Yutten Turse, Olz Hap, and Salome Einstein in the style of Egon Schiele, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Chapter 28: Thunder perfect mind

  Special Circumstances headquarters, Mikla metropolitan area, Confluence dimension

  Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (local time)

  While the agents were busy studying alien magics while avoiding attention from vampire shadows, the Erd author had a weeklong holiday from work and wrote a chapter or two every day. All the chapters, starting at 14 and going all the way up to 19, were about the Special Circumstances section – the board and the team of agents they recruited to deal with, well, whatever this weird situation was. While it was generally disorienting to read about yourself as a character in a book, the SC board was getting used to all that, and the only delicate issue being described was Sophie’s visions in the Chamber of Memories and her subsequent reflections on these visions. The intervals U, T, and S for their part proceeded in the expected direction.

  Salome Einstein: Well, girls, we have things to discuss.

  Olz Hap: Sophie might not like her innermost thoughts and feelings being exposed in this way, no?

  Salome Einstein: A part of me thinks we should tell her. Another part is against messing with her mind while she is in the realm of vampire shadows.

  Yutten Turse: Would be nice to give her a head start on this, yes, but I’d say it’s not possible under the circumstances. Anyway, the fact that this personal thing of hers is emphasized probably means it will play some sort of role in future chapters, right?

  Salome Einstein: Right. The most obvious implication being that she has lived many lives in the Erd simulation – can this get even more strange or have we reached some sort of limit now?

  Yutten Turse: It could go in other directions, some of them unpleasant, but that’s the most obvious interpretation, yes. Do we think she took advantage of Bob’s access to Erd?

  Olz Hap: I think things will get even stranger. And Sophie is a very capable lady, but let’s just see what happens.

  Salome Einstein: Right. Anyway, our band of heroes seems to be doing fine against the Erd shadows. Are we surprised?

  Olz Hap: No.

  Yutten Turse: No. But it’s not a given that they will learn much from the alien magic. Should we be worried that there is a risk of some sort of infection?

  Olz Hap: Happy thought. I feel like Sparking up for this. [Brief pause.] That’s better. So, obviously, we’re not capable of doing anything like that. Or are we?

  Salome Einstein: The shadows are some sort of magical creation. We would be capable of attaching magics to other magics so that the former activate when the latter are probed. But they would be automated routines.

  Yutten Turse: Mm, I love feeling the Spark texture. If we tried to attach some sort of infection to one of our magics, it would be a weak attack. And its obfuscation would be weak. We would not be a great threat to someone like us.

  Olz Hap: Right. That’s how magic works for us. If Alice and Bob are equally strong, then an active and personal attack by Alice on Bob is a substantial threat to Bob. But if Alice sets up some sort of automated attack flow to target Bob while she is away, not getting personally engaged, then this is a threat to Bob only to the extent that he is very careless.

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  Salome Einstein: What Alice could do is to set up something to alert her about Bob’s activities, then jump in to attack him personally. But even this scenario assumes considerable carelessness on Bob’s part, because he should be capable of dealing with automated alerts and obfuscations set up by Alice.

  Yutten Turse: Also, our automatons are not very good at jumping across dimensions. But there is no guarantee that aliens and demons are equally incapable.

  Olz Hap: At our level of sophistication, then, the worst scenario is either that an automated attack is able to exploit a serious mistake on our agents’ part – let’s consider that unlikely – or that an automated alert will be able to report back to the Diankoran dimension, conceivably drawing in a direct attack.

  Salome Einstein: But the second option is also rather unlikely, because looking for automatons when you are probing the magics of a presumed hostile caster is standard procedure in the Confluence. Not least among investigators, I’d say.

  Yutten Turse: Yes. Which means that, at our level of magical sophistication, only incompetence will expose our agents to real trouble, and they have proven themselves competent numerous times.

  Olz Hap: And that leaves only the option that the Diankoran people are substantially beyond our level of sophistication. But that seems implausible, because the Mori Parce person in Chapter 7 said we have already defeated them once.

  Salome Einstein: Precisely. Also, assuming their alliance with Soth is meaningful to them – that Soth has contributed something to their capacity – they cannot be that far beyond him. And our agents defeated him essentially on their own.

  Yutten Turse: Don’t you just love it when the conclusion to something is that you basically don’t have to worry about it? But it was a good exercise, and I commend us all for taking our roles as the Guardians of our Civilization very seriously. Good work, everybody!

  Olz Hap: I guess we’re not too bad. But I was almost worried there for a while. Shouldn’t we have considered these possibilities before we sent our agents shadow-hunting?

  Yutten Turse: I think our brains already worked their way through this and concluded there was no significant risk, but it’s always good to make it explicit.

  Salome Einstein: Right. I’m sure it will come as a great surprise to everybody that Yutten wants more explicit material.

  Yutten Turse: Hey! I wouldn’t mind, actually. But I think the real sneaky reason I got us involved in all this was to get an excuse to Spark up. Explain to me why we are not on Spark all the time.

  Olz Hap: There are two reasons why we are not Spark sluts, or other enhancement sluts for that matter. I think you already know them.

  Yutten Turse: Let’s go through it anyway. Maybe this will go into a future chapter and we’ll look really based, you know.

  Olz Hap: Well, the first reason is that enhancements lose their sparkle when you overdo them, so if you want to benefit from them you need to be a little bit careful.

  Yutten Turse: Yeah, that’s what the scaremongers are always saying, isn’t it?

  Salome Einstein: And the second reason is that if you spend too much of your time being on some enhancement, you lose the perspective of the non-enhanced mind, which may be important.

  Yutten Turse: Sure, I get that for, say, Mellow or Bloom, because the non-Mellowed perspective is obviously something you want to bring along on your journey. A little anxiety can probably do good things for you, for instance when it comes to noticing dangers. But what would we be missing if we were always on Spark? The stupid perspective?

  Olz Hap: It’s not as obvious, I’ll grant you that. But I suspect that people who go around all the time feeling really bright would tend to miss some things. Overconfidence might be one thing.

  Salome Einstein: If you have the attitude that your intelligence will always sort out your problems for you, that will probably tempt you towards certain choices that may not always be particularly wise over time.

  Yutten Turse: So, you’re saying we need the stupid perspective to keep us humble, is that it?

  Olz Hap: And careful. Cautious.

  Yutten Turse: What about Perk, then. Almost everybody is constantly on Perk – are we missing out on the low-energy perspective?

  Salome Einstein: Guess I’ll go with the wisdom of the crowd on that one.

  Olz Hap: I think there’s a cost to it – something similar to what we said about Spark – although, arguably, the benefits here outweigh the costs.

  Yutten Turse: Ha! We should employ an advisor who is never on Perk just so we could hear what the low-energy perspective has to say about things.

  Salome Einstein: Yes. Dear Ms. Lo-engy, what is your view on the Diankoran fellows?

  Yutten Turse: But every time we ask, she’s having a nap, so we never get to benefit from her wisdom.

  Salome Einstein: Sad story, really. We would have defeated you, Diankoran people, if we were only able to hear what Lo-engy thought about you, but she never had the energy to tell us.

  Olz Hap: Ohnoes! Anyway…

  Yutten Turse, Olz Hap, and Salome Einstein in the style of Egon Schiele, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.