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

  Chapter 15: Big calm

  Special Circumstances headquarters, Mikla metropolitan area, Confluence dimension

  Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (local time)

  Olz woke up feeling it would be a long day, and that it was time to assemble the group. Yesterday evening had seen two major events: the Erd author had written a chapter about Soth, and Sophie Strange had sent a message saying that the place they had visited in the shadow dimension looked like a city in Erd. She had shared the message with Yutten and Salome, and they had decided to sleep on it.

  Olz Hap: Ok, ladies. We find ourselves once again responding to events.

  Salome Einstein: Isn’t that all we do? Observe and comment, occasionally talk to someone else.

  Yutten Turse: We’ll talk about you / on our live ether show.

  Olz Hap: Hm?

  Yutten Turse: Don’t mind me, I’m just mouthing off random associations. We’re the commentariat in this book, aren’t we? Anyway, our secret benefactor handed us Soth on a plate. I suppose that’s good.

  Salome Einstein: I say we do two things straight away. Get our dimensional magic specialists to look at Soth’s full-body version and to locate the anchor to his pocket in Thesaurus.

  Olz Hap: The latter without being observed.

  Yutten Turse: Just loop the obfuscation fifty times. Soth is not going to manually nest through that.

  Olz Hap: I guess you’re right, although looping will just hide the traces of our magics – the possibility that he will look right through our obfuscation in the first place remains. Still, in some ways we’re fighting this guy from a position of magical equilibrium, sometimes knowing more than he does. That’s new.

  Yutten Turse: If we just pour enough of our stored energy into it, there’s no way he will look right through it. We’re a whole civilization with collectivized resources and he is just one guy – a very old and experienced guy, but no match for everything we can bring to the table. Also, we have friends in high places who show us his secrets.

  Salome Einstein: But he has allies. An alien race helping him attack Erd. There’s a lot of information to take in here.

  Olz Hap: In some strange way our three cases keep merging into one. But I guess that was clear from the start. Still, it’s all converging on Erd for some reason. Are we to believe that the shadow dimension is a reflection of the Erd sim?

  Salome Einstein: I believe these are the spontaneous occurrences Raistlin talked about in the previous book.

  Yutten Turse: Wow. This is all a bit overwhelming – I think I need to Spark up to get a grip. [Yutten casts Spark.] Ah, that’s better. Huh. Seems clearer now, right?

  Olz Hap: The spontaneous bursts of magic are occurring in the shadow dimension. That’s why Bob Rife and his people have never observed them.

  Salome Einstein: And the shadows sucking that dimension dry are Soth’s attack on Erd. He is attacking Erd by attacking its emergence as a magical dimension.

  Yutten Turse: Boggles the mind. He probably received these shadows from his alien benefactor. What’s in it for them?

  Olz Hap: Hard to see. Might be important to understand, though.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Salome Einstein: Agreed. But whatever it is, our priority here and now is to stop them. Sabotage their destruction. Or do you have other thoughts?

  Yutten Turse: I agree. We stop them from achieving their goals. Maybe we will save Erd in the process.

  Olz Hap: Yes. But how? Seems to me Soth is the weakest link.

  Salome Einstein: We have the advantage on Soth. Find a way to neutralize him, then deal directly with the shadow dimension. Which seems to be Erd’s reflection in the Real.

  Yutten Turse: Struggling to be born. The shadow dimension is Erd being born, except Soth and his friends are sucking the energy out of it.

  Olz Hap: What if Soth is right, though? Let’s say Erd is born in the Real, that it emerges as a magical dimension. Later the Erd people run their own simulations and other worlds are born, and so on. Will there be chaos and interdimensional war?

  Salome Einstein: Or maybe we can all be friends. A happy interdimensional metacivilization.

  Yutten Turse: Why not. We’ll all be citizens of the multiverse metaConfluence! In the meantime, I suppose we will keep an eye on Erd. Make sure things are allowed to mature before it’s pushed forward.

  Olz Hap: So, the Confluence will be the Protector Elders of Erd?

  Yutten Turse: Could be. Some people want to dominate and control.

  Salome Einstein: And feast on other people’s energy.

  Yutten Turse: Yes. The temptation to build an empire will always be there. There’s no way past that. Are we so afraid future Confluence generations might fail that we have to hold ourselves back, thereby depriving those future generations of the possibility of succumbing to temptation?

  Olz Hap: That’s the real question, isn’t it? If we fight Soth and let Erd be born, we’re setting up a temptation for future Confluence generations. They will obviously be more developed than these newly born dimensions and could subjugate those dimensions if they want to.

  Yutten Turse: I want to be Empress Tomato Ketchup! You will all have to kneel and behave very nicely. Or else.

  Olz Hap: You can have the best harem in the world. All the young ones obeying your every whim.

  Yutten Turse: We’re definitely moving forward with this.

  Salome Einstein: Ok, so we have 56 centuries of the Elder empire and 42 years of a republic behind us. Can we trust that the Confluence will be benign a few centuries from now?

  Olz Hap: The thing about the future is that it seems kind of open-ended.

  Salome Einstein: Who knows what direction it will choose. But letting Soth and his friends suck the life out of Erd because, if we let it live, someone else might suck the life out of it later seems rather backwards.

  Yutten Turse: Right. If Erd wants to spontaneously emerge, it should probably be allowed to do so. Then we deal with eventualities when they show up.

  Olz Hap: Yes. It’s possible that our descendants will be monsters, but we can’t kill ourselves today because of that possibility. Also, doing the opposite of whatever Soth is doing seems like a reasonable way forward.

  Salome Einstein: Agreed, then. This is the point when we assemble our group, right?

  Olz Hap: Well, I suppose this would normally be the point where we call in our elite special forces squad.

  Yutten Turse: Run from our fate. Maybe if we run fast enough, we can escape orbit.

  Salome Einstein: Our little outfit here is not named ordinary circumstances, is it? My feeling is that if we send our mutant supertroops after Soth they will all die without further ado.

  Yutten Turse: Yeah. It’ll be a single-sentence paragraph from the Erd author. Then they sent the elite team of dragon slayers after Soth, but they all got stuck in Thesaurus and are lost to eternity.

  Salome Einstein: And then we’re back to the only option we have.

  Olz Hap: I guess I agree with you, weird as the whole thing is. Faced with a unique threat against their civilization, the secretive Special Circumstances board decided to, you know, send two backwaters investigators and a grieving explorer to deal with it all.

  Salome Einstein: Don’t forget Bob, the mid-level manager.

  Yutten Turse: And the dog!

  Olz Hap: We’re going to do this, aren’t we?

  Yutten Turse: We’re Special Circumstances! We do sneaky things like this all the time.

  Salome Einstein: What do you think Soth will do when he knows he’s up against a dog?

  Yutten Turse: He’ll get so distracted by a strange urge to throw sticks that his five hundred defense layers will collapse into nothing. We have the best secret weapons.

  Olz Hap: Ok, so we call them in. What do we tell them?

  Yutten Turse: We’re going to have to tell them that they are characters in the book.

  Salome Einstein: I had been hoping to avoid that, but I think you’re right. There’s no way past it.

  Olz Hap: Either we tell them or we will have to invent some reason that we are using them instead of our crack team of mutant ninja superheroes.

  Yutten Turse: Also, my feeling is that it’s better if we don’t try to manipulate things too much. Just let the story unfold as it wants to. We don’t have to control it. Trying to control it will just interfere with its spontaneous manifestation.

  Salome Einstein: Huh.

  Olz Hap: Are you saying this story is trying to be born in the same way that Erd is trying to be born? That there’s some kind of dimensional parallel between them?

  Yutten Turse: Maybe. The idea just leaped into my mind. This Spark energy makes me feel giddy. But, yeah, just let it unfold. Let it go its way.

  Olz Hap: That’s a fine way to run a security agency, but maybe you’re right. Anyway, I think we should also invite our group to learn about Soth’s dimensional magics.

  Salome Einstein: Sophie for sure, but the others don’t know any dimensional magic. It’s not the kind of magic that’s appropriate for happy amateurs.

  Yutten Turse: Don’t control it. Just invite them to look at what they want. It will sort itself out.

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