving me at tier 2.7 while almost everyone else was racing through tier 3 and even tier 4 now. Scanning over the crowd, it didn’t take too long for me to find Robert, wheelchair-bound and controlling his body via a mixture of Liquid Sugar Cowl and Candyman. Even if his now-permanent hexes of sentience, he was making things work. And of course standing behind him and his cake-eye-balls was the pair of raid monster and legendary entity, Harper and Alexander.

“Who would have thought they would shack up,” commented Margaret, sitting down next to me and looking at the pair of sentients. “I have to say, they do make a cute couple.”

“Yeah but now Robert is getting sentimental and gushy, he is thinking about trying to make them magi-sentients, or at least partial-magi-sentients… And knowing those two, they’ll probably say yes,” I replied with a furrowed brow: I didn’t hang around Harper or Alexander a lot but anyone who lived Historie Pastoria Sweets would have heard rumours about their dating over the past few months, and the confession of love on Blazehopper’s VoxView stream was the final nail in the coffin. Hopefully we could do a small enough ascension event that we wouldn’t have to deal with more Vraglix bashers trying to party crash or strained coffers, we still had loans to fully pay off.

“I don’t think that is a bad thing.”

“It isn’t… I know it is. It’s just the Enigma has gone through a lot, and I’d like some stability, pretty sure your cousin would too.”

“And not deal with weird magic for once?”

“Yeah… I mean… whatever Clockwork Witchwork did felt… wrong.”

“I know, feeling my options get stripped away like that was crazy, and not in the good way,” commented Margaret with a shudder before pausing and asking, “You think Reagan and Johari know anything about what those Glory Daze members used?” With that, she motioned over to the pair of legendary tier mages who were talking with a handful of Glyirian officials and people I could only assume were a part of Netro Road’s upper echelons.

“I guess I can always check. You want to come along? You dealt with that magic also.”

“No way, you know them, not me.”

“Fine, I’ll just tell you what they say later,” I replied, getting up and looking for the best way to get to them and ask them about the weird magic I experienced. Let’s hope info-karmic retribution doesn’t get in the way.

It honestly looked way longer than I wanted to get the two attention, even longer for Reagan and Johari to peel away from the groups they were talking to listen to my questions. Listing out my weird encounter with the future-shaving magic of Clockwork Witchwork along with all the other accounts of unnatural self-destructive magics that I picked up while compiling our loot, I watched as the faces of both the scions of Starport Cyber grew darker and darker. Glancing over his shoulder for a second before looking back at me, Reagan asked,

“Is this a more private place for us to speak?”

“We could go to another resort, or the main tower, that’s closer.”

“Take us to the main tower.”

“Okay, follow me,” I replied, tense with how stern they were.

“Clearly whatever they are about to say is rather grave,” noted Wlogwa from the back of my head: I could feel Ulra nod in agreement from her personal space.

“No kidding,” I telepathically replied as I led the two to the core room of Old Fashioned New Imports. The second we entered the room, Johari went to casted some sort of complex spellcraft, creating an invisible barrier around us: I could feel the presence of ambient mana shift, seemingly stripped of the presence or at least the influence of the wills of the metaverse. Felt weird, especially since I could weirdly pinpoint why it felt weird.

“So the heretical magics are about to rear their ugly heads,” commented the young scion, tapping the flowers on his chest in weird contemplation.

“We all knew the dam would only exist for so long. It seems its time is drawing near,” cryptically followed up Reagan.

“Heretical magics? Dam? What the two are you talking about? And why the weird barrier?” I asked the two, already starting to regret that decision.

“It’s hard to explain to someone like you. You haven’t been in the hubs or lesser worlds of the hidden and upper universe groups, and you haven’t been around artificial world clusters to have the chance to learn… there are more wills than the fifteen wills of the metaverse.”

“You’re kidding right? More wills?”

“Nope, not at all. The ten heretical wills, the only reason why people don’t know about them is cause the other wills made it like that. Made a sort of magical preterphysical dam that made it so people died when they used those wills unless you use only a tiny bit at a time or did it in a clean environment like this barrier,” explained Johari before continuing, “No one really knows how long that dam has been around, except way longer than one of us. But we do know it is about to fail with the recent reports.”

“Indeed, from the current look of things the dam will only last a few more months, at best. The Aligning was the final nail in its coffin and now everything is coming to fruition,” followed up Reagan, pausing and letting his gear literally turn. “Perhaps that is the reason why Robert Fayn was chosen by the wills.” 

“Wait, wait, wait, Robert was chosen by the wills? Like the wills of the metaverse?” I half-questioned half-shouted in shock. I mean I know he had a quest given to him by some gods and became a blackzone manager in a weird magical kidnapping-slash-indoctrination: but chosen by the wills of the metaverse themselves?!”

“Well, a single will, magos from the looks of it. Like how Reagan here is chosen by cosmic and I’m chosen by cusp. Might be awhile before he gets any mandalas to reflect that. But it’s why he already is so many types of pinnacles of mages,” confirmed Johari with a simple nod. “And with the dam breaking and what is probably going to be a Re-Aligning, I wouldn’t be surprised if magos turns him into an anti-heretical mage or something.” Re-Aligning? Anti-heretical mage? Just how much weird manalogical stuff was going on that we didn’t know about? Seeing that my mind was racing a mile a minute, the flower-adorned scion patted me on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, everything should be fine. We think. But you should probably get an eye on Robert and get ready for everything to change.”

“I... well I would already keep an eye out on Robert anyway. And fuck, I guess I’ll just try to get ready for these, what heretical wills?” I told the two, struggling to get everything in order in my head: the amount of twists and turns getting thrown at me were starting to get a bit much even for me, and I’ve seen some crazy stuff during my time as a member of the Harbingers of the Black Skies.

Reagan and Johari didn’t say anything in return, just giving me knowing looks that I was pretty sure were partially in sympathy. It was obvious that the two of them weren’t exactly ready for this dam to break either, and they were legendary mages with the knowledge to prepare. And that was scary to think about: the metaverse was about to be changed for good and I was standing before two legendary mages who potentially couldn’t even get 100% ready for it… and I had to keep Robert and Historie Pastoria Sweets safe through all of it. My tiny pond was going to get tossed into the wide ocean: it was going to be sink or swim time when that dam broke. And I knew everyone who lived in the Enigma didn’t want to drown cause of it, because I sure as hell didn’t. No way I’m going to stay tier 2.7 now. I need to get stronger. I need to get ready.