“Did you have to shoot her?” Aurin asked, reminding me that she wouldn't like it when I do things like that.

  “I… uh, I guess not. It just felt thematically appropriate for me to turn on the evildoer after I’ve tricked them into letting me into their fortress of doom,” I sheepishly replied.

  I had kind of shot the woman because it felt right to do so. Aisling had given me some extra ammo for this mission, so I wasn't worried about running out. The gun she gave me was absolutely silent as well. As long as I didn't fuck with the bullets too much, that is.

  That didn't mean I wasn't going to fuck with them, just that I had to be careful. I had also made some modifications to one magazine of the bloodthirsty bullets. It was actually fairly tricky to make permanent changes, because the models would collapse after a couple of minutes if I wasn't very careful when building the mental structures.

  Which, sadly, meant no magazines of Russian roulette bullets.

  Aurin poked my forehead, then brought me into her embrace, “Stop killing innocent people. She was trying to be nice.”

  “She kind of freaked out when I mentioned bringing down the castle, though… and I have to do that for my job. Rewiring her to make her okay with the whole operation would have taken a lot of cost, and I don’t have time to recover in my mind here,” I replied, and wrapped my arms around her back. “In fact, I probably have to go now.”

  Looking towards the stone soldier, it was standing there completely dead-eyed and mindless. I wasn’t sure how she was commanding it before, but if I found the primary soldier, I’d probably figure that mechanism out.

  Assuming it had a mind and wasn’t just an automaton anomaly. Makesi had started teaching me about the basics of anomaly classification alongside other lessons like how to extract Dust from Dusttouched entities. He kept giving me breaks from the lessons, and it kind of felt like he was treating me like a Kindergartener. I’m pretty sure Vivi influenced his teaching style.

  I realized at that moment that my thoughts were wandering away from what Aurin was telling me.

  Noesis was strange in that it gave me plenty of time to think but precious little to act. Aurin hadn't even started speaking by the time I realized I was lost in thought.

  “What's your plan then? Just walk through the building and shoot everyone, or make them shoot each other?” Aurin asked, her hand patting my head in a way that made me reconsider my choices.

  Because, yes, I was just planning on doing that. But I didn't want to make Aurin upset.

  “Okay! Fine. I'll ask The Stream if there are any non-lethal solutions I can buy,” I said, looking up into her eyes.

  “Good girl,” she said with a smile that made my heart flutter. I activated my emotion-sharing collar for just a moment so she knew what she was doing to me. Her smile shifted into a smirk. “Focus, you have a job to do.”

  With a deep breath, I suppressed my feelings and opened The Stream. Pushing her back a bit because she was right, I needed to focus.

  I tried to think of what terms would help me here. Aurin wanted me to go in non-lethally, which meant I needed to make the enemies no longer capable of harming me.

  How could I do that? I needed a specific idea so the System wouldn’t just suggest something like a hat that makes it impossible for people to shoot me for fifty thousand Dust or something equally ridiculous.

  There was always the lantern, but I'd already discovered that might be a bad idea here. I wasn't sure how the stone soldiers worked.

  I think I had an idea. Based on how the compulsion I used to get in here worked. Showbill was for attracting people to a play and setting their mood for it, right? If I played into that theme… Well, I wasn't sure. Makesi didn't really know why my Manifests followed this theatre theme.

  He didn't know much about Bearers because they were generally secretive about their Aspects and Manifests. But it felt right to do it like this.

  A show has come to town, and I'm trying to lure a crowd for our first performance. Got anything for less than two hundred Dust?

  I got exactly what you need for four hundred Dust toots. It's a quality product, you'll be satisfied, I guarantee.

  [Sure] [Nah]

  I stared blankly at the pop-up in front of me. Nobody had mentioned that the System was capable of talking. But then this was supposed to be my own subconscious mind filtered through my Aspect, creating these.

  So maybe it was normal? Shaking my head, I searched again. If it was going to talk to me, I might as well talk back.

  Can you do three hundred?

  Three fifty, and I ain't going any lower than that. Just accept the deal, sweetheart. You'll love it, I know you will.

  Well, it was nice to get a bargain… from my own subconscious mind. Why was I like this?

  I accepted the window and felt the object appearing in space in front of me. Holding my hand out to catch it, I saw it was a rolled-up piece of parchment with the weirdest mental concept I had ever… okay, not the weirdest that I had ever seen, but it was close.

  -350 Dust

  Dust: 347

  Masses of faceless people gathered around a theatre just as it was opening, their children screaming in glee with non-existent mouths. That wasn't the weird part, though. The weird thing was the theatre itself. I didn't know why, but it felt familiar. Like I had seen it in a dream or something. But I didn’t ever remember my dreams, so where was the deja vu coming from?

  Stuck to the side of the parchment was a sticky note with my handwriting on it. It explained how to activate the poster.

  I had to stick it to something, and it would attract everyone within one hundred metres to come see the Show. What show? The Show, of course. When they saw the poster, they would wait until the Show began. If they weren’t able to see it or reach it for whatever reason, the compulsion would end.

  But it wouldn’t begin, because there was no Show, so after an hour, they would disperse with a feeling of immense disappointment instilled within them.

  I wasn’t sure what logic it was using. Maybe it was like this because I only had Showbill unlocked. There was supposed to be something more here, but since I didn’t have any of the other parts of the Theatre unlocked, I could only announce the opening of it.

  Flipping the sticky note over there was a postscript on the back. I had no idea what it meant.

  The crowd leaves echoes of amusement. The Show consumes them. You receive what remains when it has taken its fill.

  What would I get? Did I eat their happiness? I had no idea what this could possibly mean.

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  Whatever it was didn't matter. I couldn’t produce amusement without a Show, and I couldn’t have a show without at least a couple of other Manifests.

  “Okay, so this should work,” I said, holding the poster out to Aurin.

  “Did it just talk to you? You closed the window so fast I couldn’t read the whole thing, but what I did read didn’t seem normal,” Aurin asked.

  And here I was trying to avoid thinking about that exact thing.

  “I was pretty sure I took a while to decide on… oh wait, sorry, you don’t think as fast as I do. Yeah, I don’t know, it was weird, but maybe this is normal?” I said.

  “Are you trying to convince yourself or me?” Aurin asked, and I didn’t actually have an answer for her. “Maybe message your teammates to see if they’ve ever had that happen.”

  “Look, we’re kind of busy right now. I can do that later after we finish up here,” I lied.

  Aurin nodded and decided not to continue pressing me on it, which I was grateful for.

  “Now, I need you to go out into the hall and hang the poster up on a wall. Just wherever looks like an area that could manage a lot of traffic.” I was still holding the poster out for her, waiting for her to take it.

  Aurin looked at the poster, then back at me. Her arms raised to take it, then lowered again. A frown formed on her face, and it looked like she was struggling with something.

  “You good?” I asked.

  “I can’t take it. It’s not my role to put up broadsides for the Show…” Aurin sort of trailed off at the end and stared into space.

  How did she know about the Show? I didn’t show her the sticky note, and she definitely couldn't see the mental model on the parchment. Was it because she was a Cast member? How did any of this work?

  “Okay, no problem, I can do it myself. If I am attacked, I will defend myself. That’s okay with you?” I said,

  “Yeah, go on, put up the advertisement. If someone tries to hurt you, they’re fair game,” Aurin replied.

  Pushing open the door, I peeked out into the hallway. The poster was tucked under my left arm, and my gun was in my right.

  Not seeing anyone, I crept out of the room. Aurin followed along behind me.

  “Do you know a good spot to put this? We need plenty of room for the crowd of people to stare at the poster,” I asked, moving to the side and gesturing for her to take the lead.

  We walked down tiled hallways leading towards the centre of the structure.

  While moving down a long, straight hallway, I suddenly felt multiple spotlights shining on my back. I spun and blind fired, trusting the smart bullets to be able to find the targets themselves.

  Only for them to completely fail, all I succeeded in doing was adding a bunch of holes to the wall. Oops. I forgot they weren't computer-controlled.

  These weren't dumb smart bullets that auto-tracked targets; they required cognitive understanding to track their targets.

  The group of armed soldiers I had shot at took advantage of my mistake and opened fire on me. The rattling cracks of their submachine guns would have torn me apart had Aurin not grabbed me from behind and pulled me to the ground to lower my profile, but a bullet still caught my shoulder on the way down.

  Once I had eyes on them, I didn't have the same issues anymore, and I tagged all three heads in an instant.

  I put pressure on the bullet hole in my arm with a hiss. Aurin was stock still, her face pale. She looked like she was stuck in a loop of wanting to help but not knowing what to do.

  Opening The Stream, I tried to find something in the General Manifest for the wound. For twenty Dust, I could get a rapid clotting spray, and that seemed like it would be good enough.

  -20 Dust

  Dust: 327

  I handed it over to Aurin, “Shake the bottle before you apply it, please.”

  She nodded, taking the can of spray-on wound clotter. I moved my hand and ripped the hole in my sweater slightly larger so she could spray it on. Then she held it out and started spraying it.

  “Holy mother fucking bitch!” I gasped. It felt like someone had jammed a hot piece of metal into the hole and started wiggling it around. Aurin placed a hand on my back and kissed me to stop my shaking. It wasn't stupid, indulgent behaviour if it worked.

  A few seconds after she began, the pain vanished, and a warm, tight, crusty patch formed over where I had been shot. This would do for now until I could get Makesi to pull the bullet out.

  He was our dedicated medic at the moment.

  “Okay, their guns weren't silenced. That means we need to move fucking now,” I said, pulling myself off the ground with the help of Aurin.

  She turned down the next hallway only to stop on a dime and signal to me. Multiple targets approaching, but fewer than ten, with an additional complication to top it off.

  I could handle that.

  Pressing myself against the wall, I peeked around the corner, spotting a half dozen armed guards approaching. A single stone soldier followed along behind them. One of the men in the back had a particularly easy mind to subvert.

  With my mind moving faster than they could react, I felt their spotlights hit me one at a time while I focused my mind on the next step. I flicked my collar on while fixating on a miserable moment from my childhood, then transitioned to thinking about the heart-fluttering joy that Aurin made me feel, then switched back on a dime to misery, then to joy flickering like a broken bulb as I spun my mind as fast as I could with Noesis. The group fumbled with their guns, and one of the men clutched his head, dropping his weapon entirely.

  Aurin made a choking noise behind me.

  This bought me the couple of seconds it took to do the next step.

  The mental concept I needed to break was a wind-up toy soldier. It had already been wound up and was walking endlessly forward, following the rules of someone else. I picked it up and pointed it in the opposite direction. Then spun the crank the other way. When it was completely unwound, I applied pressure until it snapped and then kept turning it until it was wound the opposite way. When it was fully wound in reverse, I dropped the little soldier in place, allowing it to start walking backward, and watched as the man's loyalties flipped around.

  I hid back around the corner just before they started firing at me.

  Listening to the guns suddenly going quiet one by one, with a crack of a separate gun marking their end. Then, with a crack, the final soldier ended the last member of the squad's life with his own.

  This was why soldiers really needed some kind of mental resistance training. All I had to do in order to convince him to commit fratricide followed by suicide was flip all that discipline he had built in his mind in the opposite direction.

  Turning the corner again, there was a single stone soldier that had been marching behind them that was still coming my way. Swapping magazines, I changed to the rounds I had altered the concept of slightly.

  Then unloaded into the statue, every round landing with an explosive crack that caused shards of hardened clay to shatter off it until it was just a pile of broken pottery.

  Aurin waved for me to follow her, and I did, running down the hallway with her. We managed to avoid any more conflict before we arrived at a large open room. It looked like a briefing room because there was a projector sitting in the centre of the room, pointed at a pull-down screen.

  In front of the pull-down screen, Aurin bent over, and I climbed onto her shoulders. She hoisted me up so I could stick the poster to the wall in a position anyone in the room could see, even if the room was completely full, right over the top of the projection screen.

  When the poster was finally unfurled, I could hear the sounds of excited children whispering amongst each other. It also exuded a feeling of being incomplete when I looked at the empty front side, like a painting that someone had given up working on halfway through but still put up for sale.

  The poster itself was covered in script that I could not understand at the top and bottom. It could have been meaningless for all I knew. In the centre, there was a large square that was completely blank.

  I felt Aurin shiver underneath me, “What's up? You can let me down if I'm too heavy.”

  “No, you're tiny and light as a feather, I could hold you all day.” Okay, rude. I wasn't that small. My height went up to a whole five feet. This was within the normal range for adult women. “It's the poster, I feel like I need to partake in the Show. But there is no Show. It's not ready yet, so it just feels uncomfortable. Like the feeling you get when you think there’s something important you were supposed to do but can’t remember what it was.”

  She bent down so I could get off, and I gave her a hug when she stood up again.

  “Do you want me to fix it so you can't feel that way anymore?” I asked because I wasn't really sure what else to do.

  “No, Ren, I'm fine. It's going away now. Let's go, I can show you where I think the control statue is for the building,” she replied. After a moment, we left the room just as people were starting to stream in, so that they could stare excitedly at the poster.

  They whispered amongst themselves in a meaningless stream of words that individually made sense, but when put together, were just nonsense. A feeling of disappointment passed through me as I followed Aurin out of the room.

  I felt like a failure for not putting on the Show they deserved. This feeling was so strange that I checked my mind for potential infohazards but couldn’t find any. I was perfectly clean. No stray ideas were sitting around my theatre besides Aurin.

  Since it wasn’t an outside source, I decided just to ignore it. I could get weirdly emotional over random things sometimes, and maybe this was just one of them.

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