Ellie — 1

"Bye now! Remember to return when the street lights come back on!" My main body called out. To which I looked towards the town and realized there weren't any.

You know there aren't any street lights, right?

She completely ignored my point. Typical. Letting out the best sigh that I could in this body, I turned with my other selves and began towards the town.

It took me a moment to adjust to my new insectoid form. I had already been a spider-like construct once, so it wasn't that bad, but it was certainly odd.

Running along the forest floor, I approached the town carefully. Looking over myself, I realized I probably wasn't suited for the task of recon right now. I couldn't blend in with the environment.

Taking a few minutes, I covered myself in a shell of leaves such that I looked like a small plant, then found a nice place in the middle of the village to sit off the side of a road. To hold an observational stance, I enhanced my auditory functionality as much as possible and carved out my internals to leave mass available for it. Just dumping them on the ground underneath me.

Several conversations started to come into focus, but I took my time to focus on them one by one. I wanted to ensure that the information I provided myself was as clear as possible.

Ellie — 2

"Bye now! Remember to return when the street lights come back on!" My main body called out. To which I looked towards the town and realized there weren't any.

How am I supposed to do that when there aren't any?

She didn't look like she was going to respond. Offering a salute towards my main body, I turned and began towards the town. For some reason, I found this form quite nice. The first tree I came across, I climbed my way to the top and began hopping from branch to branch.

Every couple of trees, I would stop and make a few adjustments, improving my legs to make jumping easier, designing a set of antennas to pick up environmental Mana better, and rebuilding my eyes so they weren't just static flat surfaces, and actually adding a bit of neck movement so I could swivel my head. To be honest, my original self was quite lazy when it came to constructing these bodies, so I rebuilt the drone body from the ground up with small additions as I went. Just as I reached the edge of town, a notification popped up in my vision.

Profession Level (Greenweaver) Increased +1 (?) +4 Wit, +2 Spirit, +2 Arcana, +4 Free Stats

Warning: Stats will not be applied to the entire Soul until individual partitions have rejoined.

Am I partitioning my Soul when I do this? That might be a problem—one for a later version of me to think about, at least.

I knew my Wit was absolutely being affected, thinking felt sluggish compared to normal. Though to be fair, I had grown used to thinking hundreds of times faster than a normal human would.

While I rapidly hopped between buildings, I began taking snapshots of their interiors. Only took a break to retch when I saw what we were dealing with. Ugh, humans. Why did it have to be humans?

Ellie — 3

"Bye now! Remember to return when the street lights come back on!" My main body called out. To which I looked towards the town and realized there weren't any.

They don't have that technology, dummy.

Actually, wait a moment, why didn't they have something as simple as that? Was it the Zone's influence? You could build them so simply, just a collector from the ground, a de-attunement rune and a light rune along the pole. At the very end, just put a simple array to manifest the light. Simple.

I tried taking a few steps and stumbled, falling on my face immediately. I watched the other drones wander off, seemingly not having any of the issues I was having. Hmm, okay, let's see if we can fix that.

Thankfully, I still had some biomass remaining, so I began building a miniature version of myself, holding off my distaste for being so small. Barely even a foot tall and made of dandelion fluff, ugh.

Actually, wait, dandelion fluff floats incredibly easily, doesn't it? Maybe I can…

A few minutes later, I was sitting in front of my personal approximation of what a fairy would look like. The pale skin was incredibly soft, composed of dandelion fluff with an internal bone structure made from Scorchbark. Insectoid wings hung from its back, designed with a mechanical spinning platter that controlled flaps, made out of Wondersprout to actually benefit from Grace. I really didn't put that much effort in, but I was fairly sure this would do for what I intended.

I disconnected from the insect body, moving my conscious control into the doll-like drone I'd created. Looking down at my arms, a smile crossed my face. This felt right.

Flapping my wings, I found myself slowly lifting off the ground as the wings picked up speed, rapidly turning into a blur. I sped off towards town to find some fun.

Ellie — 4

"Bye now! Remember to return when the street lights come back on!" My main body called out. To which I looked towards the town and realized there weren't any.

I just sent a snapshot of the town in response. They'd figure it out.

I immediately travelled into town. I figured that if we were going to make this a long-term endeavour, or at least until the end of the arc, it would be useful to set up a network to spy on the town itself.

Taking inspiration from the last puzzle I worked on, I figured that a system of transmitters set up in isolated locations around town would be useful. Then, connected to the whole system, I would just add as many little spy artifacts as I could hide around town.

No problem at all. As long as nobody found one. However, I had also solved that problem by making them look incredibly man-made, with a wood surface that appeared to have been sanded and finished with linseed oil. The main body even provided a neat type of wood at one point, which I switched to.

[Storygrove Heartgrain] This material is taken from the dense inner wood of a Storygrove Tree, a species native to narrative-saturated Realms where Mana accumulates through repetition, expectation, and theme. The material this tree consists of is strengthened by fables created about it. This grants the material a resonance with structured Mana patterns. Naturally holds a large amount of Mana and binds itself to the land around it as it grows, making it well-suited for creating domains of influence. The wood will shatter when an Oath made upon it is broken.

I had no idea how she managed to find the perfect tree, but it seemed like she did. It was almost like the Zone was designing itself to set up the story we wanted to tell. I pinged her and mentioned she should grab a seed from it. She replied that she'd get around to it, which meant she wasn't going to bother. So I'd have to remember when we all rejoined.

Ellie — 5

"Bye now! Remember to return when the street lights come back on!" My main body called out. To which I looked towards the town and realized there weren't any.

There aren't… Oh whatever you're probably fucking with us anyway.

I trailed behind the others at a respectable pace, by which I meant I walked in the exact opposite direction. Finding a nice log, I lay down on a patch of lichen, the drone's sensory data found lying upside down to be rather pleasant. My legs slightly twitched in the air, tapping together as I counted one, two, three in my head.

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Hey, the girl playing 'build the fairy doll' also wasn't heading into town yet, can't blame me for being lazy about it.

It's interesting, you know, the human eye technically perceives vision data as being flipped and inverted, then decodes that data into the sight that one of those bags of flesh would see as normal. I wondered for a moment if I could do the same thing.

The moment I pondered upon the topic, my vision inverted and flipped itself, which was interesting because my eyes didn't even work that way. They were supposed to just cheat by dumping the pixel grid straight into my memory. That raised the question: how did I do this? Was it some function of Nature Mana to adapt to its environment? I was upside down right now aft—Oh shit!

I scrambled and threw myself off the log, hiding right behind it as I heard footsteps approaching. It sounded like there were two people, and they were discussing something.

I was only half paying attention because my eyes wouldn't revert back to their natural state, which was fairly annoying.

Ellie — 6

"Bye now! Remember to return when the street lights come back on!" My main body called out. To which I looked towards the town and realized there weren't any.

There are none? What do you want us to do instead?

She didn't respond. I figured she'd been having a rough few days, so I decided to give her a break. I mean, she was me and I was her, so I'd also had a rough few days, but why are you thinking about this so hard? I was just trying to be nice. Geez no need to get on my ass about logic and shit.

Looking around at my contemporaries, I saw they had absolutely no order. They were just going off and doing their own thing. Knowing this would become absolute nonsense in the end, I decided to find an overwatch position. Travelling to the highest tree in the village, I climbed all the way to the top and looked out over the town, trying to spot what everyone else was doing.

I immediately spotted a potential problem.

Hey! The version of me that turned itself into a fairy. What the hell are you doing with those kids?

I'm setting up the storyline, obvioooously.

We don't have a plan for… Never mind, what have you established about our monster persona so far?

Oh, nothing yet, I just thought it would be fun to play with these kids. Set up the idea that there are fairies in the forest. I'm laying it on thick so that the kids get it, don't worry. If I can get them angry enough to hit me, we can use that as the excuse to start butchering these people.

I let out an exasperated sigh. Why did I have to be like this?

I began setting up a multi-channel connection with all of my alternate selves except for the main body. Checking in on her current thought process, she was climbing a tree for the third time and was swearing up a storm in her head over her repeated falls. Reduced Wit was really affecting her. She hadn't even realized she could just draw the circle from the ground by stretching her Authority. She was busy, so I decided not to include her.

"Okay, can I get a status report of what everyone's doing?" I asked over the mental connection.

"Who put you in charge?" Came five simultaneous replies.

"I'm you, you put yourself in charge," I said, letting out a sigh.

"That… Is a good point," came one response, alongside a lot of grumbling about how that wasn't really how it worked. I could feel most of them didn't want to be in charge anyway, so I just pushed on.

"Can I get a sit-rep on any relevant information to be compiled for the main consciousness? I'm going to do a primary analysis of—"

"Just because we can speak fancy doesn't mean we should," one of my counterparts interrupted. Which completely derailed my train of thought. I sent a sharp spike of manufactured panic at them, created by attempting to remember an embarrassing moment from my teen years.

After receiving the feeling of an apology from them in response, I continued, "Of your data so that we can create a comprehensive plan of attack. Please don't bombard me all at once. We can do this one at a time; our Wit is already divided enough. Would anyone like to go first?"

"Oh, oh, me, me, pick me!" yelled the fairy. I had no idea how she had managed to make its voice loud over a shared mental connection, but she did.

"You already started some kind of story so that actually isn't that bad of an idea," surprisingly.

"Okay so I was flying all over the village, and I came across these kids, they saw me flying around so I thought I'd go check them out and it turns out there's already this mythology about fairies being present in the forest so I decided to roll with the punches, pick up from where the locals left off, they've been asking me grant them wishes for the past ten minutes and since they were small wishes like toys which I could just grow using [New Growth] I would—"

"Can you just send me your memory of the event?" I interrupted their unending sentence. "I was trying to follow along, but it feels like you haven't taken a single breath since you started monologuing."

"Well, duh, why would I bother breathing? We don't even need to do that in the first place, and this is a mental connection, so we can ju—" they began again.

"Just send the memories," I said, including how it felt like they were slow-cooking my metaphorical brain.

"Oh, right, yup, here you go," they replied sheepishly, then dumped their memory into my head.

Sorting through them, it looked like they hadn't built up as much nonsense as I thought they would have. There was actually some fairly good fae energy in their delivery, and it felt like they really got into the theme. I'd have to work it out later, but I could already see how one of the kids could have crossed us when they asked for a second gift after being given one already.

She was just at the line where she came across as annoying, but not malicious. It was good work.

"Alright, who's next?" I asked the group.

"Here," one of the threads replied, sending over what looked like a bunch of snapshots of people doing everyday activities in their homes. Taken from the perspective of somebody who had decided to stalk the whole town.

"Uhh, thanks. I'm sure we can figure out how to use this somehow. Anyone else?"

One by one, I received and processed the remaining data. There was a particularly useful conversation that had been picked up by two people who had gone on a walk outside the town to conspire about something.

They were either planning a murder or a kidnapping—I wasn't exactly sure which. The version of me that had overheard it was too focused on fixing her own vision, which she'd somehow fucked up.

I also had numerous miscellaneous conversations that helped inform me about the town's culture. It seemed to be some kind of mix between Renaissance era European and modern rural Japanese cultural tropes pulled from both time periods and locations, and blended together. Which made me think this Zone was designed intentionally for me.

One of us also set up a network to spy on the entire town, which was incredibly useful.

"Uhh, hey one of these kids is kind of wei—" The fairy dropped the connection to me mid-sentence. I tried to reconnect with them, but their thread was just gone. Checking in with the original, she hasn't even received the memories back, which wasn't supposed to be how any of this worked.

"Hey, has anyone noticed anything weird about the town yet?" I asked the group.

"No, not really, it seems incredibly boring. Almost too bor—" They were cut off as their thread also disconnected.

I reversed the channel so that everyone could hear everyone else, "Okay, something is going on, check the threads if you're confused, we…"

Another thread dropped, and I began to notice my thoughts speed up as my Wit was spread over fewer channels, "We're losing people get—"

One more connection was lost. "Get back to the main body!" The last connection snapped shut. My eyes were scanning the town. Something was happening and I was in a vantage point to see it. But I couldn't see anything. It was like the town was still perfectly normal.

Suddenly, I was blanketed in Authority, something was right behind me, but I couldn't move. I could barely think. My thoughts felt like they were moving like molasses, which didn't make any sense. My mind wasn't even in this body.

"Here I was, about to begin having some fun, and what do I find? A bunch of INSECTS, infiltrating MY territory." The voice clicked as it spoke. Not just tonally but literally, like every word was being said with mechanical precision.

Pulling as hard as I possibly could, I ripped myself from the body and rejoined with the original, severing all connection with the drone.

"So when we returned to the surface, it turned out I had glassed the entire Zone… Sorry, Hazel, something's come up that I need to focus on. Can I get back to you later?"

"Oh sure, you okay?" Hazel asked, and I could hear the disappointment in her tone.

"Yeah… I think? I'll figure it out probably. Just had my plans derailed a bit." I replied with a sigh.

Apparently, I couldn't just skip into town and replace the monster. This story was going to be one of those where one of the monsters is killed, but it turns out they weren't the real evil. There was actually a worse one lying in wait.

Now, the question is which one was I going to be?

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