Capture Target

Oh my~  You seem to like this.  It’s only a simple negligee, but you seem to really like this.

I’m glad you’ll have something to entertain yourself with during storytime~

Hm?

Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to tire you out, you know.  Not when you’ve made it clear how exhausting it is.

Let's move on~

---

So.

Jessica rescuing me from being raped -- it -- 

It broke everything.

And I mean that in a literal sense.

Specifically, the fact that I had a curse that was supposed to make an event be ‘fixed in reality’, that now very much wasn’t.

It’s -- okay, the details of this I learned later.  Much later; at the time we had no idea what was going on, but let me give you the basics of it.

Shardcraft -- Dignity's term for using divine shards to change the rules of reality -- is… messy.  I view it as almost like coding a computer, but with intent included in it.  And without any specific ‘rules’ as to what you ‘can’ or ‘can not’ do.

…I’m very, very glad segfaults result in reality bugs instead of rewriting reality itself.

…A-anyway.

It’s similar, but not the same as code.  When you code, there are very strict rules as to what you can and can not add or include.  You can create integers, characters, arrays, floating point numbers, whatever.  You can’t create a quantum nexus wormhole and declare it a variable in your calculator program.

That’s not the case with shardcraft.

With shardcraft, you can absolutely create a quantum nexus wormhole.

Mind, I don’t know what a quantum nexus wormhole is, but I could make one!

Reality bugs happen when these instructions conflict in some way.

The most common example is with the laws of physics.  I’ve mentioned this before, I think -- if ‘entropy’ doesn’t define the ‘end of the world’, then you’re almost always going to have reality bugs somewhere.

So you have these conflicts of instructions, and instead of just crashing, like a computer would -- well, like a computer would if you’re lucky -- reality just gets a bit less… stable.  And less so over time.

The threshold for how ‘unstable’ it can get before things start going really, really wrong is actually surprisingly small.  It only takes a few instructions clashing to collapse the entire thing.

That’s where reality bugs come in.

By turning this instability into a physical thing, by reifying it, you can remove the instability from ‘reality itself’ and put it into ‘this one thing’.

That drastically increases the threshold one has before reality itself decides to ‘nope’ out of existence, meaning you have to create it all again.

Now here’s something really important to note.

Reifying the instability doesn’t remove the conflicting instructions.

So instability just keeps on bleeding into reality, and you keep on draining it out, and… yeah.  You see how this goes?

This is why it’s important to kill reality bugs whenever you can.  If they get too big, too numerous, they can make an ‘unreality hive’ -- a kind of mini-reality inside the main one, that just pumps out instability into the rest of the world.

Unreality hives are really powerful, really messy, and shouldn’t be touched unless you happen to have divine protection from unreality fuckery.  

Like, say, if you’re a magical girl.

I, however?

I was not a magical girl.

So, to recap:

We were in the center of an unreality hive.

The unreality hive had declared a certain event ‘will be so’.

My innate sluttiness combined with the magical girl powers Jessica held, to say that that event ‘shall never be so’.

So reality cracked like an egg.

---

I don’t have the words for what happened next.

Nobody has the words for what happened next -- they don’t exist.  Because things that are not real became true and things that are real became untrue and it’s just -- how do you describe something that can not be real with real words?!

The closest you can get are abstract metaphors!

So that’s what I’m going to use, as best as I can.

Okay.

Okay.

So.

Reality cracked open like an egg.  Jessica and I fell out of the egg, thrashing, as the egg whites frothed and the egg yolk grew.

Jessica and I were mixed together, merged, as the substance we were in became frothy and full of air -- until her divine protection forcibly split us apart.  She was fine.  I was not.

I was merging and unmerging with everything that was and wasn’t, everything that will be and won’t be, and what held me together wasn’t my strength of will.

Your strength of will doesn’t matter when unreality and reality decide to fight over you like a well-worn chew toy.

What matters is the weight and strength of your soul.

How accepting your soul is to outside influences -- and how firm it is at rejecting that which is Wrong.  How much you have impacted others and how much others have impacted you.  How loving you are, how hateful you are, how much you believe and how much you don’t.

All of that and more, weighing up to the sum total of you, is the only thing that can save you from being drowned in reality when it breaks around you.

I was constantly struggling, trying to get my head over the surface, and catching glimpses of my sister fighting the growing egg yolk.

One time it was a dinosaur, shimmering, made of fears for the future from crying children.

The next it was a cloud, rippling with green thunder, made of repressed regrets.

Then an unborn chick, made of gooey egg yolk.

And Jessica blasted them all the same with giant laser beams of love and justice.

…In retrospect, it’s surprisingly cathartic to know that ‘love and justice’ can be used as a weapon against fears and regrets.

It’s also cathartic to know it can be wielded in the form of massive laser beams of death.

Regardless.

Jessica managed to scoop me out of the frothing egg whites, and tossed me back through the crack in unreality that was fidgeting in and out of existence, as if it couldn’t make up its mind.

Thankfully, Jessica is pretty good at reading the mood of cracks in reality, and timed it perfectly for me to fly back into MISSY.

I flew back into reality, and ended up stuck in a surprisingly soft set of tree branches far too high from the ground.

And I promptly passed out then and there.

…What?

…My egg metaphor was not lame and tortured!  

I'd like to see you do any better!

Wait no that wasn't an invitation to -- shut up!  Shut up!  Lalalala I am not listening! 

---

Now that that's out of your system, and we can move on…

The aftermath of reality itself crumbling around you is not nearly as interesting as the event itself.

Either reality has broken and you no longer exist, swept into the endless void of unreality, or reality is fixed and things are back to normal!

…Mostly.

It’s one of the reasons unreality hives are so annoying; if they cause a fracture in reality, and you fix it, there are two possibilities.  You either return things back to the state they were before reality broke -- unreality hive included -- or you just annihilate everything corrupted by unreality and patch things over while saying ‘good enough’.

In this case, Jessica went for the second option.  Resulting in a massive, perfect spherical hole right in the center of the landmass, with glassed obsidian at the bottom.  The only thing left of the fourth landmass was a ragged 'donut' around the hole in the middle, and there was more hole than donut.  

Frankly?  This screwed us over a fair bit.  Sure, we'd looted everything we wanted to and could from the demons and angels by now, but this meant there was next to nothing of the fourth landmass to claim for farmland, logging, mining, and so on.  We couldn't even put mines in the crater because it was below sea level, and water was seeping in.  

The coastline being intact allowed for fishing, and there was still this really lucrative hidden cove that endlessly respawned a kraken to hunt and harvest.  But beyond that, and the smoking ruins of the Hall of Mirrors on the far side of the donut from the Kingdom mainland?  The fourth landmass mostly just got in the way of sailing circles around the Kingdom.  

We'd gotten rid of the worst threat we'd faced yet, but in a way that robbed us of potential resources for building up for the final battle against the Evil God of Chastity and Virtue.  We were relieved, but also nobody was happy.  

So, yeah.  Unreality hives.  Messy to destroy.

And, sometimes there are… effects.  That, uh.  Linger.

These effects tend to be, you know.

Pretty weird.

Usually detrimental.

And occasionally useful.

Remember how Zaylee got kidnapped by the pastmen?  Yeah.

She was in the pastmen’s enclave -- their ‘fold’ of reality -- when the entire fourth landmass decided to ‘nope’ out of reality for a day.  Thankfully, Jessica did manage to save her, like she saved me, but there were, uh.

…Effects.

…Let me describe what happened from my perspective.

After sis jerked me awake in the tree, we went off to find Zaylee.  Tossing people through vacillating rends in reality results in rather unpredictable landing spots.

My soul was still feeling rather sore after the whole -- thing, and that resulted in me not being the most attentive at the time.  My thoughts were a bit -- sluggish.

So when we heard the sound of blades clashing against each other, I didn’t quite realize why Jessica was wanting me to hurry up.

And when I saw Zaylee, I was glad to see her!  And I gave her a happy wave.

And when I saw the other Zaylee, I was glad to see her!  And I gave her a happy wave.

…And then I paused for a moment, and realized that there were two Zaylee's.

And they were in a deathmatch against each other.

So that was an interesting sight to come across.

---

It was rather weird to see.  Both Zaylee’s had identical damage, and were breathing and speaking at the exact same time.  A mirror match that looked like it had to be choreographed.

It took some a lot of quick talking to get the Zaylee's to stop trying to kill each other.  Each accused the other of being some kind of evil doppelganger, which -- well, yes, not a bad assumption with the Pastmen, but also there was clearly something going on.  

I managed to resolve it by relying on ‘You know, if that other Zaylee is fake, then she’d try to attack you when I tell you both to stand down,’ and other phrases like that.  It took the rest of the time slot to figure out what was going on.

It turned out that Zaylee had not, in fact, been duplicated.  No clones, evil or otherwise.

She was now one soul in two identical bodies.  

In the middle of a fight with ‘herself’, she didn’t notice -- the brain is amazing at ignoring inconvenient details when you’re focusing, and both Bodies looked identical to their eyes -- but once things calmed down, the vertigo of having four visual sensory organs caused her to fall down onto her rump on the grass.

Both of her.

But, Zaylee was a very accomplished assassin, and it didn’t take too long for her to bounce back.  A day or two, tops.  It wasn’t like there was much we could do while waiting for her to recover -- the unreality hive was still too fragile to be worth poking with anybody other than Jessica, who had powers custom-designed to resist it breaking down.

Once she did recover, we discovered a few things.

First of all, both bodies shared all sensations.  All ‘input’, I suppose you could say, went to the same, singular brain.

…The fact that said brain was in both of them is a complication that -- ugh.  Okay, okay, look.

The brain can be said to do three things:

Receive input, send output, and process information.

You know, ‘what do you see, what do you say, what do you think’.

There were portions of both brains that were almost always identical, and other portions that were rarely identical.

And yes we could scan the brain, though it was rough and it wasn’t as fancy as the magnetic tubes that hospitals here have, and do you really need all this detail?!

Thank you!

Look, it’s weird, but both bodies were controlled by the same person.  It wasn’t a matter of ‘different bodies that shared a brain’, it was a matter of ‘one person in two locations’.  And yes, that distinction is important.  It was weird.

But, all of that means one very, very important thing:

If you groped one of Zaylee’s bodies, the other felt it too.

Why wouldn’t that be the most important piece of information?!

It opened up a whole new world for her!

Well, I say that, but it’s more like we opened it for her… Zaylee knew full well how drenched in sexuality and debauchery we all were.  Well, all of us except for Jessica.  As the one that cleaned up after our messes, it was very hard to not notice it.  And with such repeated, regular exposure, it’s only natural one would become more -- curious, about it all.

This was very different from back when she was brainwashed by Master.  This wasn’t one guy getting off on his maid of the week’.  No, this was a bunch of people that liked to fuck each other fucking regularly.  And she was more than welcome to join in.

It started innocently enough.  When I asked her what it felt like, for her, to be kissed by two different people at the same time.  One for each body.

Oh, sure, Zaylee tried to hide her curiosity in the idea, but I didn’t let her!

Because I really really really wanted to see how she’d act.

So, with a bit of friendly cajoling, she succumbed to peer pressure and agreed with reluctant amusement to give it a try.  With me and Shimizu, one of us for each body.

For me, it was kinda… eh?  I mean, don’t get me wrong.  It was fun.  Master had good taste; Zaylee was hot, and had a fair amount of experience kissing.  But, well…

…When Shimizu kisses you…

…It’s kinda hard to really.  You know.  Focus on things.  Things that aren’t Shimizu, that is.

As I was kissing her she just melted.  I mean, I’m not slouch when it comes to making out, and when combined with our super-herm?

She didn’t have much of a chance.

Don’t get me wrong.  Kissing a girl as she melts, overwhelmed with sensation, unable to do more than needily squirm against you in a breathless way of begging for more?

That’s kinda fun.  Kinda hot.

Just, you know…

…I’d rather that be me, instead.

-- oh shut up, you already know I’m a slut!