A sleeping girl inhales.

She wakes on an alien shore, under dry rain. The rocky ground is sharp, not to the touch, but to the mind. The air is sweet, like a hospital room that's been lived in for too long. The sky gapes into a blue-green Möbius strip.

She stares up at the tumbling sky for a long moment, then says, "What the entire fuck."

"You will see the end of days," a sourceless voice proclaims.

"What if I don't wanna?"

She attempts to sit up.

Nothing will stop her. The sourceless voice doesn't seem to pay her words any attention.

"You will see the dawning of a new Age."

Is her environment any less unsettling from a sitting position? Wow, it super is not. She stands up anyway, looking around at the for-lack-of-a-better-word landscape.

It's pretty much more of the same in every direction. Behind her is a big hill, also made of rocks; in front of her is an ocean, reflecting the light of the... sky? If she stares at the sky for too long her vision will start to swim and it will get harder to stay on her feet. The blackness is too black. There are no stars. There are too many stars.

"To be a monarch, or a beggar," the voice continues. If she listens closely, it is not just one voice but several, in chorus. "To lose everything, or to become a god. To stand with us, or against us. The choice is yours."

In the manner of dreams, she is no longer on the island, no longer in a body.

"Remember this," the void hisses.

She wakes up in her own bed, a slight tickle at the back of her throat.

She tries to mutter a complaint about trippy dreams, but coughs instead, sitting up abruptly. The cough is unpleasant, one of the kind that feels sharp and spiky in her throat. She shuffles out of bed to go get a drink of water—

—and a wave of flickering blue flame rolls out of her hand and washes across the floor, lighting several discarded socks on fire and scorching the hell out of the carpet.

"What. No," she says, curling her hands into fists and hugging them against her chest as she stares disbelievingly at the mess. Indifferent to her exclamation, the socks continue to burn. She feels dizzy and unbalanced, and despite the relative calm and quiet of the early morning, her concentration wavers as though she's surrounded by a hundred TVs playing a hundred different movies at full volume. Something in her head makes the silence feel like noise.

She takes a deep breath, and then another, and then slowly and carefully reaches for the nearest burning sock. Nothing explodes, yet. She picks it up, slowly and carefully, and drops it in the small and mostly empty metal trash can by her bed, slowly and carefully. Then she approaches the second sock.

The noise that isn't there flares and pops like static. A wave of force billows outward from her body. It stamps out the remaining fire, but knocks over the trash can and spills the first sock under her bed; and cracks her window, shatters the empty plate on the floor by her desk, shoves the desk halfway across the room, and hurls her favourite chair into the wall. Loose papers swirl around the desk, blown out of their mostly-tidy piles; a rain of pens clatters to the floor.

She bites her lip and closes her eyes and stands very still for a moment. Then she turns, paying close attention to the noise now, and rights the trash can and retrieves the adventurous sock and carefully-carefully-carefully carries sock in can to bathroom, where she dumps it in the sink and turns on the tap. Now there is no more fire in her apartment. This is good. This is a step forward.

A shift in the noise—she drops the trash can—azure fire spills from her shaking hands and melts a big messy hole in her shower curtain.

She turns on the shower, cold, and climbs into the bathtub past the smoking vinyl tatters and sits under the spray in her nightshirt, clutching her head in her hands and crying. A halo of flame crawls over her hair; she flinches from its quiet crackle, shivers when the water puts it out with a sputtering hiss.

This is not a long-term sustainable solution, but it is a solution that involves her not burning her house down right this minute, so she'll take it.

It's a while before she pulls herself together enough to turn the water to a more livable temperature, flinching back quickly from the shower knob when blue light sparks and flickers on the back of her hand. It's another, longer while before she curls up and pillows her head on her arms and tries, for lack of anything better to do, to get back to sleep.

Sleep is nearly impossible to achieve. She half-dozes, her attention wandering, feeling the tiny tongues of flame that rise from her skin and wilt in the water.

Then she jolts awake. Her first thought is that she's having another bizarre dream; her second thought is that she's managed to start drowning in the shower. Then all the strange sensations come together into a unified experience.

A wet gritty feeling on her skin, an oily gas-station smell, deep darkness on the other side of her eyelids, the spray of the shower a rain of muffled impacts barely detectable through her (wet, gritty) nightshirt. She's still curled up in the bathtub, but there's something all over her, and it's flowing over her face and obstructing her breathing.

In a flash of sudden panic, she explodes.

She can feel the fire pouring off her, but the slime just hugs her tighter, wrapping itself around her face, pressing on her eyes to keep them closed, blocking her nose and shoving itself against her mouth until a treacherous cough opens her clamped-shut jaw and the wet gritty stuff surges in, tasting of something that belongs under the hood of a car. She claws fruitlessly at her face, first with her hands, then with arcs and spouts and blasts of fire as tangible to her as extra limbs. Nothing helps. Fire rises from her back, burns through her nightshirt, and bubbles haphazardly through the glop without substantially displacing it. Fire flows in waves over her skin, sputtering and choking and breaking apart as the slime rolls over it in a horrible sticky gritty nasty-tasting tide.

Slime pours itself down her throat and slides down her back. She flails, bruising her arms on the wall and the edge of the tub. It would be very stupid to get out of the shower and go running blindly through her apartment in this state, but she has trouble suppressing the feeling that she has to get away—

Imaginary sound rolls and boils in her mind, feeling like static under her skin. An unseen force launches her out of the shower, through what remains of the curtain, through the thankfully-open bathroom door, and out into her bedroom. She tries to calm herself down, tries to keep the strange power contained inside her body, but she can't keep a lid on her panic. Blasts of force and fire lash out at random, doing nothing much to the slime but having very audible effects on her furniture. And the slime still scrapes over her skin, pours itself down her throat in torrents, slides up her nose and into her ears and between her legs and fills her from every direction, in her guts and her lungs and her stomach and—she should be choking to death, she should be popping like an overfilled balloon, but she's not, she stays alive and conscious through all of it, even when the slime does something agonizingly painful deep inside her body—

A new sense unfolds. It's nothing like the synaesthetic static of the magic dream fire. It's mostly closer to sight than anything, but it sees in every direction, without reference to the position of her body; and it sees only life. The trees in the park outside, the early-morning squirrels climbing their branches, seagulls fighting for discarded fries in a McDonald's parking lot, every other person in her apartment building and their plants and their pets and—herself, last of all: the glow of a human life, honeycombed in gold and haloed in angry blue fire, being rapidly overtaken by a marbled red-black pattern like alien ichor or bad cartoon lava. The last of the slime soaks into her skin and disappears, leaving her clean and unhurt, the abrasions left by the gritty stuff rapidly fading. She opens her eyes and watches her scratched-up arms healing over in seconds.

After a minute to catch her breath and calm her racing heart, she warily looks around. Her bedroom is a fucking mess. Surprisingly few things are on fire, but that's still—she counts them, the dresser and the laundry basket and the pile of scattered calligraphy—three more fires than she wants in her house. And the only fully intact piece of furniture she has left is her bed, which although structurally unharmed is still soaked in the same dark red liquid that's splattered all over the room. Judging from the trail of it leading out of the bathroom, and the way it so thoroughly soaks the remaining scraps of her nightshirt, it's probably the slime's fault. Slime blood, maybe. If slime has blood. At least none of the things with slime blood on them are burning.

She doesn't dare move. She can see the power inside her, now, watch it flicker and flare in time with the dance of the noise, watch it flow into her limbs every time she shifts slightly.

Can these problems be used to solve each other somehow? Did she get anything out of being sexually assaulted by alien slime besides this - life-sight?

Her curiosity yields a confusing series of not-quite-images, alien creatures she's never seen before, that she can only identify by imperfect analogy - hyena-horse-crocodile, worm-lizard-mining-drill, mammoth-dinosaur, sea serpent, demon bat - and then something that looks almost like slime blood, dark and red and gooey, and she stops there with the thought that she could really use a source of slime blood right now—

With her new life-sight, she can clearly see the egg that starts growing inside her.

Why the fuck is there an egg.

Her jolt of alarm sets fire to the one remaining dry corner of her blanket. She hisses angrily under her breath and curls up into a ball on the floor and watches the egg grow rapidly in size from 'marble' to 'tennis ball'. It stops there. She can tell, when she thinks about it, how to incite it to come out.

The slime powers may have had a much more hostile introduction than the fire powers, but they're vastly friendlier now that they're here. Laying an egg the size of a tennis ball, even one with a soft shell filled with nothing but soft squishy goo, is probably not going to be terribly comfortable; but so far it seems to be under her control in a really heartening way, and it might be useful for something. Putting out fires, if she's really lucky.

She does the thing.

Laying an egg turns out to be significantly more comfortable than advertised. She loses hold of the fire again, this time not in fear but in pleasure; the feeling of the egg sliding out of her womb is like a long, intense orgasm, and it exhausts her enough that for a minute or two afterward she doesn't even feel up to opening her eyes and looking around to see what else is on fire.

When she does, it's actually not that bad; a few more things are scorched, but the only actual visible flames are the ones she's already seen. She sits up and looks at her new slime egg, resting on the floor in a puddle of clear sticky fluid. Its lifeforce is nearly the same as hers, marbled red-black without the trace of gold or the aura of fire. A simple mental command splits the shell and sends the blob of dark red goo slurping across her floor. Controlling it is as easy and intuitive as moving her own limbs. She rolls it in a circle, has it consume its own eggshell for sustenance, then blobs it along to the scorched and slime-soaked fragments of her desk and has it start eating those. By the time it reaches the burning papers, it's the size of a largish teddy bear and capable of rolling right over the fire without hardly having to stretch. She sends it to the laundry basket next, feeds it all the clothes with holes burned through them but has it leave the intact ones alone, then has it climb the dresser to the burning corner and put that out, and finally sends it over to her bed to smother the burning blanket.

There. Good. No more fire, and a means of controlling further fires that's significantly more workable than 'sit in a bathtub for the rest of her life'.

As for the rest of those images - she examines them again, nicknaming them in her head. Tank for the thing like a mammoth crossed with a triceratops crossed with something out of Lovecraft. Warhorse for the hoofed thing with crocodile skin and ram horns and hyena teeth. Tunneler for the worm-lizard with a face like industrial mining equipment. Leviathan for the snake with fins and a dragon's head. Imp for the long-limbed bat-winged hairless demonic monkey. And the goo... she rolls it across the floor toward her and pokes it with her finger. Its outer surface hardens at her command, lightening to a rocky reddish-pink; then the goo underneath consumes the hardened skin and rounds itself back into a uniform blob. Useful, malleable, multipurpose. She thinks she'll call it Clay.

She is definitely in no hurry to lay a Tank egg, but Tunnelers look like they could be legitimately useful, with those heavy three-part jaws full of hard rock-chewing teeth. If they're as good at digging as they look... well, she's not going to be fit for human society if she can't stop setting things on fire. She and a Tunneler and a blob of Clay could all fuck off underground and find or dig a nice little cave for her to live in, assuming she can find usable sources of food and water. Is Clay edible...? Let's not test that just yet.

There's another page in the mental booklet of egg options. She flips forward from Clay and finds herself looking at a mental image of... herself.

Um. What.

...if she clones herself, does she get a little baby twin, or...? Will it turn out like the Clay and be totally under her control? A little mind-controlled baby twin?

If she clones herself and gets a true duplicate, though, a second Naomi identical both physically and mentally to the first... the Clay doesn't seem to have any problems with pyrokinetic incontinence. Maybe a second Naomi could escape her fiery curse.

She decides she doesn't feel quite hopeless enough to try that yet. Maybe she can start a little smaller, make one of the other creatures whose adult size would be easily concealed inside her apartment, see how long they take to grow up and whether they have any detectable independence.

...maybe she won't try that right away. She makes an effort to clean up her room instead, sending her Clay around to eat broken things and slurp slime blood out of the carpet. It has trouble digesting the ceramic of the broken plate, but manages wood and rubber and plastic and spilled ink just fine; and it does get through the plate, just very very slowly.

Okay, now that her bedroom is more or less vaguely clean, she should protect it as best she can against further outbursts. She has enough Clay now to form it into a hard-shelled nest, its high curved walls hopefully sufficient to block any involuntary emissions; she puts it under a broad splash of slime blood on the ceiling, which although unpleasantly drippy will provide some protection against any escaping flame blasts. Then she curls up in a puddle of surprisingly comfortable goo and spends a very long time quietly crying. She doesn't seem to get hungry or thirsty, and although she's exhausted she is very reluctant to sleep given what happened the last couple of times.

The ceiling gets lighter, then darker. Intermittent flame blasts splash harmlessly against her hardened Clay walls. Eventually she is tired enough to sleep despite her well-founded worries.

She wakes, foggily and not all at once, on her bed in her room as it looked before all the fire and slime blood. Her front door is standing open, silver-gold light dimly defining various furniture.

...ugh it's the magic dream aesthetic again. She sits up and snaps, "Fuck you!" at the unmarked walls.

The walls don't answer. Her doorway leads into a gothic-style cemetery carpeted in mossy grass. A woman in white stands by the gate, under a lamppost.

Fine. She approaches the woman, because that seems like the sort of thing you're supposed to do here.

"The world trembles," the woman says, by way of greeting. She sounds vaguely apologetic, but firm. "You must learn, or be swept away."

"I am so in favour of learning, you don't even know."

The woman nods gravely. "Make haste."

She vanishes in a cloud of golden hexagons and reappears some ways beyond the gate. The wrought iron bars swing open. A box sits invitingly in front of a statue of some kind of angel killing a snake, or a dragon, or something. The stone is a bit worn.

...oooookay. And if she opens the box...?

There's a grimoire inside. It's sort of plain-looking but is obviously an Object of Some Importance. As soon as she touches it, new knowledge leaps into her head, of how to give life and take it, of blood as a vital essence, of protection and endurance. Sigils crowd her vision for a moment, then fade into something like muscle memory. With these sigils she can call blood, her own and others', to her bidding.

The woman gestures; at her feet there is a rotten corpse, skin sloughing from putrid flesh. It is bisected by the iron fence, trapped there by the way the bars have bent.

It is still trying to get out.

"The dead are rising to the siren's song," the woman says. Her tone does not change. "Destroy it."

The woman waits patiently. The zombie under the fence flails and makes some unpleasant gasping noises.

...Fine. She attempts to damage it with her newfound knowledge.

Said knowledge is all too happy to offer up a way to magically inflict torment on another being. It'll take a couple tries, but eventually the zombie will stop moving. The woman nods in approval.

"Basic abilities are as easy as breathing. More advanced magic will take practice and stamina, and will deplete your reservoir of energy."

The next gate opens, and three new zombies begin to claw their way out of the ground.

"Lay these dead to rest. Silence the call."

This does not look very much like learning. But fine, if the dream lady wants her to slay dream zombies, she'll slay fucking dream zombies.

She can sense their - not their hearts, per se, the physical organ is shriveled and defunct, a lump of dead flesh like the rest - but perhaps the equivalent of it, in whatever is animating the zombies. Some central nexus that is just as vital to their existence. The blood magic eagerly offers her a way to hook her will into claws and yank on that nexus, hard.

This option suits her mood. Yoink.

One of the zombies falls down and doesn't get up. The other two go from wandering aimlessly to paying attention. Not the good kind of attention.

She very impolitely interrupts them with some more of that first magical attack.

It's apparently not as distracting as the heart-pulling thing. One stumbles, then recovers its footing. Both of them groan and advance on her. They go much faster than zombies in the movies.

Oh, how about another yoink then.

That'll do it. The air goes dark and heavy, smelling of honey and salt. Two voices speak simultaneously, one the sourceless male voice from the first dream and/or hallucination, the other the voice of the woman in white.

"Be mindful of the voices. They will whisper in your sleep," the woman warns.

"Listen to the voices that whisper in your sleep," the man urges.

The air abruptly goes back to normal. The air pressure doesn't change, but it feels like it should have.

"You are both voices whispering in my sleep," Naomi points out.

No response. The gate to the next section of the cemetery creaks open. The woman in white is waiting next to another lamppost, under a tree.

Naomi proceeds toward her.

"You must learn focus and control," the woman tells her. "Each weapon you use provides a focus for your abilities. As you give of yourself to heal your own body and others', a magical echo will accrue in your blood. As you do harm to others, the opposite of this echo will take hold. These echoes can be exploited to bolster your abilities, but they can easily turn inwards and begin to devour you."

A pale gangly thing appears, tied by its wrists to a thick branch of the tree. Its limbs and fingers are too long to be human, and its skin is unhealthily pale and gaunt. Black metal circles its joints and head, but whether the metal is an adornment or actually part of its flesh is unclear. Its head is hung limply and its feet do not touch the ground.

"The Rakshasa have also come to heed the song. Have pity, but spare them no mercy. They were once like you."

"Is there some purpose to murdering the helpless abomination? I'm really not seeing what I'm supposed to learn from this."

The woman frowns a little. "They are a blight on your world, and wretched out of their own. But you must learn to balance the opposing forces of your magic within yourself, and I would have you do it here and now, and not when inexperience may kill you. I can only intervene once, and only in dreams."

Okay, fine, balance. What does she have in the way of healing abilities?

She can block incoming damage, which isn't exactly healing, but it's sort of the same general shape. This is the sigil for it and this is what it will cost her to cast it.

She does the thing, and pays attention - does she get any kind of sense of where her balance stands, or is she going to have to track it by guesswork?

She feels a little lighter, maybe slightly giddy. There's also a golden haze at the top of her vision, but that turns out to be from the thing that blocks damage, which has manifested as a sort of golden umbrella over her head.

Hmm. Okay. And if she does the thing a bunch more times?

Well, she's not injured, so it doesn't heal her, but she can feel the parts of the spell that are supposed to straighten bone and knit flesh going past her all the same. As it is, she feels a bit refreshed, as though she's just had a drink of cold water. If she pauses between casts, she'll notice the effect only lasts maybe five or ten seconds, tops.

After the fourth round, it starts getting harder to draw that sigil in the air, like she's been sprinting and needs to take a breath.

...hmmm.

Pause, wait, try again after a short rest?

It's just as easy as it was the first time.

Huh, okay.

She experiments with harming the helpless abomination next, to see what the feeling is like.

The magic feels... spiky, is maybe the best metaphor. There's a very slight tension in her joints. Up to her how she feels about it morally; the Rakshasa doesn't really react.

She is fairly sure that this is in fact a dream, or she would've been a lot more nervous about all those zombies. She has no moral opinions about tormenting imaginary demons.

Okay, what happens if she harms the demon a few more times and then heals herself a few times after that? Balance, hopefully?

Yep! She feels pretty much normal. If she leaves herself with too much of one feeling or another, they slowly subside over the next few seconds, as well.

The Rakshasa dies, and continues to hang there limply.

"The world shakes," the woman murmurs, looking at it. "The dead rise." Her attention shifts to Naomi. "You will be tested."

She vanishes again, and the gate next to her opens, this time into a proper graveyard, with a few rows of tombstones and two mausoleums on the far side.

"I would really appreciate a higher ratio of learning to cryptic nonsense," she says, and proceeds through the gate.

A couple steps in, the air goes weird again, and the voices both say, "You are cursed with free will." As before, the atmosphere returns to normal when they're done.

"I like to think of it as a blessing in disguise."

A few more meters in, a dry, scraping sound comes from her left.

Oh, is she about to be attacked by some sort of horrible creature?

It's more zombies. They're caked in dirt but seem no less intent on blunt force trauma.

Yoink!

One of them dies, or at least falls down and stops moving. Then the other two are on her. One swings at her with a loose fist; the other lunges, rotten teeth on full display.

Oh no how terrible. She yoinks the teeth one because that's grosser.

It falls on its face, but she doesn't have much time to appreciate the comedic effect: the other zombie's arm slams into the side of her head with a meaty smack.

Torment torment torment torment torment.

It falls gracelessly to the ground on top of the second zombie, which is struggling to get up.

Self-heal annnnd yoink?

They're all dead, or re-dead, if she likes.

The same dry scraping sound comes from behind her.

She is not sure she's learning the intended lesson here. She turns and administers friendly greetings to the new zombies.

They're not as friendly as she was, but that's okay, they're dead now.

The graveyard is quiet after that, but the patch of graves down the path looks suspiciously familiar.

Oh, do they perchance contain zombies, which she will have to kill?

They did, and now they don't. Something big climbs out of the earth on her other side. It's a taller zombie, maybe seven feet tall, clutching some kind of stick with a connecting bit on one end.

YOINK

This one doesn't fall over. It does pause for a few seconds, then shakes its head and roars at her.

That's a few seconds of valuable nasty-sigil-writing time!

It's still standing. Maybe size correlates with toughness somehow. It jerks its head down, trying to headbutt her.

Yeah she does not wanna be there when that happens. Dodging and more nasty sigils, this seems like a good approach.

It crumples. The stick it was holding clatters off the ground and comes to a stop a couple feet away.

There's a sort of whispery noise behind her.

Oh what the fuck is it now—

Apparently nothing. The woman in white is waiting by the further of the two mausoleums, under yet another lamppost.

A very grumpy Naomi stalks over to join her.

"Revenants do not follow the call," the woman says. She gestures at the roof of the other mausoleum. A figure is crouched at the top of the A-frame. It's wearing some kind of robe with a hood, and its movements are almost birdlike, in the way it turns its head. "They follow death. You cannot leave this place while it lives. Be agile, be confident. Your life depends upon it."

Black smoke and feathers swirl around the revenant. It disappears from the roof and reappears on the ground with a noise like flapping wings. It looks straight at Naomi. It's wielding two large cleavers, and its face is obscured in darkness.

She puts up her golden umbrella and yoinks.

The tip of one of its cleavers embeds itself in the ground and the revenant itself sways, stunned momentarily.

What time is it? Why, it's Nasty Sigils Time!

The revenant doesn't seem to care. It winds up and swings both cleavers at her.

Unfortunate! Perhaps it is instead Running Away Time.

The Revenant pursues her, but it's not actually faster than her. It stops and holds its cleavers up in front of it, crossed, gathering more of that black-smoke-and-feathers in front of it.

Yeah whatever the fuck that is she wants to be far away from it. And maybe try another yoink—the yoink sigil has been weirdly inconsistent about how soon it will let her draw it after a previous instance, she hopes it doesn't keep being that obnoxious in reality—

The yoink sigil has decided to be uncooperative this time around.

The revenant finishes whatever it was doing and sweeps both cleavers back down to its sides. A flock of smoky crows bursts forth from its robe, cawing and making a general ruckus. Despite their insubstantiality, their talons and beaks look quite sharp. They dissipate after flying a couple meters.

Wow, she was so right that she didn't want to be in front of that!

Fine, have some plain old run-of-the-mill nasty sigils, maybe they're more effective than they look.

The revenant sinks into the ground in the same haze of black smoke. And then it's just... gone?

Naomi is not sure she trusts this departure. How about she leaves the vicinity just in case.

Good plan. The revenant rises up behind her and swings its cleaver through where she just was. Then it sees her and pulls that same cleavers-crossed-in-front trick as before.

Cynicism wins the day again, hooray! Time to get the fuck out of the way and try the yoink again!

It works. This time it interrupts whatever the revenant is doing; its arms fall back down to its sides, and the smoke stuff evaporates.

Oh. Good. That's good. And now, more of the regular nasty sigils, just in case they are having some effect.

The revenant falls to its knees, tips over backwards, and explodes into a flock of quickly-vanishing crows.

Yeah she's still suspicious.

Nothing jumps out at her.

On the one hand, the revenant doesn't come back. On the other, neither does the woman in white.

Hmm. How about 'wander around in search of another Lamppost of Cryptic Bullshit', that seems like a reasonable approach here.

She seems to be in a quite literal dead end. No more gates mysteriously swing open, either. One of the mausoleums is blocked by a solid stone door.

A door! Sometimes those are openable!

There's some kind of mechanism next to the door, but it has no obvious way to interact with it.

Why this.

Okay, fine. She examines the mechanism. What is its deal.

It's a slot. Inside the slot is a socket for something. It looks like it's made to come apart and go back together again.

Are there, perchance, any objects in this overly dramatic rock garden that look like they might be meant to go in the thing.

There's the stick that the big zombie dropped! It has a sort of connecty thing on one end.

What... okay. Sure. Fine. Stick, go in thing.

Abracadabra, the door opens!

Uncharacteristically for the inside of a tomb, the floor is instead a giant hole into another hallway. It looks like a safe enough jump.

"This experience has minimal educational value!" she says, but she jumps down.

Once she leaves solid ground, the air goes weird again. "Make the right choices," both voices say. The air snaps back to normal.

She lands in a hallway that looks like something out of an Indiana Jones movie, complete with a few scorpions scuttling away from the torchlight at the other end. Cryptic Dream Lady is there, by an ornate stone door.

Naomi approaches the Cryptic Dream Lady and gives her an extremely fed-up look.

Cryptic Dream Lady either doesn't notice or doesn't care. "Fighting eternal darkness is a fool's errand," she says. "Wisdom is the light that drives the darkness away." She pauses. "The torch, child. We speak in metaphors because alien minds cannot decipher them. Your path will be equally puzzling - wisdom must be your torch." She vanishes.

Does this by any chance indicate that she is meant to interact with this here torch in some way.

Pulling on it will open the door, yes. It also releases some kind of catch and the torch comes off the wall in her hand, which is convenient, because the hallway past the door isn't very well-lit.

The floor is made of tiles with symbols on them, arranged in some obscure pattern. The arch above the tiles is illustrated with a glowing version of one of the symbols.

"I am so not impressed with your idea of learning," she says.

Okay, do the tiles with the special symbol form a path across the tiled section? Looks like yes. Off she goes.

As soon as she steps on one of the tiles, it sinks a few inches into the floor and the symbol on it lights up. Closer inspection, or really any inspection whatsoever, will reveal that it's the same as the symbol on the arch.

Once she's across the tiled section, the voices come back.

"You are with the chosen, but you must choose for yourself," the woman says. At the same time, the man tells her, "You are with the chosen, but you must make the right choices."

The hallway eventually slants downward and opens into a large hall. Six large tiles, a different symbol on each, are arranged on the walls within easy reach. Near the ceiling above the door, three of the symbols are carved into the wall.

...

Is the solution here perchance 'find the first symbol and poke it, then find the second symbol and poke it, then find the third symbol and poke it'.

Wow, she must be super smart.

The door at the end of the room opens with a grinding of stone and grit. In the room beyond is another hole in the floor, though this one looks like it has been built into the stone on purpose. Exactly what that purpose is is unclear.

There's nothing else in the room aside from some broken pottery.

"Fine, I'll jump down your fucking hole in the ground."

She jumps down the hole.

As before, the air does the weird pressure thing while she's jumping.

"This is merely a dream," the woman says.

"Even if this is merely a dream," the man echoes her.

The next hallway is carved grey stone, clearly meant to be a tomb, though not currently in use. A fire burns in a rusty barrel in the corner; the woman stands some meters away next to yet another ornate door.

The torch vanishes from her hand on the way down, or she would be sorely tempted to throw it at the woman.

Instead, she marches up to her and says, "All right, what's today's lucky number?"

"They are the cats prowling at the walls of reality. You are the mouse. It is best to remain unseen. A clever mouse creeps carefully, to avoid stepping on a trap."

The door opens. The woman vanishes.

The next room isn't a room at all; it's the outside of a concrete structure, covered in dirty snow. It looks like it should feel cold, but it doesn't. A lane extends down to her right, leading into a bunker of some sort.

...sure, fine, follow the non-yellow non-brick road. Cautiously.

Nothing happens on the road itself. Once she reaches the entrance to the bunker, she will see that the hallway is littered with piles of land mines, many of them blinking an ominous, silent red. If she steps carefully, she will make it past the mines and into the next section of hallway, which holds a scattering of vertical red lasers. They're even easier to avoid than the mines. Around the corner is a horizontal laser, maybe half a foot off the floor.

Will anything terrible happen if she jumps over it? Let's hope that no.

Nothing terrible happens.

The next room is full of ankle-deep water. The ankle-deep water is full of electricity. There's a handy-if-very-old computer console next to the door.

Let's see if there's a Stop Electrocuting This Flooded Pit button!

There is not, but probably if she beats up on it enough she can make it stop routing power to the rest of the place. Old things break easily.

Works for her.

Once she sloshes over to the other side of the room (which, mysteriously, doesn't leave her feet wet), the woman reappears.

"Where the cat walks, the clever mouse will walk unseen. A mouse cannot defeat a cat, face to face."

She vanishes again as the bunker door behind her groans open. The room beyond also has water on the floor, a great many support columns arranged in a grid, and something heavy clanking around inside it.

Gosh. Almost like she should sneak around the edge of the room and hide behind those support columns.

What a clever idea. There's another computer console on the other side of the room; this one does have a helpful large button labeled "POWER RESET."

Oh! A Start Electrocuting This Flooded Pit button! How convenient!

And wouldn't you know it, the clanking heavy thing is made of metal. It doesn't like being electrocuted that much.

The computer setup emits some sparks and smoke and finally dies altogether, but the Big Metal War Machine seems more or less out of commission.

With the power off, the door to the next room won't open automatically, but there's a big handle in the middle where it's clearly meant to be operated manually.

And does this handle perchance open the door.

Yep.

The woman's standing in the little section of hallway past it. As she steps past the threshold, the room goes blindingly bright, then pitch dark. A silver light illuminates the woman in silhouette. She holds out a necklace.

"Talismans can protect you, strengthen you, and focus you, but they cannot save you. Nothing can save you. But the choice will set you free, one way or another."

Again, she vanishes, and again, the door behind her opens.

Gosh. A necklace.

She puts on the necklace and proceeds.

It's New York. Or more accurately, it's New York if New York had been hit by several tornados and maybe a stampede. The concrete is torn up and strewn across what's left of the road; a crumpled taxi sits on its side on the sidewalk. There are only a handful of people there, standing in a loose group. None of them seem to notice her.

"Hurry," says an older black man. He seems to be in charge, if only because he's survived longer than anyone else there. "We have no time to spare."

"Shouldn't we consult the Council of Venice first?" says a white man in a dark blue suit. Both the man and the suit look like they've seen better days.

The first man catches the sarcasm and glares at the second man. "Now is not the time for argument!"

An alien roar echoes down the empty streets.

Oh gosh, alien roars! Her favourite!

Where is the thing doing the roaring, and how does it feel about having its heart metaphorically torn from its body?

"What was that?" someone says.

Someone else points. "It's coming out of the ground!"

Wreathed in dust and dirt, a... thing with far too many tentacles erupts out of the ground. It roars again.

"Go! Go now!"

"Don't hold anything back!"

The group starts running at the thing, half preparing some kind of magic and the other half aiming the heaviest ordinance they have. There's a bit of confusion on what to attack, but as the dust clears something that looks more or less like a head is revealed, and the firepower converges there.

If she had her alien slime powers in this stupid fucking dream she could run it down with an army of Tanks. As it is, the yoink sigil is the best she's got.

It has absolutely no effect whatsoever. To be fair to Naomi, nothing anybody else is doing seems to be working either.

The thing rears up, as though inhaling deeply. Its face looks like the underside of an octopus.

Then it leans forward, and blackness billows forth from its mouth, and Naomi is swept off her feet into a featureless void.

The voices come back, in the darkness, like a bedtime story or a kiss on the forehead. "Be mindful of the voices," the woman says. She sounds worried. "They corrupt."

"Be mindful of the voices that whisper," the man says. He sounds like he knows what he's talking about. "For they speak the truth."

She wakes up back in the real world, still in her shell of Clay in her trashed apartment.

She curls up and hisses, "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you fuck you fuck you—"

—and she can feel the fire stirring under her skin, but it stays there.

Okay. Fine. Good. About time. If she sees that dream woman again, she will grudgingly refrain from punching her in the face.

She takes a few deep breaths, and then has her Clay nest eat itself and stands up and surveys the damage. It says a lot about yesterday's stress levels that she only now notices that not only has the door of her bedroom been blown completely off, but a blast of slime blood followed it into the living room and painted a broad red path all the way to her front door, over two upturned end tables and a corner of her very nice secondhand couch.

"I'm not getting my deposit back, am I," she mutters under her breath.

Now - experiment with dream magic, or experiment with alien slime powers?

...Definitely the alien slime powers. The alien slime powers are so much nicer and more convenient in every way.

Okay, which of these creatures seems like it will come in the smallest and most convenient egg? The Imp definitely has the smallest adult size of the lot. She'll try one of those.

The egg is only a smidge bigger than the one for Clay, if that, and just as much fun to produce. She takes a minute to recover, and then picks it up and studies it. Her life-sense can clearly see the shape of the Imp inside, with its little face like a cartoon skull and big pointy ears and crumpled-up wings and curled-up tail. And - whatever sense or ability she uses to control the Clay - can feel the Imp as though from its own perspective. She can make it twitch its ears and wiggle its tiny clawed toes. It's like she has two bodies, and one of them is the one she's had all her life and the other one is a fetal demon.

Well, fine. She hatches it.

It tumbles out facefirst into her puddle of Clay, and likes the taste enough that she has it eat some. On this diet it grows at a visible pace, from small enough to hold in a single cupped hand up to the size of a cat, then a gangly toddler, then finally stops when it's almost as tall as Naomi herself. She looks at it, and looks back at herself through its eyes.

...she's kind of a total fucking mess. More important things to worry about, though. Like: so far, this experiment indicates that the eggs she lays do not produce noticeably independent beings, and do produce things that grow up real fast if they eat enough Clay. So cloning herself is a plausible option. And if that dream was anything like an accurate warning about future events, she wants to have ten of herself scattered across the continent by the end of the week.

She hesitates for a moment. But wow she really doesn't want to be murdered by a great big tentacle beast the size of a fucking house. Clone egg, go.

The clone egg turns out to be considerably bigger and more painful than the first two. She's pretty sure she screams; she might have even blacked out for a moment somewhere in there. She is very glad that her destructive dream magic is under control by now, or there probably would have been a lot of fire involved. But here she is, still alive, catching her breath in the aftermath of an agonizingly orgasmic egglaying.

...her life is very weird.

She hatches the clone. A little baby Naomi opens little baby eyes, and Original Naomi looks blurrily out of them. She can't detect any signs of autonomy in the duplicate, but... hm. She feeds little-her a bunch of Clay, and absently sends her Imp into the bathroom with a handful of Clay to see if Clay can usefully drink tap water. Turns out it can. The Imp has a little trouble operating the faucet with its long clawed fingers, but soon there's a blob of Clay in the sink, growing until it spills over the sides. Conveniently, the shower is off, and presumably has been all this time, even though she definitely did not have the presence of mind to turn it off on purpose when she was busy fighting an alien slime creature. Maybe she got it by accident in all the flailing around.

Fed on gooey Clay, her clone grows up fast. It's only a few minutes until there are two identical Naomis sitting in a puddle of Clay in their wrecked bedroom. And it's - definitely easier to think, like this. The Imp didn't seem to contribute any cognitive capacity to speak of, but having two of her is like... well, it's like having two of her. Connected so deeply that they share every thought, but still two full-sized brains, in bodies haloed by invisible flame.

"Cool," she says from her clone self.

"Let's get exponential," she says from the original.

Both of her start gestating new clones.

A very loud and intense twenty minutes later, the apartment is starting to get crowded and the Clay in the sink is getting a little runny from drinking all that water. One of the fourteen Naomis - number twelve, if she's keeping track correctly, which she might not be - goes to turn off the tap, and she sends the Clay out of the sink to ooze down the hall and eat some broken furniture.

None of her are hungry or thirsty or need to go to the bathroom. Whether that's dream magic or alien slime powers, it's very convenient. All of her are covered in Clay and egg-related fluids, but when she has the Clay retreat to the floor and then sends herselves to have a series of quick showers, they all clean up fine. And with fourteen brains, the staticky noise of the dream powers is barely a distraction at all; she's thinking more clearly than she has since she woke up from that first dream. She's thinking more clearly than she has in her life.

Two Naomis sort through their supply of clothes and assemble outfits for everyone. One Naomi sorts through their supply of cash and divides it into thirteen shares. With a little luck, some of her will be able to stretch that far enough to catch a train or bus to another city; others will have to stick to local transit and find a relatively innocuous place to start burrowing. She equips each of her thirteen clones with a bag of some kind - purse, backpack, messenger bag, environmentally friendly grocery sack - and puts two Tunneler eggs in each; Tunneler eggs are thankfully in the small size class, so this isn't too much of a hassle. Actually, with fourteen Naomis in total, she finds that she can put out a small egg without distracting the rest of her much if at all. After a little more thought, she adds a Clay egg to each bag.

Thirteen identical women heading for the subway in a pack are bound to attract some attention, but she thinks it'll probably be safe to send them off at a rate of one an hour. After double-checking their inventory, she has the first one head out the door.

Some part of her expects that they'll lose contact somehow after the clone passes out of mutual life-sense range of the apartment, but in fact this does not happen. All fourteen of her remain connected even after the thirteenth traveler gets on the subway and zooms off into the distance. It's comforting, in a sense, but... there's too much she doesn't know. If she gets fourteen clones set up in fourteen different cities and then horrible tentacled monsters rise up from beneath the earth and eat everyone, safety in numbers won't have done her much good. It's a bit nerve-wracking.

To distract herself from her worries, she experiments with sigil magic and her Imp. One good yoink and it's a goner; she has her Clay eat it, then makes five more, with the intent of investigating just what the constraint is on using several yoink sigils in a row.

The constraint is both frustratingly vague and a harder limitation than it was in the dream; she has to wait about twenty seconds between casts, or else it just doesn't do anything. It's a bit harder to draw the sigil in the air, too - there's some component of the magic helping her remember all the exact bits and curlicues, and it doesn't do that if she tries it again too soon.

She kind of wants to experiment with the fireballs thing, but she also kind of really doesn't want to do that because even though she's probably going to end up completely abandoning her entire life to go be a hundred clones living in caves and experimenting with fucked-up magic shit, it would still be super inconvenient if she blew out a window or something and had to explain the current state of her apartment to, well, literally anyone.

Night wears on and she doesn't feel the least bit sleepy, but she has her original self curl up in a comfy puddle of Clay next to her gross bed and go to sleep, just in case there's any more infuriating dream bullshit to be had. The rest of her continue on their various journeys.

Thankfully, the infuriating dream bullshit seems to be more or less done with, unless you count dreaming about dancing pineapples selling burgers to be infuriating.

Around midmorning the next day, there's a knock on her door.

...uh?

She separates herself from her Clay puddle and puts on a bathrobe and goes to get the door. There's slime blood covering the peephole, and it refuses to yield to a vigorous fingernail; she gives up after a few seconds and warily opens the door a crack to peer out.

There's a woman standing in the hallway. She has shoulder-length dark brown hair, and is wearing a button-up shirt and pants that look professional but nondescript. A square cross pendant hangs just below her collarbones.

"Good morning," she says. She has a bit of an accent, thought what accent is anyone's guess. "May I come in? I have... some advice you might find helpful."

...uh.

"You... maybe don't wanna come in," says Naomi. "Unless you've got a carpet cleaner in your pocket and a couple hours to kill."

To demonstrate what she means, she lets the door swing wider. The living room is mostly intact, but a good third of it - including most of the area by the front door - is absolutely soaked in a mysterious dark red fluid. It looks like someone either committed a couple dozen very messy murders, or laid down fake blood with a fire hose. The walls and ceiling are dry, but the middle of the big patch on the floor still glistens unpleasantly.

The woman's mouth drops open. "Are you--" she starts to ask automatically, then recovers her composure a bit. "Well. I suppose so. Still, this is a conversation you might not want others to overhear."

"Fair enough. Come in if you want, I'm not gonna stop you."

The woman nods politely and steps through the doorway, closing it lightly behind her.

"Bee problem?" she says. "There's been a lot of that going around lately."

"Bee—?"

She thinks of the golden honeycomb tracery in her lifeforce, and the scatter of hexagons that marked the infuriating dream lady's departures. Huh.

"Maybe."

The woman looks like this does not surprise her at all. "I represent an organization headquartered in London. A very large organization with branches across the globe and connections in every government, although we see ourselves as a, mm, a silent partner." She waves a hand, as if this is just background information. "We pull strings. Big strings. Prime Ministers, Presidents... Kings." She steps closer to Naomi. "Dark days are coming. The world is in turmoil, and we're recruiting." She turns away. "Soldiers, agents, adventurers. Crusaders." There's a bit of a smirk in her voice on that last one. She turns back to Naomi to judge her reaction.

Skepticism. Skepticism is her reaction.

"We offer good terms," the woman continues, unfazed. Maybe she gets this kind of reaction a lot. "A fresh start. A network unlike any other. Unlimited resources, a fantastic medical plan, and a way to harness and use your incredible powers. It will be a big transition, but look at it this way: this is a unique opportunity. You have been chosen. You have been granted powers beyond what most can imagine." She shrugs. "So you can either be an outcast in a world that will never understand or accept what you've become - or you can join others like you. Take a stand against the rising darkness. Embark on a journey into the unknown. Into the hidden places. Into the secret world."

"The unknown has not been much fun so far," she says dryly, gesturing at the enormous puddle of ??blood?? on her living room floor.

The woman glances at it. "The choice, as we are so fond of saying, is entirely yours. But know this. Your emerging powers will attract plenty of attention, and not everyone is as, ah... as accommodating as we are. On your own, you'll be easy prey. You might not last the week."

She pulls out a small envelope from her back pocket. It's sealed with the same cross she's wearing around her neck, imprinted in red sealing wax. She hands it over to Naomi. "This will get you where you need to go. There are instructions inside. Use it, or don't use it, it's your prerogative. Either way, you won't see me again." She reaches for the door to let herself out.

—when she takes the envelope and the woman's fingers brush against hers, she has a flash of strange insight and then the number of pages in her metaphorical egg book goes up by one. Yep, she can now clone this person. What the fuck.

She blinks in startlement and lets the silence drag a little too long before she manages a distractedly sarcastic, "Thanks."

"I trust you'll make the right decisions." The woman pauses halfway out the door, just a little too smoothly for it to be genuine. "By the way - our organization is called the Templars. You may have heard of us? We've been around for a while. Good day." And she's gone, pulling the door shut behind her.

She looks down at the envelope, stifles an impulse to throw it in the puddle of slime blood, and instead goes and sets it on the kitchen counter.

(Her clones are in various stages of setting themselves up, some still on trains and buses, others finding likely-looking patches of land to start digging. Only three have made it all the way to constructing underground caverns. It's a little unpleasant to be tucked away underground in slimy darkness - too reminiscent of her fight with the alien slime - but it is less unpleasant than dying, so she will just have to suck it up. Maybe she can find something bioluminescent to grab, and light her caves with fireflies. She checks, and her clones are able to read off any organism they touch, although the Clay and the Tunnelers don't seem to have the trick of it.)

Nothing much else happens for the rest of the day, despite the Templar lady's dire predictions.

The next day, in the early afternoon, there is another knock on her door.

She does the open-it-a-crack-and-peer-out thing again. In a bathrobe, again, because she's been experimenting with using her dream bee magic to kill Imps and that means laying eggs a lot.

It's a man in a dark blue jacket and sunglasses. He looks her up and down and wolf-whistles. "Not too shabby for someone a few days out. Mind if I come in?"

...she snickers, and steps back and lets the door swing open.

His eyebrows go up when he sees the mess, but he strolls in anyway. "God damn. Somebody's been naughty." He flashes her a smile. "I approve. Time is ticking, so I'll cut straight to the chase. I work in talent acquisition, specializing in a highly unconventional sector for a very particular client. And they're particularly interested in your kind of talent: fucking stuff up."

"And here I was hoping you were here in search of a calligrapher," she jokes. "Go on."

He laughs at that. "My client is only interested in the best of the best, and that's where I come in. Your talent is raw but it's, uh, obvious." He gestures vaguely around the room. "My client has the means to refine that talent and make the most of what you've got and I'm not talking about money." He looks over his sunglasses at her. "Well. Not just money."

She snickers again.

"You are objectively way sleazier than the lady from the Templars, and yet, I like you much more."

"Oh, well look who's popular! They try to get you with that whole righteous stick-up-the-ass bit? Good on you for not biting, you seem smarter than that."

"That's me. Destructive and cynical."

He laughs again, but it's a little more abrupt than it was before. Possibly he wasn't expecting that answer. "We're prepared to give you a chance to prove you've got what it takes to hang with the big boys and girls - to rule the world." He exaggerates the last words, making them overdramatic. "It's up to you to grab that opportunity by the balls." He takes another look around her apartment. "Based on what I've seen so far, you might be what I'm looking for or... you might end up dead. Time will tell."

He pulls out a business card from the inside of his jacket. "You have an appointment tomorrow in Brooklyn that I'd recommend you keep. There's no address. Consider this the commencement of your official interview. Find us." He turns to the still-open door, stops, turns back. "Or we'll find you. My client has eyes everywhere. I'd tell you not to be stupid, but it looks like you've already got the hang of that."

She grins at him as she takes the card, and manages not to blink at the acquisition of another sample for her library. It's easier to avoid reacting when it's not such a surprise.

"A treasure hunt! What fun!"

He clicks his tongue at her. "Later, 'gator." And then he's around the corner and gone, just like the Templar lady.

She giggles to herself and looks at the card.

Interesting, though, that both of them were visibly surprised by all the slime blood. It suggests that while the magic bees are routine, the alien slime powers very much aren't. She should probably take care not to make them obvious, then.

It has the location of a subway stop on one side and an elegant blue triangle logo on the other. It seems to be made out of heavier cardstock than most business cards usually are, but there's nothing else remarkable about it.

Very cute.

All right, time to go be in Brooklyn by tomorrow.

She makes another clone just because it turns out to be easier to do things when there are two of you, and packs a reasonable amount of things into suitcases like a normal person who isn't planning to live underground in a dark slimy cave. (None of her have found any luminous wildlife.) Then she buys a plane ticket. She decides not to take any eggs on the plane, but she does bring a lump of hardened Clay in disguise as a paperweight. Does she give a shit that she's abandoning her apartment? No, no she does not. All the stuff she actually cares about is packable. She does make an effort to have her Clay clean the place up a bunch; when she's done it still looks alarmingly grimy, but no longer like the site of thirty ritual murders.

Meanwhile, her clones cautiously dig in and extend their tunnel networks, duplicating themselves a few times for the extra brainpower and redundancy. She discovers that she can lose her connection to Tunnelers once they're out of life-sense range of a clone, but Clay functions as a very good life-sense relay if she lines all her tunnels with it, and the lost Tunnelers are just fine as soon as she gets them in range again. She also discovers, when she has her Clay eat a spiderweb with the spider still in it, that she can add to her library of cloneable creatures using Clay if the Clay eats the creature in question. That's... potentially useful, and also somewhat alarming. On the whole, though, she's still pretty happy with her alien slime powers. They're just so much nicer than the bee dream magic.

It would probably be useful to surround herself with a discreet army of cloned bugs, but she does not feel quite ready to go there just yet. Better to play it like she's just a normal magic bee person for now.

The utlity clone takes a bag of eggs and heads out to start another tunnel network, and the original Naomi lugs her luggage down to the airport and gets on a plane. The Clay left behind in the apartment flushes itself down the toilet. Interestingly, she can't feel it anymore once it gets out of range; apparently only her clones serve as actual network service providers for the Naomi overmind.

When she lands in New York, she decides to try something new. Can she modify the templates in her little library? An hour's concentrated fiddling gets her a Tunneler with an adult size not much wider than a fancy pen; she spends all night in her cheap hotel room laying eggs and sending out mini-Tunnelers to thread the city with tiny Clay-filled tunnels. (They come thirty to an egg, a tangle of tiny worms each small enough to curl up on the end of her finger without their little tails poking over the edge.) Then, bright and early the next morning, she cleans herself up and heads out to look for that subway stop.

It is, for all intents and purposes, a normal subway stop. There aren't many people out on the surrounding streets, but that could be because this looks like an industrial district. Or because it's six in the morning. Probably both.

From the stairs, she can see a gracelessly-aging laundromat, a hot dog vendor, a little kiosk that looks friendly, and a small fenced-off park with the gate standing open.

Hmm. Which of these places looks most conspiracy-like? She really wishes she had another clone active in the area, so she could have a second perspective if something happened to this one, but it's probably better not to run the risk of being discovered. At least she has her subterranean spiderweb of Clay to extend her life-sense range all over the city.

She buys a hot dog, even though she hasn't felt hungry in days. It's comforting. And it gives her something to do while she spies on everything in the vicinity.

The vendor, true to New York form, barely acknowledges her except to take her money and give her a hot dog. A few people mill about the streets, most of them having just arrived for work, a couple of them tourists (because no matter where you go in New York, there are always tourists). Some birds chirp in the park.

Basements aren't totally uncommon in New York, though there are significantly fewer where they might interfere with other infrastructure. The building that have basements in this area seem more or less normal, but her lifesense detects an office building's worth of people two hundred feet underneath that, which is decidedly not normal. To the east there's some kind of maintenance network that hangs off the sewer system; it doesn't actually end before her Clay cuts off.

Hm. Her tiny Tunnelers are mostly running on automatic; she directs a few of them to extend their tiny tunnels downward in the vicinity of the mysterious subterranean office building, to get a better sense of its layout. Then she strolls in that direction, trying to match sight to life-sense and figure out which building has the excessive basement.

Apparently, at least five of them; the place is massive, and actually extends out under the river to the northeast. The Tunnelers come up against the top of it at around fifty feet down, and when they do, there's a warning electric crackle a few inches out from the actual concrete.

If she looks closely enough, she'll see that same triangle logo graffiti'd on a couple of the buildings, usually accompanied by some kind of arrow or pointing hand.

Perhaps she and her hot dog should follow the arrows!

They'll lead her to what must be either the maintenance network or the most absurdly spacious sewer she's ever seen. The driest, too. The place is a maze, but the dead ends don't actually go very far, so it's easy to double back from them. A few presumably homeless people are dozing up against the walls or in piles of makeshift bedding; they glance at her but don't otherwise react when she walks by, even if she walks by more than once.

Conveniently, scattered along the brick tunnels are a few more triangle symbols, as though to reassure her that she's going the right way.

She finishes the hot dog before proceeding into the tunnels. Mini-Tunnelers divert away from the top of the underground complex and tunnel outward in search of its sides. Naomi follows the triangles, innocent as can be.

It's big.

...It's really big. It doesn't all stay on the same level, but she'll still reach what amounts to the front door of the place long before the Tunnelers find a part of it that doesn't just drop down fifty feet and keep going outwards. It seems to be arranged in kind of a pyramid shape.

Eventually, the sewer ends in an incongruously modern concrete structure. Just inside it is a wall proudly displaying the triangle emblem. Past that wall, there's an atrium lit with fluorescent lights, and then an archway in a tinted glass wall. Standing past that are four people in uniforms, all wearing gas masks and equipped with assault rifles. The two in front clearly notice her, but they don't say anything.

She strolls on in without a care in the world.

Immediately, several alarms go off. She has just enough time to be surprised at the sudden noise before the world spins and everything goes black.

Her lifesense shows a handful of people manipulating her unconscious body, dragging it from the entrance where she'd collapsed to a nearby room with several computers and some medical equipment in various cabinets. The person waiting in that room starts to their feet and starts bothering the people carrying her until they get her secured. Everyone leaves except for the guy who was in the room to begin with.

When she wakes up, she's strapped to a dentist's chair.

It's very unsettling to watch herself from an outside perspective.

So of course the first thing she says when she wakes up is, "Well, good morning to you too."

"Hey, a talking one! Cool," says the guy. He's holding a syringe, apparently for effect, because he puts it down immediately. "Okay, that'll make this easier, have you ever seen a psychiatrist or taken psychoactive drugs? Oh, uh, Benedryl doesn't count."

"Nope!"

"Okay, excellent. Uh, there's a lot of narcosynthetics in your bloodstream to fasttrack the rapport process, so make yourself comfortable before you lose motor function in your arms and legs." He picks up the syringe again, this time with a mad gleam to his eyes. "Is it safe?" he asks mockingly, before throwing back his head and cackling. Then he cuts it out and shakes his head. "No, no, I'm just fucking with you. I'm a reseacher, an exper-"

"Zurn!" a woman's voice interrupts him from the computer monitors on his desk. "My schedule is triple-booked, so get started ten minutes ago?" She sounds exasperated.

"Uh, yes, ma'am, Ms. Geary!" Zurn says hastily to the computer. He looks back at Naomi. "Illuminati, tsch. Am I right or am I right?"

She giggles. He's just so charmingly crazy! If this was the only one of her there was, she'd be strongly tempted to murder him and run, but luckily she has backups!

"Okay!" He puts the syringe back down on what sounds like a metal table. "Today we're going to be provoking your extra-human potential. Routine tests, psychic driving, invasive procedures, autosuggestion, and this is all gonna happen while you're under a post-hypnosis roleplaying scenario." There's a moment where he clearly realizes what he's just said. "Uh, I wouldn't worry about it. I'm gonna play you a looped recording of the catastrophe in Tokyo, and with a little, heh, 'chemical assistance', your uninhibited neurons are gonna work their cah-razy magic! Any questions before we begin? No? All righty, here we go."

Even as he speaks, she can feel something - probably drugs - luring her back into unconsciousness.

"Sounds like fun," she manages to say before she - or at least this instance of her - slips away again.

The rest of her keep watch over the network. Lucky she works as a magical wifi hotspot even when she's asleep; there aren't any other clones in range of the city.

Very shortly, she isn't in range of the city either.

There's a subway in Tokyo. These people--are they familiar?--one calls her Sarah, but that's not her name--

A woman begs to be let through the gate. She is devoured, sobbing, by a man who no longer has a face. His clothes are stained black and there is a questing, writhing tendril growing from the back of his neck.

And then he comes through the air vent. And more. And more. They are not made of flesh. They babble nonsense in Japanese, or plead that they can't stop it, they're sorry, so sorry....

The gate is opened. There is pulsing black in vines and globules on the walls and floor. It suckers greedily at the tile and sends waves of its broken people crashing against the shore of sanity.

The group meets a man in an abandoned subway car.

"This is no time for argument!" he says, furious and trying not to show his panic--that is familiar, or--was that only a dream?--she kneels and helps a man to his feet, heals him with golden light that pours from her hands to his.

There is a boar, too black to look at, too big to live. Its tusks gore into reality. It is unstoppable. It is not unkillable.

She is separated from the group. She stares into forever, into the winging night, the blue-black titan's dream. She faints.

Naomi wakes up back in New York, no longer confined.

Well. That was... that was something.

Zurn is muttering to himself, checking a computer readout. "Pineal gland... overstimulated.... Higher brain functions... functioning, always good." He notices her. "Hey, you're up! That is great work, well above MK-ULTRA's success rate." He rolls over to her on his swivel chair. "Hey, can I ask you--have you ever seen a jaguar tripping?"

"Zurn!" the woman reprimands him through the computer.

"Uh, wow, yes, right." He lowers his voice conspiratorially and adds, "Look it up some time."

"I will!" she assures him.

"Hey you better haul ass over to the Test Chamber. Jump through a few hoops. Oh, oh!" He motions for her not to leave yet, never mind that she hasn't even stood up. "You might be feeling some discomfort from the microchip that I grafted to your spinal column, but no worries, it's gonna fade. Two weeks, tops. And as your doctor, I caution you--strongly caution you--don't try removing it. 'Kay?"

"Why, what happens if I do?"

"Well, uh, probably you'll cut into your own spine and paralyze yourself for life. So don't do that, yeah?"

"Fair enough!"

"Okay, off you go, if you get lost there'll be a search party along on Saturday." He turns back to his computer.

"You know," she says, getting up and heading for the door, "the mad science aesthetic really works for you."

"Thanks!" he says, cheerily and apparently completely sincerely.

The main floor is all concrete and acute angles, but a second look reveals that each doorway has a little plaque next to it, usually with either someone's name or the name of the room itself. The one labeled "Test Chamber" has several holographic training dummies, an array of weapons in the center of the room, and an impatient person waiting off to the side.

"Good morning!" she says to the impatient person.

The impatient person gives her a cell phone "for reports" and instructs her to pick a weapon or two, familiarize herself, and find Ms. Geary. Then they go back to talking on their own cell phone.

Well then. What's the selection of weapons like?

She has her pick of artillery, melee ranging from Wolverine-esque claws to a hammer bigger than she is, and a collection of what looks like junk but is probably magic foci, judging by the aura coming off it and the familiar feeling of those books.

Oh, let's go for magic, shall we?

Setting aside the blood magic books, there are two choices: a tangle of wires with what can best be described as "a weird feeling" to them, and a ceramic disc about the side of her palm, which is room temperature but feels like it's supposed to be hot on one side and cold on the other.

Hmmmmm. And what does the disc have to say for itself?

At her touch, knowledge unfolds in her mind, of how to command fire and ice and energy, how to bend lightning to her will, how to invoke the wrath of hurricanes with surgical precision.

Yeah she's keeping this one. She has had a lot of trouble with fireballs, and she deserves a turn bending them to her will.

Excellent. Shall she go find out who Ms. Geary is and what she wants?

Sounds good!

Assuming that Kristen Geary is of some importance will take her up a ramp on one side of the room to a large office overlooking the rest of the complex. Sitting at the lone desk in the room is an austere-looking woman with white hair and pale skin, dressed in a navy blazer and pencil skirt. Leaning against the far wall is another woman, tan with wild black hair in a loose, short ponytail. She's also wearing navy, but has on jeans and a trenchcoat, plus a muzzle-like mask over the lower half of her face.

"I fucking love old-school hip-hop," the first woman says, in that slightly-too-loud tone of someone wearing earbuds. She notices Naomi and takes them out. "Ah, you must be our new blood."

"How'd you guess?"

"The clueless look and naivety," Geary says coolly. "But this isn't another test. We don't do probation, either you're in or you're out. And at least for now, you're in. The Illuminati is very achievement-oriented that way. Like X-box but hardcore."

"Spoken like a woman who's never owned an X-box. So, I was told to meet you, I've met you, now what?"

"Used to, got bored." Geary flicks a hand at the bay window behind her; part of it lights up with a map. "Solomon Island. Little town, preppy school with some connection to us, both kind of disappeared off the coast of Maine. The people aren't a major deal, but our noses need to be totally clean on this one. The military got involved and we don't want the shitheels at the DOD making everything even worse. Give an old man a red button to press, I swear, it's like Viagra to them." She rolls her eyes. "I'm sending you and, uh, Kate, right--?"

The other woman nods but doesn't say anything.

"And Kate out there to assess the impact on our bottom line. Kate's been in the field for a few months now, she'll be mentoring you so we at least break even on what we pay Zurn. Don't make me look bad, or I'll mount your head on the wall as an object lesson to the next fuckup." She's looking at her phone, clearly already mentally working on something else. She turns away and waves over her shoulder. "Ciao ciao."

"Nice to meet you!" she says to Kate. "I'm Naomi!"

Kate nods in return, which is more or less all she can manage right now, and hopes she doesn't look standoffish. She tilts her head to indicate the entrance to Geary's office and starts walking that way herself, assuming Naomi can infer what she means.

Naomi follows. Cheerfully.

When they reach the bottom of the ramp, Kate almost turns towards the warehouse exit, then catches herself as she remembers: she was going to upgrade her rifle and ring, before Geary grabbed her and told her she was, apparently, going to Maine. She veers to the left and steers them back out in the main room, then towards the Inventory building. A few guards are standing near the bank of computer consoles, but otherwise it's a slow day.

Kate picks "Distillation" from the buttons on the screen, then pokes through the list and selects the accumulated weapons she's earned in the last week or so and won't use.

Are you sure you want to distill these items? This process is irreversible.

Kate taps "Yes" and waits. After a few seconds, the hatch just under the console opens, and Kate fishes out the distillate. It's a flask of golden liquid about the size of a can of beer, made of glass and capped with metal at both ends. She automatically reaches over her shoulder for her rifle, then glances at Naomi and reconsiders. The new girl could probably benefit a lot more from the distillate than she would, and it's not like she won't pick up more practically just by existing. She offers the flask up.

"Uh. What?" she says, peering dubiously at the flask.

What in the hell was de la Guardia doing when Naomi showed up, painting his toenails? Ah, fuck, she's gotta talk. She takes a deep breath, so her throat doesn't have to do as much work. "Weapon," she says. "Makes it work better."

"Okay. Thank you. How?"

She's going to murder him. Maybe she can get someone else to do it for her and then they can deal with the consequences. She looks back at the computer, realizes she's still holding the flask, hands it off to Naomi so she has both hands free, and fiddles with the console some more until it spits out one of the rings she was going to use for her own.

She twists that ring off, holds each one in a different palm, and concentrates. The anima flows like an affectionate snake through her arms and shoulders, from left to right, as the fodder ring dissolves into nothing. The shard cost is tiny, barely worth noticing. Luckily, making a distillate requires the shards in the first place, so Naomi won't have to worry about that, and Kate can eat the few thousands' loss.

The golden light settles in her ring, and she puts it back on.

"Move it. Like that."

"...huh. All right."

She retrieves Fireball Friend from her pocket, holds the flask in one hand and the magic disk in the other, and... moves... it...?

Some instinct she didn't know she had picks it up from there, not dissimilar to the way she knows how to draw the blood magic sigils. Weirdly, she can feel the energy traveling through her, using her body as a conduit to get from one point to the other. Her elementalism focus gleams for a moment, then returns to its default appearance.

Huh. She puts Fireball Friend back into her pocket.

Kate nods in approval, then decides messing around with the rest of her gear can wait. If she can plow through a nest of basilisks on her own, she's pretty confident she can handle whatever's on Solomon Island. She beckons Naomi and heads back the way they came, this time taking the other path and trotting up the stairs to the fake warehouse. Or possibly real warehouse; she's never bothered asking.

...'kay.

She's aware of how it looks, but she does know where she's going, more or less. She weaves around the stacks of pallets to the other end of the warehouse, turns a corner, and hops down a hole in the ground. It is admittedly more of a slope than a hole, but the distinction is a bit academic when the hole has golden light and bees swirling around it, and roots keeping the resultant tunnel from collapsing.

Welp. Down the bee hole it is.

There's a faint pop, like the air pressure changing, and then they are standing on a large wooden platform jutting out from a great tree trunk, some fifty meters across where it connects. Behind them is a large swirling portal, twice as high as they are, showing a view of New York over the water. Other portals are next to it, one showing some kind of old English architecture, another narrow alleyways.

Other people are milling around the platform, some entering the portals and some leaving. Near the middle edge of it all is a man dressed like a stereotypical train conductor, with two giant humanoid automatons flanking him. Kate heads straight towards them, ignoring the other people.

Naomi traipses along after her.

(Where is she—? Not in range of any part of her network. It's an unsettling feeling. Clearly she needs to figure out how to smuggle eggs everywhere she goes.)

"Hello there!" the train conductor says cheerfully. "Welcome to Agartha, the Hollow Earth. I do hope you're not here for the local service, by my watch it's--" and here he pulls out an honest-to-god pocketwatch and checks it "--a hundred years late on the hour."

She snorts.

"Right then," he says. "You'll be needing one of these. Haven't figure out how to make more, but luckily there's still enough around to hand out like sweets." He gestures, and one of the automatons holds out a closed fist and drops something the size of a softball down to Naomi.

She catches it.

It's a brass and glowing blue ball. Presumably it does something.

"Activate that, and you'll be able to return to Agartha in a metaphorical - and literal! - flash. Just press the bit on the top, there. Now then, within Agartha time and space work differently. You can cross the globe at a brisk trot if you like! If you need directions, you can ask one of the Custodians. The main hub is that way, if you'll just step onto this platform here." He indicates a circular spot nearby, honeycombed into the floor.

Well that's interesting...

She steps onto the platform.

The world twists around her, and then she's somewhere else. Same giant-ass tree aesthetic, different giant-ass tree. This one has a much larger platform, ringed with teleporters. The trunk is hollow, and holds a large multi-purpose plaza, accessible through an archway carved out of the wood.

After a minute, Kate follows her through, looks around for a second, and points to one of the teleporters on the far side of the platform.

Sure, Naomi can follow directions.

It's too bad Agartha's gates don't correspond to their geographic locations at all. If they did it would probably be significantly easier to find a place you'd never been before. Kate looks around the platform, kind of wanting to impress her student(?), then gives up and cheats by looking it up on her phone. Directions in hand, she leads them to a third platform, unattached to anything, with three portals on it. Looks like they want the left-most one.

It's significantly darker on the other side of the portal, even with the light from the World Tree shining through. She steps to the side and waits for her eyes to adjust.

Naomi wishes she could cover the entire surface of the planet in a network of tiny Clay tunnels already. She misses that broad map of the surrounding landscape a ridiculous amount considering she's barely had time to get used to having it in the first place. But, ridiculous or no, not being able to orient herself in relation to a network of living Clay feels as unsettling as being constantly unable to point out which way is down.

They're in the wreck of some kind of Viking longboat. ...Well, okay then. Who knows why there's half a Viking longboat a solid mile inland and buried in the side of a cliff, but Kate suspects it has something to do with the Agartha gate in the middle of it.

Her head feels clearer, now that she's not as close to the source of the Buzzing. She takes a breath. The air smells of rotting fish. Oh, right, they're on an island. Great. She hops out of the longboat onto the ground, then turns to see how Naomi is handling it. There's something weird about her, but Kate can't figure out what. It could be that whatever she has trouble with hasn't come up yet.

She thinks she might be able to tell which direction the rest of herselves are in, but on the other hand that might just be wishful thinking. If they're in Maine now, then the closest network is Montreal, west-ish. So is west that way, or is she imagining things?

She shakes her head, wrinkles her nose, and jumps down next to Kate.

Kate's gotta agree with her on the nose-wrinkling. Presumably she'll get used to it, but until then... ugh, it's only barely an improvement over cloying honey.

There's someone by a campfire nearby; Kate walks over, figuring that anyone this close to an Agartha gate and not dumb enough to go in probably has some idea what's going on.

Naomi tags along. Kind of awkward that the member of the expedition who has any idea what's going on is not the same as the member of the expedition who can talk, but eh, Kate's apparently been managing this on her own for a while, it'll probably be fine.

Apparently the guy by the campfire is used to nonverbal strangers approaching him, because as soon as Kate plants herself in front of him, he touches a hand to his cowboy hat and says in a Midwestern drawl, "Been waiting for y'all to come around. 'lluminati?" He doesn't wait for an answer. "They got a hand in a lotta things on this island. Don't like half of it, don't know about the other half. Better send ya on down to Sheriff Bannerman, she could use the extra hands."

A cowboy. Why is there a cowboy.

He catches Naomi's expression and laughs. "No, y'ain't gone back in time, I was just born in the wrong place." His gaze shifts over her shoulder and he picks up his rifle from where it's leaning against a tree. "You wanna know what's wrong on Solomon Island?" He aims the rifle. Approaching the campsite is a stumbling person, looking maybe drunk in the dark. They're making rasping noises, as if they're having trouble breathing.

Cowboy guy lets the person get close enough to the fire to illuminate their crushed ribs and loose intestines, then fires. "That. Ain't right. Clear some of 'em out on your way up the road." He gestures to indicate which way. "The dead should get their six feet and rest, same as the rest of us. See if you can't pick up some supplies on the way. Far as I know most people are holed up at the police station. Not that there's much policing to do anymore."

It's probably strategic to pretend she's normally as nonverbal as Kate, but she can't resist a mutter of, "Cowboys and zombies and bears, oh my!"

Kate and Cowboy Guy shoot her the exact same look, an even mixture of what the fuck? and who are you even. Kate recovers first, snorts, and unslings her rifle, starting to walk in the right direction, alert for oncoming undead.

Naomi follows, paying attention to her life-sense. Zombies aren't picked out in bright shiny non-colours like properly living things are, but the 'sight' of a corpse walking around with its dim faded smudge of ex-life is definitely distinctive if she looks for it. And she would like to know if there is any other gross supernatural nonsense in the vicinity to look forward to.

There's some kind of four-legged carnivore with knees that shouldn't bend that way off in the woods to their right, but there's a rock wall between them and it, at least for now. Down the road is just more zombies, and of course the normal humans in the police station.

Kate fires into a pack of zombies. One falls over. The other three charge.

Naomi gently discourages the zombies with blood magic.

Kate's discouragement is more emphatic, and involves a grenade. The rest of the zombies fall over and stop moving. She looks at Naomi and shrugs, maybe a little pleased at getting to show off.

Halfway down the road there's a pickup truck with several ammo boxes in the back.

Oh, the showing off is cute.

Naomi and her sigils and her Fireball Friend aren't going to get much out of ammo boxes; are they any more useful to Kate?

Not in and of themselves, but the people at the police station would probably appreciate them. Kate picks up a few, realizes that this leaves her with no free hands, realizes belatedly that she's supposed to be letting Naomi practice her own skills, then figures that these problems pretty much solve each other and we'll just pretend that was on purpose, shall we. She waits for Naomi to start forward again before following her.

Onward! To the police station and the ordinary living humans who are in it!

A barrier of chain-link fencing and cars has been hastily assembled around the station and its small parking lot. There are a handful of people on the roof of the one-story building, firing down at the zombies who are ineffectively trying to shove their way through. Even more guards, some of them cops, some of them civilians, are at each "gate," if the breaks in the fence can be called that. One opens to the road; the other provides access to the town.

The survivors apparently have practice telling the good guys from the zombies, because nobody shoots at them as they make their way inside. It's pretty much just one big room. A small triage center has been set up in the corner with the jail cell, and someone is getting medical attention on the other side of the room. There are boxes stacked haphazardly behind tables and most of the light in the room comes from emergency floodlights. There's a tired woman standing at a desk, looking between the computer screen and something in a logbook in front of her. Behind her is a whiteboard with a crude map, several names, and logistical notes in (presumably) shorthand.

Of these things, the map is most interesting at first glance.

It shows an overhead view of the section of town they're in, centered on the police station. The streets are named and there are Xs, circles, and arrows in various places. Hopefully it makes more sense to the person who drew it. Also, this town is tiny.

Kate and her boxes of ammo walk up to the woman at the desk.

"Take those up to Andy, would you hon?" the woman says, before looking up. "Oh, you're not Tom, sorry about that. Name's Helen Bannerman, Sheriff to you. Welcome to Kingsmouth. Or what's left of it, at any rate."

There sure does not seem to be much left of Kingsmouth, not that there was much of Kingsmouth to begin with. Naomi manages to refrain from saying either of these things out loud.

"I'd ask if you're here to help, but at this point we need the help whether or not you're offering." The Sheriff sighs. "Geez, that sounds a lot worse than I thought it would. But we really would appreciate the kindness. I'm not fool enough to think that's why you're here, but the worst you can say is no, right?" She offers up a thin smile.

Kate nods immediately, not even glancing at Naomi.

Naomi shrugs and echoes the nod.

"Great. Thank you. You're a godsend." She looks relieved, though no less tired. "The way I figure, we could do a lot better if we could see what's coming before it bites us on the... neck. We've got a few security cameras, but they're for in here and the parking lot, not down the street. If you could hoof it down to the Mining Museum and grab some spare cameras from their basement, I'd be much obliged. We can call it, uh, requisitioning. I can't think of anyone who'd make much of a fuss, 'cept for old Harbinger out by the docks, and she died last year anyway."

Given the town's current troubles, are they really sure that'd stop her from objecting? Naomi manages, barely, to sit on this remark too. It would probably be insensitive or something. Instead she nods again.

"It's just down this first street here. You gals look like you can handle yourselves but I don't want you getting hurt on our account, so if the going gets tough, the tough need to get going, you hear me?" The Sheriff's attention shifts away from them, to someone just coming in the door. "Oh, Tom, you're back, good--"

Kate doesn't bother saying goodbye, just gives a half-assed salute, checks to make sure Naomi's still paying attention, and jerks her head in the direction of the door. She does at least wait for Naomi to start moving first, aware that between the silence and the Illuminati schtick, she's probably coming off as kind of an asshole. Unfortunately, both of them have bigger problems.

Naomi seems perfectly alert and cheerful about all this. Out the door she goes.

The street outside is relatively calm, if you don't count the piles of gore and occasional mostly-intact bodies scattered over the asphalt. A few groups of people crouch and dig at the ground or decaying flesh -- correction: a few groups of zombies. They're not people anymore. Luckily, they're few and far between enough that Kate can pick out a path down the street that avoids most of them. She points it out to Naomi, then decides to give speaking a shot.

"Any... healing?" Well, it was words, at least. The smell of ocean and death grounds her, drives the buzz from her mind, but she's still only had a few months' practice walking and chewing gum, as it were.

"I... think so?"

Oh boy, more talking. Damn bees. "Show me?"

She does the magic umbrella thing to herself.

"Sanctuary," Kate provides, then casts it on herself. Her golden umbrella is a bit thicker and more distinct than Naomi's, but not overwhelmingly so. At least the new kid won't die immediately. Kate remembers her first death. It wasn't much fun. Her anima form always makes her feel like she has a head cold. "Ready?"

Nod.

Kate sets off down the street, skirting the groups of human remains (all kinds). About halfway down the block, there are zombies on either side of the street, so Kate picks the side they're already on and shoots one of them in the head. It goes down. The other three turn on Kate and Naomi.

Tra la la, botherin' zombies.

Aware that she's supposed to be training Naomi, and confident enough in her own ability should things go south, Kate steps to the side, out of the way, and waits to see what Naomi will do.