Chapter 3: In Another World

“Momo?” I call softly. “Are you with me?”

“I’m here,” she says, her lovely voice echoing inside my head, “but I’m not corporeal right now. I need anima to take physical form.”

Right, of course. In the MMO, reapers were a powerful high-level warlock summon that asked you to harvest the life force—the anima—of your enemies, which was a flavorful way of saying “hit things until the meter fills up.” The numbers were balanced so that a warlock player would be able to summon their reaper once per major encounter, usually saved for a specific burst window to get maximum effect. I’m going to be royally pissed at Nyara if I only get my Momo for a few minutes at a time.

“I’ll have to find things to kill for you,” I say aloud. “Shouldn’t be hard.”

“Aw, thanks!” I can almost hear the tilde she’d have put there if we were texting in DMs.

I grab hold of the coffin’s edge and push myself up to look around. I’m in a squat room, all black stone, with geometric patterns carved into the walls. The room is lit by glowing orange lines running along the edges of the floor. There’s one exit, a triangular doorway, that leads into a long hall of the same material, lighting, and wall patterns.

I recognize this place. In Heroes of Telvaria, this is where warlocks start the game if they were created in the Covenant of Thorns faction. I’ve taken a lot of fresh characters through that tutorial experience; warlock was my favorite class, and I almost exclusively played Covenant over Union. It makes sense that Nyara would put me here.

I climb out of the coffin and give myself a once-over. Same plain body, little bit flabby, fairly flat chest, uneven fingernails, perpetual gamer tan. Catherine Rosemary Bird. My retail uniform is gone, thank fuck, though the flimsy black robes hanging loose aren’t much of an improvement. No pockets? Cringe. And no weapon.

“Momo, do you think I can cast any spells? I should be a warlock, given where we are and the deal I made with Nyara.” I hold out a hand, pointing it randomly at a wall, and try to concentrate inward. How is it people always find their magic in stories? What am I meant to be reaching for?

“You should have a few abilities,” Momo’s voice reverberates in my head. “The Lady gave you a sense for anima and how to harvest it, as well as the ability to draw from your own life force to cast spells when your stockpile is empty. All of that should feel instinctual, you just need to focus on what you want. The spell she started you with is… well, it’s not a normal spell from the game. It’s entropy.”

 I frown, lowering my hand. “Entropy? Isn’t that something to do with thermodynamics? It’s what the Incubators were obsessed with in Madoka, I think.”

There’s a pause, and then Momo speaks again with embarrassment in her voice. “Sorry, I tried to nod and then realized you can’t see me. Um, yes. Entropy is a measure of disorder in a system—okay, technically, it’s something about like, the dispersal of energy? Doesn’t matter. As a form of magic, it’s the ability to induce disorder. For living things—which are highly complex, highly ordered systems—that’s going to cause a lot of problems, though the effect is variable. Throw a bolt of entropy that strikes someone’s chest and you might give them a heart attack, or they might just grow a few benign cancer cells.”

My frown deepens. “Well, isn’t that convenient?”

“Hmm? What do you mean?”

“I’m thinking about what Alice said, about the demiurges and how their hands are tied. Nyarlathotep needs an ‘access point’ to make big moves, but a spell like this is perfect for subtle nudges. There’ll be no way to tell the difference between a truly random effect and something the goddess influenced to happen. Complete freedom to interfere as she sees fit, which she could use to screw us over when we need the spell most.”

“Orrrr she could use it to help us out!” Momo says, sounding exasperated. “Don’t let Alice get in your head, Cat. I’m the only one allowed up here, got that? I’ll bite her. Rawr!”

I laugh at my adorable girlfriend. “Okay, okay.” Privately, I’m still concerned, but it doesn’t seem a point worth pressing right now.

I close my eyes and concentrate inward again. At just the thought of wanting to detect the anima around me, a strange new sense blooms to life. The air around me feels colder, but it’s the cold of sucking on a mint. My body is warm, but it’s warm like spicy peppers. When I open my eyes, what little color was cast on the room by the orange lights has been completely leeched. The pink of my knuckles and the green of my veins have been amplified, made brighter and more vibrant.

The lack of anima in the atmosphere around me is sharp against my skin. The anima inside me curls to my touch, fuzzy and purring. This is weird. Not unpleasant, somehow.

Past the anima—past the life force burning in my veins—there’s a bundle of power waiting deep in my chest. It’s a chaotic force, flickering and shifting beneath my ribs. It’s a discordant song where every note scrapes against the natural rhythms of my body. I can feel now, intuitively, how that chaos will flow from my heart when called, traveling up veins and nerves until it reaches the tips of my fingertips and is expelled. I feel a sense of danger, too; if it isn’t expelled when called, it’ll travel right back inside me and burst.

I shut off my freshly-discovered second sight. “Okay, I’m ready. Let’s blitz this tutorial level and get to the real action.”

“You’ve got this!” Momo cheers me on.

There’s only one way out of the coffin room, so I step through the doorway, out into the hall, and immediately get splattered against the ground by a rapidly plummeting ceiling tile.

Death is quick, though the shock is intense. Being crushed to paste by a block of stone is a uniquely harrowing experience. For a terrible instant before I lose my senses, I can feel bone pulverizing and meat squelching, my skeleton shattering as my organs squish and pop. Then I’m dead.

I gasp awake in the stone coffin, heart racing, hands shaking. Alive. “What. The fuck!?”

“Are you okay, Cat?” Momo asks, concern in her voice.

I laugh without humor. “No! That sucked! What the fuck!?

I leave my coffin again and peer out the doorway. It looks like an ordinary hall. The floor and ceiling are both divided into tiles, but there’s nothing else to differentiate them. Apparently, some of them are just trapped! I grind my teeth, ignore whatever Momo says next, and take a running jump to get past the first stone tile.

The second tile is an illusion. I fall right through the floor, slam into the side of a pit, and land on a bed of spikes that pierces my body in a dozen places, killing me instantly.

Then I’m back in the coffin. Phantom pain haunts my skull, chest, and limbs in the places I was impaled. Turning to look at my doom just meant the metal spikes stabbed into my head from the side instead of the back.

“Cat, maybe you should—”

“One more,” I cut her off. “I’m pissed now.”

I vault out of the coffin, take another running leap, and this time I reach out with my hands to grab onto the edge of the next tile when I fall through the floor of the second. I probably wouldn’t have been able to do something like that before I was brought here, but my body feels more agile than before. Spry and young again, not a thirty-year-old with back pain. I get my fingers on the third tile with ease, dangling over the pit with an iron grip.

Then the ceiling above that tile slams down, pasting my fingers and sending me falling back into the spikes. I die.

The scream that erupts from my throat when I respawn is so primal that it takes me a few moments to catch my breath afterward, chest heaving raggedly as I clamber out of my coffin and then collapse against it, teeth grinding.

“Fucking kaizo level,” I mutter. “Ridiculous. Infuriating. Insulting.”

“Cat?” Momo asks hesitantly. She sounds miserable. “I’m sorry, I don’t—I didn’t—”

I wave a hand in the air dismissively. “Not your fault. That white-haired bitch showed me the risks and I still took the deal. It’s Nyara’s fault for being a FUCKING DICK!” My voice rises to a roar with those last words, and then I’m catching my breath again, whole body shivering, and a ragged laugh bursts out. “God, I can’t remember the last time I swore this much. But I can do it as much as I want! No more biting my fucking tongue so the fucking bastards at my fucking retail job won’t turn me in to management! FUCK! WHORE! SHIT! PISS!”

Momo giggles. “You’re so cute.” Softly, she says, “I love you, Cat. The moment I have a body again, I’ll show you that in every way that I can. Until then, remember that I’m cheering you on, okay? I believe in you. I’m here for you. And I’ll make up for all the pain, I promise.”

A small smile creeps across my face. “I know. I’ll hold you to it. Okay, catharsis achieved, back to the grind. Time to stop being a monkey.”

I return to the doorway, tap the first tile with my foot, and immediately step back. The ceiling tile slams down without crushing me. It stays down, unmoving, for at least most of a minute. Interesting. I could maybe use that window to try and jump past the third tile straight to the fourth, but it’d be a gamble. More enticing is the empty space I glimpsed through the gap in the ceiling.

I trigger the trap again, then jump on top of the tile after it settles. When the ceiling tile returns to position, it lifts me up to an identical copy of the hall I was just in. Alright, fucker, I’m wise to your tricks now. I tap the next tile and jump back to trigger the next trap.

The tile I’m standing on smashes me against the ceiling, pulping me instantly. I die.

Coffin. Eyes open. Phantom pain.

“Motherfucker!”

I die four more times before I reach the end of the gauntlet, which honestly feels like getting off easy. When I push open the stone doors at the end of the second hallway, I’m shocked at the lack of stabbing or crushing or being dropped in a pit to get stabbed or crushed.

In the next chamber, two other sets of stone doors have been pushed open and left that way. A fourth and final set remains closed, with a snarling, demonic face carved into it, and script below that.

There are people here. A red-skinned demonblood—the MMO’s copyright-friendly version of tieflings—leans against the wall to one side of the door, spade-tipped tail flicking back and forth as she shuffles a deck of cards with practiced ease. Blue hair in pigtails, nubby little horns, and red eyes that light up at my entrance.

“Ah, the last of our little set has graced us with her presence! Kept us waiting, you did! I was just about to lose my mind with only dear, dull Adama here for company—and there’s not much left to lose, I’ll have you know. Fancy a round of poker?” The demonblood grins.

“She is exaggerating,” the man inspecting the door comments, his voice soft and rich. He’s plain human, dark-skinned, shaved head, with warm brown eyes. “We have only been waiting for a scant handful of minutes, most of which I have spent in fruitful contemplation of the riddle upon this door. You have my apologies for Ms. Gobbet’s behavior.”

The demonblood makes a face. “It’s just ‘Gobbet,’ no frills. Miss me with that Ms. Me. Titles are for squares and I’ve got way too many curves.” She shoves at her breasts with a brazen wink, which doesn’t accomplish much wearing a shapeless black robe.

“I am Adama,” the man introduces himself, rising from the door and giving a slight bow. “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. And you are?”

The first party members. Delightful. “Hi, I’m Cat.” I wave at the other warlocks and step more fully into the room, joining them by the door.

Gobbet snorts. “You sure are.” At my expression of confusion, she taps the top of her head and then points at mine. “I take it those are new, then?”

I run a hand over my hair and discover two shapes that weren’t there before: cat ears, fuzzy and soft, sticking straight up from my head. “I have cat ears,” I marvel. “I’m a catgirl! Yes, hahaha, yes! Wait, what color are they?”

“The same shade of orange as your hair,” Adama says. “Your eyes, if you wondered, are one blue and one green.”

“Yesssss!!” I squeal in delight and twirl in place. Cat the Cat! Hell yes!!!!

Catgirls—and catboys, technically, not that you saw many of them—were one of the playable races in Heroes of Telvaria. The anime style of cat people, meaning basically humans with minor feline features, because you’ve gotta have at least one weeb option. Most of my characters were cheshires.

Something twinges in my mind like an itch I can’t scratch. Is that really what the cat people were called? It feels right, but also wrong. I dig deeper into my memories. In Heroes of Telvaria, the cheshire race was comprised of individuals who had been blessed with a human base and cat-like features by the Golden Lady, one of the many masks of—

Nyarlathotep.

Ice cuts through my celebration. That isn’t my memory. She put that there. My real memories of the cats are gone, replaced with a version that lines up with the Lucid Circle’s changes to the world I knew and loved. It’s worse than losing my recollection of who created the reapers in the MMO, because this time new information was inserted to fill the gap. Just how many of my memories has Nyara edited? How many of my memories were left untouched?

The only thing saving me from a complete breakdown is the very fact that I was allowed to notice these edits in the first place. If Nyara can alter my recollections so thoroughly, she could have made it so I wouldn’t notice anything had changed. Should I be grateful for that small mercy? Or was it a mercy at all? Maybe this is just another example of what Alice talked about, of the way the Circle’s hands are tied; there has to be a sign that my mind is still my own or something fundamental breaks about what Nyara is doing with this world.

I need to talk to Alice again. Bleh. She was so annoying!

Gobbet and Adama both took note of the change in my demeanor, but neither of them have said anything. They’re just watching me, gathering information. Despite their friendly introductions, these aren’t allies; they’ll be rivals once we leave the tomb.

“Hey,” I say suddenly, “did either of you have to navigate a horrible gauntlet of death traps to get to this room?”

Adama quirks an eyebrow. “I did not. My test was a simple word game. I confess, I was disappointed to find that it resembled one I had solved before.”

“I set my test on fire,” Gobbet says cheerfully. “No idea what it was supposed to be, but it burned pretty well!”

“Cool, cool cool cool.” I let the flash of anger ground me. Nyara is fucking with me, and I’m not going to let her win. “So, how do we open this door?”

Gobbet pats the stone face. “Gotta feed this fucker, I figure.”

Adama nods. “The gatekeeper demands a sacrifice. The wording is convoluted, I believe with the intent to incite an act of betrayal from within the group; if read carelessly, it could be interpreted to suggest that the correct way to proceed is murdering a compatriot. The more accurate reading asks us to offer an entity from the underworld.”

“So we have to summon something. Do either of you know how to do that? All my magic is good for right now is killing.”

Gobbet makes a gesture like flicking a lighter and a ball of fire sparks to life in her hand. “I know the fundamentals, but it’s not my preference.”

“Luckily for us, it is mine,” Adama says. “Even more fortunately, I was provided with chalk upon my awakening.” He produces a stick of white chalk from the sleeve of his robe and sets to tracing circles on the floor of the chamber.

“So,” Gobbet says, dismissing her flame and shuffling her deck of cards again, “how about a game while we wait? Poker? Blackjack? Three-card monte?”

“You are missing chips and a table for the first,” Adama notes. “The last is a confidence game. Ms. Cat, I highly advise against gambling with this woman.”

Gobbet sticks her tongue out at him. “Spoilsport.”

“I think I’ll wait until I have any money before gambling it away,” I say dryly.

Gobbet finishes shuffling and splays the cards in front of her with a grin. “How about a different kind of game, then? I’m something of a soothsayer, or sooth they say.” She cackles at her own dumb joke. “But seriously, pick a card. If you’re not gonna gamble with me, at least let me tell your fortune.”

I frown. “Wait, are these tarot cards or playing cards?” I could have sworn I saw a glimpse of hearts and diamonds while Gobbet was shuffling.

“They’re whatever they need to be. Pick a card.”

I glance at Adama, but the circle he’s working on seems complex; he’s going to be there a while. “Alright, fine.” I tap a card at random, noting the rose-patterned back.

Gobbet flips it over. "Ah, the Lovers. In reverse, tragically, though that's not as final as you might think. Frustration in love is a might shade better than love's total absence. Still, quite telling given the circumstances. Sell your soul to find connection? To escape a bad relationship? Bring back a dead husband?"

I flinch at the last question. “Girlfriend, actually,” I say, seeing no point in denying it after my obvious tell. “You?”

“Won my pact in a game of cards,” she says glibly. “All the up with none of the down.”

Before I can get annoyed at Gobbet’s refusal to reciprocate, Adama speaks up. “The circle is ready. If you would each take a point of the triangle?”

My guess was wrong; the completed circle is just basic geometry. One triangle intersects four rings, with Adama standing at the point opposite the door. Gobbet and I take our places.

“Normally I would fill each ring with script,” Adama explains, “but with three warlocks it should not be necessary. The demon I intend to call is of rather low caliber, so more complicated bindings or offerings would be excessive. Shall we begin?”

“Ready when you are,” Gobbet drawls, summoning and unsummoning her fireball.

I nod. “Go for it.” There’s a part of me that’s wary of trusting a diabolist I’ve just met, but that’s the benefit of a time loop; if this goes catastrophically wrong, I can make a different choice next time.

“Very well. Esor’ekalb, you are called. Hear my voice across the veil and be dragged by it from your pit.”

A mystic wind blows through the chamber, stirring hair and ruffling robes. The shadows cast by orange glow lengthen and darken.

“Esor’ekalb, you are called. Though my circle is but chalk, may it be steel and silver against your will.”

My skin prickles. The chalk of the circle brightens and seems to gleam like metal.

“Answer my summons and be bound. Esor’ekalb, you are called.”

With a wave of rancid heat, the demon appears.