I sat in the meeting room, squinting because the lights were far too bright. Luckily, as my eyes closed, they acted as a sort of dimmer switch and their glow reduced in brightness, so I wasn’t screwing myself over. I really shouldn’t have let Vivi convince me to drink that nail polish remover of a liquor last night.

  In the meeting, I explained where I had been for the past six days, and learned what they had been up to. On their end, it was mostly intel gathering. Aisling learned that the group we had encountered was the ‘Water’ Office, which was being supported by Earth Office’s logistics. The plan was to hit Earth and cut off their communication while driving them out.

  Based on Aisling’s personal assessment through her Aspect, if Heaven Office decided to take action, we were apparently fucked. So we couldn’t wipe the groups off the face of the Earth, we had to drive them out of town by making it unprofitable to remain here. This meant Makesi was technically correct in his decision not to go loud the other day. Though I still felt shooting the commander was the right move, because it gave us information on his capabilities.

  When they finished explaining all this, I shifted slightly to find a more comfortable position on Aurin’s lap. She was invisible right now, and I discovered that to everyone else it didn’t look like I was floating. Instead, it looked like I was sitting normally in the chair. When flicking Aurin visible then invisible again, I sort of popped up and down as if changing between states where Aurin existed or not. When Aurin moved something, nobody could see it move until they looked away, then back at it.

  She didn’t feel like being seen at the moment, so I wasn’t going to make her.

  Now that she was part of my Aspect, Aisling and Makesi were acting less weird around Aurin as well. I wasn't sure how to feel about that.

  I was asked by Makesi to stay behind so he could help me choose a Manifest to start with. On the way out, Vivi looked my way and gave a brief nod. I nodded back and appreciated that she was thinking of me.

  “So what actually is a Manifest? That’s what you wanted to go over, right?” I asked, once it was just Makesi and me in the room. Aurin kissed the top of my head to remind me that there was a third person. I reached down to squeeze her hand in apology.

  “First, your condition. Are you alright? I don’t expect perfect policy adherence from someone your age, and the REB doesn’t either. That is why the first world exception exists. But when you vanish without any context beforehand, the rest of us have no information to work with. I need you to signal your intent before you act, so we are not operating blind,” Makesi said, immediately turning the conversation awkward. Was he really going to treat me like a child? That was a little patronizing, honestly.

  If that meant not getting chewed out, I could live with it, and technically, I was like a child to him. So he wasn’t exactly wrong to treat me as one.

  “Yeah, I don’t think anything like that could ever possibly happen again,” I said, lifting Aurin’s hand in mind and flicking her visibility on and off. “Given the circumstances and all. I’m kind of stuck with her…”

  “You should schedule stress testing with Vivi to see what she’s capable of. If you can arm her with a weapon—” Aurin vigorously shook her head, and I raised my hand to stop him.

  “Do you want to talk, Aurin? This concerns you after all,” I asked, squeezing her hand.

  “Uhh, sure,” she said, her voice small compared to how she usually acted. With a thought, I made her visible and sent her confirmation of that fact mentally. “I don’t think I’d be very comfortable hurting people. If that might be something you'd expect?”

  Where the hell did my confident Aurin go?

  Maybe that was just how she acted with me? Thinking about it, she hadn't really had any good experiences with other people, had she? That was a problem we'd have to resolve.

  “If that's a line you aren't willing to cross, nobody has the power to force you. You aren't bound by any contract after all. The fact you wouldn't even be considered alive by the REB is taken into account as well, but that's beside the point,” Makesi said. The fact that he didn't suggest that I would have to force her to comply due to my Contractual obligations was a relief. Because there was a reading of the Contract that would necessitate that I do that, given that she was a part of my Aspect. All the more reason to stick with this team, I suppose. “Well, I'd like you to think of what you can do to help Ren. If only for her sake.”

  “Mmm!” Aurin hummed in agreement and emphatically nodded.

  “Onto Manifests now?” I asked as I opened up The Stream and tabbed over to the page referencing them. It was a list of words that sort of linked to how I saw my Aspect.

  “Right, yes, at the moment, you should have access to only the General Manifest, along with a single point to unlock another Manifest. With every Grade increase, you gain access to another Manifest. The progress to your next Grade is listed on your System Console. To simplify how it works, the General Manifest is your baseline. It figures out what is physically possible in a dimension and attempts to produce items that meet the definition of ‘general good’. This can be anything from medication, as you discovered, to furniture, to clothing. It will never contain anything with modified physical laws by default, nor will it contain anything that might be classified as specialized equipment, which is a lot more broad of a definition than many of us would like. For anything outside that category, you need to obtain a separate Manifest. Once you have multiple Manifests, their properties can be combined. As an example, I have the Fieldwork and Load Manifests, which together allowed me to purchase the Modular Transport we’re in right now,” he explained.

  “I don’t see Fieldwork in my list of options. But it also doesn’t sound like something that has to do with your Aspect. Also, how do you tell what’s in a Manifest before you pick it?” I asked, given the names of each Manifest, I could kind of intuit what might be the theme of what is inside them… sort of.

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  “Manifests are designed for each Archetype individually, not your Aspect. So while there will be items you can buy that interact with your Aspect, there are some Manifests that won’t have anything to do with it. The Sink Archetype in particular is often meant to act as a generalist and as the team’s field operations manager, handling anything that isn’t managed by a specialist. This is because the idea of being a Sink is oppositional to reality manipulation as a whole. We don’t have anyone who specializes in transportation or setting up a base of operations, so I’m currently handling both those roles.”

  As he spoke, I received a notification through my System from him. It was a list of things I could request from him, along with estimated Dust costs. He had apparently prepared a document for the team already, which didn’t really surprise me for some reason.

  Makesi continued, “As for figuring out what’s in a Manifest, well, you won’t know until you pick it. The act of choosing it alters your soul such that a new theme of altered objects can be warped in. The name is the REB’s best guess at what will be made available. Given the newness of your Archetype, you probably won’t have hundreds of possible Manifests like common Archetypes. Could you read me your list?”

  “Sure,” I said, and read off the menu in front of me.

  Available Manifests: Noememetic Architect (Eunoic)

  Mask [Locked]

  Narration [Locked]

  Director [Locked]

  Script [Locked]

  Showbill [Locked]

  Stage [Locked]

  Design [Locked]

  Curtain [Locked]

  Thread [Locked]

  Cast [Locked]

  Unlock Points: 1

  As I read them out, a confused look grew on Makesi’s face.

  “What?” I asked when I was done.

  “They aren’t usually… so abstract. I was going to give you a suggestion for what to take for your first one, but honestly, I have no idea. When you buy it, the System will be able to give you a little bit more detail, but at the moment, I guess just pick whichever one calls to you.”

  Hmm. These were all themed around the stage in my mind, because my Aspect was somehow themed around theatre. So I could intuit that Cast is at the end because it was most recently added, as it’s related to cast members on my stage. Namely Aurin.

  Mask definitely interacted with my identity in some way, maybe even allowing me to interface with my own mind, or at least a mask being held over it. Or maybe it was for disguises?

  No wait, that would be Curtain, right?

  Well, I had no idea.

  “What do you think I should pick?” I asked Aurin.

  “I think Showbill sounds interesting,” she replied as she rustled my hair.

  “Don’t do that in front of my team leader…” Aurin redoubled her effort to embarrass me despite my protest, so I gave up. “Why do you say that?”

  “What’s your greatest weakness right now?” she asked me.

  I just shrugged in response. I didn’t really have an answer to that, as I could basically handle everything myself as long as I could overpower the minds involved.

  “It’s the fact that you have to do everything yourself. You can’t be everywhere, so wouldn’t it make sense that you’d need some other way to get your word out? You’d need some way like advertisements for the show you want to prepare,” she explained, and it clicked.

  “Like propaganda! Yeah, that sounds good,” I said, and picked the Manifest. The moment I did so, it felt similar to the euphoria if Dust started wiggling around in my head.

  Combined with what Aurin was doing, it was like my brain was melting.

  “Sure, that framing works too,” Aurin said. I slumped back against her and closed my eyes as my mind drifted away. “Is this a normal reaction?” she asked someone.

  There was buzzing going on in the background as people continued to speak, but I couldn’t seem to care to focus on them. Not in the way where I had paid my cost and couldn’t feel anything anymore, instead, I was just too distracted by the sensation to pick out the words being said.

  Eventually, it pulled away, and my mind slowly returned to normal functionality. Makesi and Aurin were talking about something, and I listened in with my eyes still closed, my head nestled against Aurin’s chest while she mindlessly ran her hand across my head in a swirling pattern.

  “...REB was founded, we never signed on first-lifers like her,” Makesi was saying. “She would have been given a few lives in a stable dimension to grow into her gift. Hell, even Vivi would barely qualify as a Contractor by the old standards. These days, all we do is tread water and try to keep dimensional integrity from collapsing even further. When a life-bearing dimension dies, that’s it. We lose another of the few planes still fit for habitation, and another trillion souls are lost to the void, never finding a world to reincarnate in.”

  That’s new.

  I hadn't really asked any wide-reaching questions. Maybe that was why it hadn’t been mentioned. I had kind of just assumed it was a multiversal organization like any other.

  “What happened?” Aurin asked, proving me right.

  The sound of fabric shifting on the other side of the room accentuated the quiet, “Nobody really knows. One day, the High Secretariat just vanished. Some speculate it was an attack from a coordinated adversary, others that some cataclysmic event happened in the Upper-Tier Worlds. Heroes I heard stories of in my youth were just gone, never to be heard from again. It completely neutered the organization. We don’t even have an Upper-Tier presence or know how to produce new Lives anymore. The System has a certain number in stock, but once we run out of those, we're done.”

  They sat in silence for a little while as Aurin processed what she was hearing. I kind of wish I hadn't hopped into this mid-conversation so I could have more context, but I was pretty sure I knew how they got here. Aurin had started asking pointed questions about my future, and then Makesi felt guilty about letting me into an organization that was falling apart.

  The thing was, a decaying empire on the edge of collapse. A mystery relating to a now lost civilization survived by only remnant factions. Potential lost artifacts and magics just out there waiting to be found. Well, if this wasn’t incredibly motivating, I don’t know what would be!

  “So, how soon until our group starts pushing into Upper-Tier Worlds?” I asked, unable to keep the excitement out of my voice.

  “Ah, you’re back with us, Ren? To answer your question: preferably never. The rate of final deaths in the colonial projects is higher than any other branch of the REB,” Makesi replied.

  “Have you no sense of adventure! All holding back does is delay our deaths until the Lives run out anyway. Do we have any reason not to?” I asked, and attempted to rise from my seat, but Aurin’s hand on my head prevented that, so all I ended up doing was flailing around a bit before settling back down.

  Makesi let out a groan, “We can discuss this later. We would need a full team before even considering moving up to the next Tier, so it doesn’t matter anyway. For now, let’s see what this new Manifest can do.”

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