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

  Chapter 8: Strange birds

  Special Circumstances headquarters, Mikla metropolitan area, Confluence dimension

  Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (local time)

  The board of the Special Circumstances section had assembled for an emergency meeting. For the decades since its inception, SC never had any major cases to deal with. They took care of other issues – Yutten Turse had been responsible for drafting regulations for restricted magics, for instance, while Olz Hap had been a primary advisor for the task of how to preserve security and confidentiality for the Confluence government – but they had never had to deal with the sort of issues the section had been created for. The early years of the Confluence Republic had been, if not quiet exactly, then at least peaceful. SC had been created during times of peace as a preparation for war, but it had never had a real crisis to deal with.

  But now, all of a sudden, three separate cases had found their way to the SC board, each by its own route involving entirely different people. There was evidence that the Protector Elder known as Soth had returned to kill someone and snatch their body, using unknown magics to accomplish this. A magical dimension containing the first signs of an alien civilization the Confluence had ever encountered was apparently under attack from some sort of energy vampires. And in the Erd simulation, the author behind the history of the last days of the Elder regime was writing a new Confluence book – the first two chapters of which described the two other cases before the SC board. Life was going to get busy for them all.

  “Ok ladies, something truly strange is going on here. What are your first thoughts?” Olz was communicating via a Transmission flow, set up to be secure from snooping. This meant that it was not strictly necessary for the three board members to be located in physical proximity to one another, but they liked being in the same room for these meetings. Also, being located in the headquarters provided additional levels of privacy.

  From old habit, Yutten cleared her throat, although she was not actually using it to produce communicative sounds. “We have expected the Elders to make trouble for us for decades now, so the fact that we’re finally seeing an attack from Soth isn’t really that much of a big deal. Except that it gives us an opportunity to hunt him down – and maybe pick up some new magics. I mean, don’t get me wrong, murder is a serious crime, but this was someone who opted out of our security arrangement, right?”

  “If you look at it in isolation, that’s basically correct.” Salome waved her arms when she talked, looking a bit funny. “It’s more of an opportunity than a crisis. I think we could say something along the same lines about the shadow dimension – it’s a situation we could choose to get involved in, maybe to rescue the place from the vampires or whatever. But we could also choose to just stay away from it and hope they don’t come here.”

  “Yes. But when we factor in the fact that the Erd author is writing about both those situations, that seems to connect everything, doesn’t it?” Olz was talking. “Somebody must be feeding him information. Is it our old friend?”

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “Must’ve been him the last time, so maybe he’s at it again,” Yutten said. “If so, I suppose he is trying to be helpful.”

  “Of course,” said Olz. “But one major difference is that with the first book, it got to our attention as a finished product dealing with past events. Here we are getting something more like a running commentary on stuff that has recently happened. It’s a much stranger situation.”

  “That’s an important difference,” Salome said. “If this is spread to the public, it will cause a major disruption. The Erd supervisor was thinking mainly about the disruptions it would cause to the simulation, overwhelming the people maintaining it, but there will be chaos out here as well. I think we need to contain it. That’s priority one as far as I am concerned.”

  “Great,” Olz declared. “Do you want to deal with that? Talk to the supervisor and get him to identify the people who knows about the new Confluence book, make sure they keep their mouths shut?”

  Salome agreed. “We should probably talk with the people involved in the other situations as well. I have a feeling this is all coming together. You know what they say down in Erd – once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”

  “There is something strange going on here, I agree with that,” Yutten said. “I’ll take care of the Soth investigation. It’s basically my old turf.”

  “Ok, so I will deal with the shadow dimension.” Olz hesitated for a moment. “Something big is coming our way. Someone’s old eggs are about to hatch or have already done so. We need to buckle up here.”

  ---

  Special Circumstances had been set up partly to provide the three heroes from the Revolution with honorable government positions, and partly as a way of preparing for rainy days. The section was located in the Tower of the High Magus, on a hidden floor near the middle of the tower that was accessible neither by elevator nor stairs. Back in the day, such inaccessibility was seen as clever, although by now every Confluence citizen knew enough conveyance magic to get around, and nobody ever used stairs or elevators unless they had decided to embrace some kind of retro lifestyle or for other esthetic or ritual purposes.

  Being located in the Tower conferred certain benefits on the section, because it was one of the most highly protected buildings in the Confluence. Under the system Olz had helped set up, every governmental building was under continuous active protection, which meant that Diviners and Abjurers were constantly working to protect those buildings from surveillance and other unwanted activities. Passive defenses - magics that had been set up in advance and were now just doing their thing without active supervision – were regarded as inadequate for the purpose of protecting the Confluence from the remaining Protector Elders and whatever hostile aliens and demons might be out there.

  Maintaining such active protections especially in Mikla, but basically all across the planet, was a huge societal undertaking. The people who worked these jobs were called defenders, and by now this job title was one of the most common in the Confluence. Having so many defenders when there never seemed to be any attacks might be regarded as a wasteful allocation of resources, but Confluence citizens were aware that they had some real enemies out there. Also, Olz and many others had insisted on running a separate division of testers, whose job was basically to try to hack into secure systems using any schemes and stratagems they could think of. Besides ordinary surveillance, testers had employed illusions and other psychological manipulations, profiled specific individuals in order to identify their weaknesses, tried to read people’s brains using STEM magics, and invented various new magics that the defenders were not ready for. The defenders also developed new magics, and a popular game was to see how long it took for testers to identify new defender magics, and the other way around. Eventually, of course, defenders and testers shared their inventions, which had to be included in the testing regime, but it often happened that either part managed to keep their secrets for the full one-year game period. Loop magics and several other metamagics had been developed as a result of these games. In many ways the whole setup was basically an R&D program.

  Strange birds in the style of Mikhail Vrubel, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.