Yes. You can make wonders that are relatively safer, but...

She shrugs.

...sort of lonely, probably.

He starts to inspect their surroundings so he can think about that instead.

Wait, what am I doing, I haven't shown you my SECRET LAIR!!!

The pink-haired girl whips a tablet out of literally nowhere, and taps in three short commands. 

The garden... folds neatly upwards, like the world's largest piece of origami. The lilacs in their flowerbeds go undisturbed, casually sidling into wall boxes: the bridge across the stream repurposes itself into an intricate gate of the same delicate cherrywood. The central tree cozies itself into the centre of a spiral staircase. 

With a delicate click, the paper-thin marble walls meet a roof that wasn't there five seconds ago. 

The pink-haired girl opens the door, a shimmer of twisted light coiling beneath her fingers as she leans casually against the fragile stone. 

Inside, a set of overstuffed armchairs cozy up around an indoor pond: consoles swathed in purple ivy and dense bundles of nerve fibre sit camouflaged among the lilacs. 

She grins. 

Welcome to Avalon. 

She bows elaborately, putting three flourishes of her hand into it. 

Maniacal Girl Avalon Sureguard invites you within. You are advised not to break anything. I may be cute, but I think you understand just how seriously fucked you'd be if you messed with me here, right?~

- by the way, the body's custom. I did a full replace. It's been... fifty something years since I claimed this Bardo? And I've been more or less fourteen for that whole time. Oh, sometimes I need to replace a bit, but Metaptropi's great for keeping spares to hand... 

She looks at him. 

- I'm not freaking you out, right? Sorry, I - I don't get out much.

this is the coolest thing that has ever happened to me, do not be sorry.

He gazes around the room, enraptured.

your body's custom – you can do that?

Avalon flops down in a very comfy chair, and grins. (The... green leather? Has a bit of a glossy shine to it, and flexes a bit in ways leather usually does not. It appears she is using some form of Abomination of Science for maximum coziness.)

Oh, not sanely. It’s a known instability risk for people like us - the more you move away from the kinds of things most people consider normal, the higher risk you have of getting caught up in your own genius. I just felt it was worth taking the chance, you know?

I’m not the best at the kind of detail work I’ve got going on here - I have some mad medicine, Exelixi, but not enough to rebuild my whole body from scratch. This - she gestures downwards at herself - is a commission from a friend of mine. Technically it’s a braindead clone and “I” am a computer chip implanted in its frontal cortex, but really the distinction only matters if someone gets out a knife and goes digging. Which would be foolhardy and stupid to attempt, given that I am a doctor of Metaptropi and no longer care about plebian concepts like “volume”. 

Avalon casually produces a brass wand covered in neon-pink runes in her free hand, then vanishes it again. 

Anyway. I ought to give you the intro lecture. Ahem... let me see here. 

Congratulations, you just Catalyzed. You’re a Staunen, and your wonders will be born of curiosity and, er, wonder. You’ll have a natural edge when building scanners, communicators - anything intended to help you learn. I’m a Klagen, also known as a Doomsayer or Cassandra: I catalyzed with the emotion of Sorrow, and all my works are stamped with it. Though my Catalyst pushes me towards wonders that improve and heal, I’m instead a doctor of Metaptropi, the axiom of Change. That means I can turn lead into gold, this garden into a secret lab, and thin air into a deadly maniacal wand. 

I’m what’s known as a Rogue - not affiliated with the Peerage, not affiliated with the Lemurians. I’m sane, more or less. We’re all a bit... off-kilter. As a Klagen, I get depressive episodes: as a Staunen, you’ll likely experience fixations on trivial things. 

It’s very important that you not begin to think that you understand how your Wonders work. All Geniuses have that drive to try to Understand The Paradox. Don’t. Let it be. If you stare too deeply at it, you’ll go Unmada or even Illuminate. 

- Oh, yes, definitions. Unmada are Geniuses who have a theory they think works. There’s a personality pattern, common to all of us, where - belief in an answer gets sticky. Before long you’re kidnapping people to rant at them about your theories and destroying inconvenient evidence that contradicts you. 

Geniuses who go mad - who stop remembering how to be human - turn Illuminate. You know the feeling you got when you were working on the scanner? How it was the only thing that mattered in the world, for a little while? The Illuminated are like that all the time. They stop caring about anything other than “what happens if I do this? What about this?” And then someone has to go put them down, because they start asking questions like “what if I fused everyone in New York into one giant shambling mass? What philosophical insights into the nature of individuality might that give me??” 

With me so far?

Wow this is a lot to process. He takes a seat in another very comfy chair.

i, uh...i think.

He has so many questions, but he can only ask one at a time, so after a minute of struggling, he chooses:

where do i even fit into this?

Usually newly-Catalyzed Geniuses are - apprenticed - to the Genius who helped them Break Through. However... Jinx is not the kind of Genius who would be a good mentor. She's Unmada, for a start. And I think you got an idea of the kind of recklessness she gets up to, given what happened to you. 

That's why I turned up: as one of the few stable Geniuses in the city, I have a dedicated Oracle Machine that alerts me to new breakthroughs. A little covert observation, and I decided to intervene before Lemuria or the Peerage showed up. You'll probably get offers from both within the next few days. 

The Peerage are the... not the good ones, both sides have their black sheep, but the sane ones. Relatively. As the saying goes, "we're all mad here": the Peerage are the geniuses who know they're mad and are trying their best to compensate. I'd be a member if I felt it was worth keeping up the subscription - the local chapter is politically weak, and I'm not comfortable taking a stance against the local Lemurians. 

"Who are the Lemurians?" So glad you asked. They're a collection of Unmada, loosely organized for mutual protection, under the delusion that together they're going to develop a Unified Theory of Genius where every single Lemurian's personal pet theory is simultaneously true. The local leader goes by Dr. Realist: he's a Technomatic, an Unmada who thinks that Wonders work because the entire universe is a simulation. 

He's also an extremely powerful Unmada, which... has effects of its own. I don't want to freak you out too much here, but I guess I need to explain Bardos, Manes and Unmada Fields now. Seeing as you're currently in a Bardo talking to a Mane.

She sighs, and gets up out of her chair. 

I'm going to use my holodisplay for this rather than just beaming concepts into your brain: while my telepathy is convenient, it's not tactile and spatial the way I want out of this. Plus I think you've had enough weird today for several lifetimes, plus I just don't get to use the thing enough.

She taps her tablet, and a luminescent blue simulacrum of the city appears, hanging in the air between the cozy chairs. Leaning in, she spreads it apart with her hands, zooming in to the club where Z was a few minutes ago. 

Here's your vampire den. We'll get back to other supernaturals later - right now we're focusing on Geniuses and things that run on our rules. Yes, there are things that "run on our rules" and things that don't. Let me give you the latest on Theory of Inspiration - though do keep in mind that I'm a Genius and therefore my Pet Theory is almost certainly wrong. 

Alright, so. "Inspiration" is the thing that makes Geniuses Geniuses: you'll hear some people call Geniuses "Inspired", but I tend to avoid that since it sounds too close to "Illuminated" for my taste. I prefer "Maniacal" as the adjective, which then makes the Thing We Have "Mania." 

Mania seems to behave a little like electricity in some ways. It can be stored, transferred, and harnessed to produce effects. You and I, as Geniuses, are natural generators of Mania: we can produce it by engaging in significant cognitive effort, though my experiments seem to indicate that there are significant diminishing returns after about the twelfth hour of work per day in my case, I haven't investigated with others, maybe you can help with that - 

Sorry, I'm getting off track. Mania. 

Geniuses produce Mania, but we're not the only things that do. Most people generate trace amounts of Mania whenever they're under significant cognitive load: analysis and hypothesis generation seem to be good candidates for where it comes from, but anything involving this science is almost hopelessly garbled by observer error, so take that with a huge grain of salt. What we are certain of is that Mania is produced in very noticeable quantities when people actually change their minds.

She smiles. 

Can you see where I'm going with this?

so–when i realized that impossible things could actually happen–and nothing i knew before was real–

- huh. You know, I’d never actually considered that before, but it makes a lot of sense - Breakthrough as a rejection of the world as it is - and then the majority of people would be Beholden because they can’t let go of their old worldview, and so the Mania just keeps contradicting them until their ability to have a worldview stops working? Interesting. I should drop a line to the Fellowship, see if we can find anyone who had a breakthrough that involved acceptance of the world... 

- Sorry! The Fellowship does Mad Sociology. I’d have been a doctor of Epikrato or Automata if I had a weaker stance against slavery. Uh, those are the axioms of control and self-awareness, respectively. Yes, you can do death robots. It’s not a good idea, but it’s possible! 

... so, uh, yes. Where I was actually going. The question I wanted you to ask was: “So what happens when there’s a revolution? When a whole bunch of people change their minds, all at once?” And as a side note: “What about empiricism? What does the existence of a whole philosophy dedicated to falsifying ideas mean, in a world where Mania exists?”

He thought of something interesting!

This fills him with incredible joy.

–wait–what about slavery?

There are geniuses out there smart enough to make intelligent beings and stupid enough to assume that their creations will not have any preferences they dislike. 

There are also ones who do mind control, but they tend to get slapped down quickly.

well, fuck them.

what about the question you wanted me to ask?

Anything the world gives up on, anything the world decides is false - Mania hates that, it wants the impossible to exist. And so it tries to make it true.

That's where places like this come from. Tiny utopias, trying to exist in a world where they can't, not really. I think this was actually a cult's promised heaven of gardens, before it broke up - and then the Mania latched on to it, made it real, or as close to real as it could manage. We had an invasion of Martians back in 1894 when "the valleys of mars are actually irrigation canals" was disproven. 

Every lost cause and impossible dream has a few Manes - fictive beings - or Bardos - impossible places - associated with it. By cloning myself into a new body, something that ought to be impossible by modern science, I made myself into one as well. Sasquatch is out there. The Luminiferous Aether? You can go swimming in it.

Not all of them survive, though. Any Mane or Bardo is - not necessarily parasitic, but it needs a source of Mania to keep going. As a Genius, I can keep this Bardo alive, be its power supply so long as it doesn't get too large - but there are far fewer Geniuses than there are Bardos or Manes. Most of them don't last. 

The ones that do... are often ugly. Mars is still out there, though we're at peace now: the Luminiferous Aether hosts wakeboarding competitions: but there's also...

She takes a deep breath, despite not talking using her mouth. 

- who's the most repudiated, most influentially, spectacularly wrong person you can think of? What false dream almost conquered the world, before it was slapped down? 

He listens rapt up til the end. This is beautiful – this is exactly how the world should work, these impossible dreams becoming reality –

But then.

...are there fucking nazi monsters.

When the final nail was driven into the coffin of the Nazi regime, when their whole edifice of “scientific” racism came tumbling down... that was a shockwave. That was bigger than aliens on Mars not existing. 

Simultaneously, the Nazis were proven to not have any functioning “wunderwaffe”, to not have found the Lance of Loginus, and to be a bunch of pseudoscientific occultists grasping at straws to try and win the war by any means they had left.

And so a fucking huge Bardo sprang into existence. The Fourth Reich, an alternate Europe where Hitler won, where the Holocaust was justified, where - 

Avalon’s hands clasp together, and twist against each other until they tremble. She squeezes her eyes shut tightly, and grits her back teeth. 

She lets out a hissed breath. 

- let me finish, this is important. 

We could see it coming. We had been unprepared for the Martian invasion - nothing of that scale had happened before. Before the telegraph, news travelled too slowly to create that kind of shockwave event. Though it was theorized, we badly misjudged the potential impact. The fall of Nazi Germany? We knew exactly what was coming, and we had years to prepare. 

It was in the middle of World War Two, mind you, so we weren’t exactly full strength: still, we got our shit together. For the first time in history, the Lemurians and the Peerage fought together side-by-side. We had our Wonders: the Fourth Reich had the Thule Society, Manes formed in the image of occult Nazi “superscience” and the “pure” Aryan race. They were stronger, tougher, smarter, actually better than normal humans, because remember, the Fourth Reich was a world where scientific racism actually worked. Some of them were Geniuses, or close enough to pass. I don’t know if they were real people or made up whole cloth. I don’t fucking care. 

We were outnumbered and outgunned. They lost anyway. The Maniac Storm of the Axis surrender died away, and the rank and file began to starve - so they started kidnapping Geniuses and particularly brilliant mundanes, to... feed on their Mania. That gave them supply lines we could disrupt, sources of power we could destroy. We tore apart the Bardo that protected them, smashed the “Fourth Reich” and freed the Manes that were created to be victims in it. The Thulians survived, but only by becoming an insurgency. 

We burned them out. Leaf by leaf, branch by branch, root by root. It broke Lemuria’s power and cost us an entire Foundation of the Peerage - the Progenitors, the bio-tinkerers. They were - infected.

The display shifts, becoming a red-glowing swastika. Avalon slashes the flat edge of her hand through it, and fragments of holographic glass spray across the room before it dissolves completely. 

We did it anyway.

Mane Hitler was killed in 1954, and we got the last of his backups and clones in 1957. The head of the Thule Society was executed later that same year. As far as we know, the last original Thulian Genius was killed in 1966: we spent another five years destroying Mania-generating artifacts that had fallen into their hands, as well as still-functioning works of Thulian Science. The last confirmed detection of a Thulian Mane or Wonder was in 1972. I was there. I helped. 

We don’t know for sure that we got them all. We probably didn’t. But whatever fragments of them are left, they’re lying low for now. 

Some dreams aren’t invited back.

good. good, that they're fucking gone.

thank you.

does anybody ever   end up in places like that? without meaning to?

Bardos are very hard to accidentally stumble into. With six billion people in the world, it does happen, but in general most of them stumble right back out again just as fast. 

There's a certain level of background predation - maybe 1% of the missing-persons cases these days are "got eaten by a Mane" - but we try our best to keep things under control. We're weaker now than we were - even after forty years, the scars are still there, the Progenitors are only rebuilding now - but we do our best. 

That's what the Peerage and Lemuria are about, in large part. None of us wants to go Illuminate, and one of the best ways is to be alone for too long. That's - part of why I bothered to come talk to you, honestly. I have - a couple stray beholden - but they don't count as people, not the, you know, the real way. 

She trails off.

...sorry, I've been a giant wet blanket, haven't I. Fucking Nazis, welcome to the world of Mania, lovely to meet you, aren't you having fun?

...no, it’s okay. it’s good stuff to know.

and i’d want to talk to somebody about this shit, too.

He smiles, a little awkward but sincere.

not like i need a lot of help to see the fun parts.

One last big warning, and then I'll stop being a wet blanket, alright? I need to tell you about Unmada Fields so you can recognize one when you see it. 

She brings up the image of the city streets again. 

If you start believing that you have the answer, that you know how mad science works, you'll start generating a sort of half-Bardo around yourself. The world will conspire to prove you right: it'll nudge things towards your aesthetics, sweep away evidence against your delusions. 

If you start noticing that the world around you is suddenly much more the way you'd personally like it to be, come here immediately. You've gone Unmada, and you need to get as much Mania out of your system as possible before it solidifies. The longer you leave it, the more it'll convince you, but if you can get to me I can help you get through it safely.

There's more, of course, but... 

She flicks off the hologram, and hefts her tablet. 

Would you like to see my lab?

He nods.

i will—