On a cold St.Petersburg evening, in a dimly lit room of a petrine-Baroque mansion, a man sits on a chair, utterly defeated and devastated. He stares motionlessly at the woman who just shattered all of his hopes of happiness.

Tatiana stands up, turns around, and walks away.

The man, Eugene, continues to motionlessly sit, tears threatening to burst from his eyes, for an indeterminate amount of time.

And then - well, that's just his luck - Tatiana's husband comes into the room.

And it was at this point when the narrator stopped tracking Eugene or the reality he inhabited to instead directly ramble at the fourth wall about the book's characters, his own personal experiences, and his good wishes for the reader.

And some person in a period-nondescript suit, sitting on a bench across the street and intently listening to something inaudible to anyone nearby, exhales with great relief.

"Oh, finally," he thinks, silently. "A break from all the goddamned rhymes, here I come."

The person opens stands up, holding his briefcase, and paces into a nearby tavern, slipping into a room they took care to order in advance.

It should be noted that that person, for all intents and purposes, is an ordinary human. They have a DNA entirely in acceptable range for being human (allowing for interbreeding with almost any other human), which was, during their creation, left to multiply and develop in conditions locally physically and chemically typical of conditions in which one would expect a human to grow from an embryo to a person. They have no organs a normal human wouldn't have, including any sort of a soul or magic-enabling circuitry. Their bones or skin or muscle tissue exhibit no properties that tissues of a normal human wouldn't. Even their psychology is squarely within the bounds of possibility for humans - if only because the humans are very, very different from the inside.

And their briefcase, just like them, is for all intents and purposes an ordinary briefcase filled with ordinary physical objects that doesn't radiate an ambient magic aura or ambient chi energy or ambient gamma particles or anything of the sort.

And so, they enter a seemingly short code into a seemingly mechanical lock to open their completely physically regular briefcase.

The person takes a glass vial with a tiny mass of gray sludge inside, shakes the vial in a convoluted rhythmic pattern a couple dozen times, and pours it over a plate of advance-ordered and advance-liquified plate of what once was stuffed Russian bilny.

The first order of business is to test for the lightspeed limit and for some common ways of bypassing it that can be tested without high energy setups.

The second order of business is to test for nearby ambient magic.

This is one of the standard protocols for the Acquisition nanobots.

(Without activation by a specific sequence of shakes in sterile conditions, the sludge, of course, looks and behaves exactly like a mixture of harmless and individually mundane microorganisms. Just your normal terrestrial viruses, bacteria, and fungi.)

The tests all come out as expected. No common loopholes to breach lightspeed, and no magic nearby. This isn't Midsummer Night's Dream!

This is not really the most promising result, but it is definitely the safest one. Nothing nearby will (probably) be able to intervene in or throw off any following shenanigans, and no one at a distance can notice because of no FTL loopholes.

...so next step is to try to make a loophole to exist anyway.

Enter the Universal Conceptial Manipulation Paradigm.

Take The Speech, Correspondence, Celestial Kabbalah, the Language of the Gods, and a dozen other sources.

Get to the first principles.

Deduce the logical consequences of said principles.

And make the analog of WolframAlpha's Mathematica.

And store the information on a medium of a normal physical object.

The Acquisitor boots up UCMP and formulates the word to send the nanobots into various points of spacetime to create contigencies that may, on extrauniversal demand, create time loops that semi-retroactively transform nearly the whole spatiotemporal volume of the universe outside of the narration's presence into a factory of arbitrary configurations of matter.

No one in St.Petersburg notices this.

No one in the Milky Way notices this, and no one in the whole object level future history or past history notices this. No one in adjacent planes of existence notices this, not even the other members of the Acquisited universe network, which, while ready to come alive at a moment's notice, does not casually exchange pings.

It's a really quite paranoid setup.

But, of course, not perfectly secure. In fact, it had a vulnerability that actively gave in and was exploited.

After all, if it wasn't... how would you be reading all of this?